Believe it or not, one of Prime Day’s best deals this year is a flagship phone. The OnePlus 8 was part of the phone-maker's 2020 lineup. Though the OnePlus 8 Pro was bigger in size and spec, the high-level specs on this standard model still make it a decent flagship phone in 2021.

OnePlus phones have generally appealed to us by offering flagship-level specs and performance for less than the ever-ballooning price of most high-end smartphones. This year’s Prime Day sale takes the $500-600 OnePlus 8 down to $349, a much more competitive price that again gives more expensive (and less expensive) phones a run for their money.

Just looking at the spec sheet, you can see that—with 5G support (on GSM networks like AT&T and T-Mobile), a 6.55-inch 402 pixels-per-inch OLED display with a 90 Hz refresh rate, 8GB RAM (albeit of the slower LPDDR4X variety), 128GB of UFS 3.0 storage, and Qualcomm’s 2020 flagship Snapdragon 865 processor—the OnePlus 8 is a phone that remains competitive. Unfortunately, there’s no removable storage, though that's not out of the ordinary in 2021.

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There are big specs in the battery and camera department, as well. The 4,300 mAh battery uses OnePlus’ Warp Charge technology to juice the phone from 1 percent to half-full in 22 minutes, according to the company, and it tends to last about a day under normal usage. Wireless charging is not available, though.

To allow for varying shots and artistic expression, the camera array includes three different cameras: one with a standard lens, one with a macro lens, and one with an ultrawide-angle lens. The cameras range from decent to not so great, though we had a few surprisingly good moments in our experience with the phone.

Thankfully, OnePlus is one of the better phone OEMs with regard to Android updates: the updates usually land within a few weeks of each release, though the company often lags 1 to 3 months behind on security updates. The company's Oxygen OS still looks good and makes useful customizations to the Android operating system, but because the OnePlus 8 is already a year old, you should only expect one more major software update for Android 12 and a little less than two years of security updates.

The OnePlus 8's update prowess, good looks, low cost, and not-cheap-feeling hardware are a lot more than we can say for many Android phones in 2021, particularly at this price point.

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