Pete Lau, co-founder and CEO of challenger handset brand OnePlus, defended the performance of its latest flagship range after claims the devices performed badly in third-party benchmark testing.

In a brief post on social media, Lau said its handsets were optimised for performance rather than benchmarking scores, noting a formal statement released by the operator detailing the reasons for its alleged poor result across some tests.

The wider statement responded to criticism from media, bloggers and social media users claiming OnePlus was throttling power delivered to a number of applications including browsers and social media services, though not those used to assess device performance.

Most of the online comments centre around testing published on AnandTech which found discrepancies on scores from the OnePlus 9 Pro compared with other devices running the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor.

In its statement, OnePlus noted: “In recent years, the performance of smartphone SoCs has reached a point where their power is often overkill in certain scenarios for many apps including social media, browsers and even some light gaming.”

Noting full end-user performance testing was done before limiting power to specific applications the company added: “In the case of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro, when you open apps or heavy games, the Snapdragon 888 processor, including the super powerful X1 CPU core, will run at full speed to provide the best performance.”

“But with actions that do not require the maximum power, like reading a webpage or scrolling through Twitter and Instagram, it’s not necessary for the CPU to run at almost 3GHz to do that smoothly. The OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro reduce the CPU frequency in these scenarios to reduce power consumption and heat dissipation while maintaining a smooth experience.”