The 6-inch AMOLED display is the biggest change in this phone, it features an 18:9 aspect ratio with much smaller bezel on the top and bottom. Weirdly enough the side bezels are a little but thicker but not really noticeable in real life use. The phone is still just as easy to hold and use with one hand. We’ve got a lot more screen than on the OnePlus 5, also the screen looks great.
The 5T doesn’t have a quad-HD display but the 1080p screen has a plenty of detail and bright punchy colors, blue tones are better than 5. The OnePlus 5T isn’t perfect and it does have some color shifting but it’s pretty mild unless you have it at an extreme angle. Most videos fit the complete screen and the sunlight legibility is definitely not a problem with this bright screen.
The speaker experience is much improved considering the tiny one on OnePlus 5. There is some bass now in these new speakers and clear pleasant highs. Now there is also a headphone jack, the sound is pretty good but if you’re and audiophile and you want HiFi DAC audio, this is not here.
This OnePlus 5T is not ugly by any means, it’s clearly a mix of trends from the past couple of months. The front is clearly inspired by the bezel-less trends, and the back looks like LG V30 and iPhone 7 Plus. It’s pretty slim and comfortable to hold and there aren’t any sharp edges too. On the left there are volume buttons and the alert slider and on the right it has got a power button and the sim slot. There is no expandable storage which is not a problem on the 128GB version but the 64GB version can feel a bit tight on taking photos and videos. The edges have a tiny curve to them if you look closely, otherwise the phone is pretty flat, and that’s a plus or a con depending on your taste.
Sadly there’s no ip68 protection from water or dust and be pretty careful. The fingerprint reader is now on the back and its fast as ever. It’s always on so there’s a chance you’ll never see your lock screen. There’s also the facial recognition which is a stock Android feature is made better by OnePlus, it no as secure as Apple’s but it’s much faster since you don’t need to swipe up. It also might be a little more secure than most Android phones since the 5T require to have at least on eye open for it to work. As you might have guessed by the aluminum there’s no wireless charging here. That’s hardly a deal breaker though since the company’s dash charging mean you can get 65% battery in 30 minutes and full charge 55 minutes.
The battery remains unchanged at 3300 mAH, which gives you an 82hrs working hours. Thanks to power efficient snapdragon 835 chip, with 6GB and 8GB of RAM. There’s no slowdown in opening and closing of apps, even if have about 100 open. It also runs smoothly through heavy games but it can start feeling a little bit warm if you play for a longer period of time.
The phone comes out of the box with Android Nougat but OnePlus has promised to roll out Oreo and has already released the beta version for both 5 and 5T. It has Oxygen OS and the experience is that it’s almost stock Android. One complaint here is the folder visualization system, so if you tap on a folder it takes you to full screen instead of just a floating bar or box.
There’s host of familiar and useful additions on top of the usual Android set, like expanded snapshot, auto night mode, reading mode which are pretty self-explanatory and AppLocker which requires a fingerprint or a password to open certain apps. There’s also OnePlus shelf when you swipe from left to right on the home screen. You can double tap on the screen to reveal your lock screen and you can also double click the power button to go to the camera app.
Now coming to the camera, it has a dual camera setup one 16-MP and one 12-MP camera. The primary camera has an f/1.7 aperture and seems about as good as before. Footage can be a little smudgy and details are just decent, but colors really pop and there isn’t any noise. The Secondary camera’s purpose is for better night time shots and better blur effects. In-fact when you do take night shots it’ll occasionally switch to the second camera but why and when it decides to do so we haven’t exactly figured that out.
Night time photos are better if you look closely but no extreme improvement, and there are lot of other flagships that are better in this department. ‘Bokeh’ on the other hand has improved substantially. The edge detection is now quite good, especially when you consider that portrait mode on the previous model has some pretty huge blunders. Still this is not the best use of the secondary camera and we miss the 2x lost-less zoom of the previous version.
4K videos have good colors and good details and the EIS works great to stabilize things. 1080p video isn’t the best especially when you are shooting at 30fps, it looks over processed and not as sharp as other sharp-shooters. 1080p at 60fps is better, but still not as good as 4K. The front camera is identical to the previous one and while not the best around it still have plenty of details and it doesn’t over-expose too much.
OnePlus 5T Specifications:
- Dual SIM (nano + nano) Support
- Android 7.1.1 Nougat with Oxygen OS 4.7, Upgradable to Android 8.0 Oreo in 2018
- Ceramic Fingerprint sensor
- 6.01 inch Full HD+ Optic AMOLED 2.5D curved display with 2106 ×1080 pixels resolution, sRGB, DCI-P3 color coverage protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5.
- 2.45GHz Octa-Core Snapdragon 835 64-bit 10nm Mobile Platform with Adreno 540 GPU
- 6GB LPDDR4x RAM with 64GB storage (UFS 2.1 ) and 8GB LPDDR4x RAM with 128GB (UFS 2.1) storage
- 16 Megapixel rear camera with dual LED Flash, Sony IMX398 sensor, f/1.7 aperture, 1.12μm pixel size, EIS along with Secondary 20 Megapixel camera with f/1.7 aperture, Sony IMX376K sensor and 1.0μm pixel size
- Ultra HD 4K at 30fps, Full HD 1080p at 60 fps, HD 720p slow motion at 120fps
- 16 Megapixel front-facing camera with Sony IMX371 sensor, 1.0μm pixel size and f/2.0 aperture
- 3.5mm audio jack, 3 microphones with noise cancellation, Dirac HD Sound
- 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11ac dual-band (2×2 MU-MIMO ), Bluetooth 5.0 aptX HD, GPS/GLONASS/Beidou, USB 2.0 Type-C and NFC
- 3300mAh battery with Dash Charge (5V 4A) support
If you already own OnePlus 5 there’s no reason for you to upgrade unless you need a bigger screen. But if you are looking to upgrade a phone that’s from 2016 or earlier than things are way different. First you’re looking at a great phone for the money, but you’ll miss the ip68 protection, wireless charging but if you can live without those than it’s a really good phone. It performs really well even under heavy usage and other areas too and its super-fast phone with a great multimedia experience. So if you looking for a new phone you can check this one out.
