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If there is one bad thing you can say about OnePlus, it is that it makes phone overhaul very, very boring. This has been done in the best possible way for consumers: the Chinese company has manufactured smart and powerful smartphones that equal or exceed the flagship products, some of which sometimes cost twice the price.
But inflation has taken its toll in recent years. While the OnePlus 3 launched at £ 309 only 28 months later, the OnePlus 6T will cost you £ 499. That's an increase of 61% and, for once, you can not just blame Brexit. If you really feel comfortable, you can get a version with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for £ 579.
Nevertheless, it should be remembered that over the same period, all the prices of phones have skyrocketed. The Samsung, the rival of OnePlus 3, was the Galaxy S7 at £ 569. The Galaxy S9 this year was launched at £ 739 (30%).
The real question is, does it always offer performance where it counts, and is there anything that can compete with it for less? The answer is an enthusiastic yes and not canceled …
OnePlus 6T: What you need to know
Since 2016, Chinese manufacturer OnePlus has decided to market two phones a year. The first is a great flagship product using the latest Qualcomm chip. The second, at the end of the year, offers incremental design improvements without increasing raw power. This is not due to laziness: the Snapdragon 845 processor that powers both the OnePlus 6 and 6T is still fast.
So, what are the big improvements to the title here? First, it has a fingerprint sensor under the screen, which gives a 6.41-inch screen that covers almost the entire front. I say "almost" because there is a notch but its size is significantly reduced compared to that of the OnePlus 6 and that there remains only a small tear at the top that houses the camera facing forward.
The battery also receives a boost: it goes from 400 mAh to OnePlus 6, which represents a capacity of 3,700 mAh. The wrong side? This jump was made following Apple, Sony and Google tearing the much appreciated 3.5mm headphone jack. And you, OnePlus?
OnePlus 6T: Price and competition
Price increase or not, this remains one of the cheapest routes to get a Snapdragon 845 smartphone in the UK. This caveat is important, but let me describe to you the best UK based substitutes before entering the gray import countries.
There is the Samsung Galaxy S9, which was launched at £ 739, but can often be seen hovering around £ 500 if you shop – it's the same place that the Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact was launched. A similar price cut hit the LG G7. Elsewhere, except sale, everything is more expensive.
Then there is the gray market. The Asus Zenfone 5Z is very hard to find in the UK (we could only see its mid-sized siblings), but it contains a Snapdragon 845 chip and should cost less than £ 500. Then there are various Chinese phones from Vivo, Xiaomi and Meizu: you can find out more about the best here.
Finally, there is the Pocophone F1 that deserves its own paragraph because it could be a game modifier and will soon arrive in the UK. With glossy specifications on paper and a great price of £ 329 (around £ 300), OnePlus is not to be missed.
OnePlus 6T: design and main features
The OnePlus 6T is a collection of progressive enhancements, almost all of which are part of the design. The bezel has virtually disappeared, with a rounded 6.41-inch screen covering 86% of the front of the handset. There is no chin with a home button, and there is only one small notch at the top, curved just enough to include the front camera.
OnePlus has been able to do this because the technology of reading fingerprints on the screen is finally ready for the show. The company claims to want to broadcast it with the OnePlus 5T but the technology was not reliable enough. Is it now or did they jump too soon?
I am happy to announce that it works well. Really good. In fact, it's almost as fast as a standard player. When you push your thumb against the overlay on the screen about three quarters of the screen, everything is bright green with flashing electric animation. Once approved, you are allowed to enter; the whole process should not take more than 350 ms, according to OnePlus.
As it is read by a separate camera lit by the green light, the company says that in theory, a cracked screen should not affect your ability to use it, if you're happy to have pieces of glbad in the thumb.
Otherwise, it is a standard handset, but very beautiful. A little Apple-y, of course (up to the mute switch), but only a real iPhone-phobe can see this as anything other than a compliment. The fingerprint reader is now part of the screen, the smooth back of the phone contains only two vertical cameras, the flash and a small logo OnePlus. The words "Designed by OnePlus" appear in a tiny font at the bottom, which seems superfluous given the logo above, but this is further evidence that the company wants to be known for both its design and its competitive prices.
Until here, everything is fine, but I do not want to let OnePlus fend off very easily here because there are anti-consumer sacrifices in the race to create such a stylish device. For starters, there is still no expandable memory. It's not a big deal for a phone with 128GB of storage, but it's always a shame.
More serious is the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack. This is clearly the way the wind is blowing, but OnePlus did a great job maintaining a feature that remains immensely popular. The company softens the blow by including an adapter in the box and claims that the space saved allows for an additional battery capacity of 400 mAh, but this still gives minimal consolation.
Keeping the headphone jack also provided OnePlus with an excuse to avoid making its products waterproof and dustproof with some kind of IP protection rating. Yes, it was a weak excuse, since Samsung manages to add both to its high-end Galaxy phones, but it was an exit anyway. Well, surprise! The headphone jack has disappeared, but OnePlus is still not waterproof – not officially at least, the company claiming that it is "water resistant" for everyday use. Disappointing.
OnePlus 6T review: View
The OnePlus 6T reduces the screen by 6.41 inches to give approximately the same footprint to the OnePlus 6. This was achieved by reducing the bottom dial by 1.5mm, the top by 0.5mm and the sides of the 0.13, which leads to a 86% body ratio screen.
It certainly dominates the phone and OnePlus offers four color presets to get the most out of it. As in the past, the default mode is far too complicated, but switching to sRGB displays a powerful screen, which is somehow the best of its kind.
Let's start with the positive. It's OLED, which means you get perfect contrast and a dark black and black. It also means that you can always have the display on so that your clock is visible at all times, if you are satisfied with an additional 1% battery charge per hour. In sRGB mode, it also covers 99.6% of the color gamut, which is, as you can imagine, very good.
On the other hand, the color accuracy is a little weak, especially around the pure purple range and also gray scales. This is not an abomination, but a timely reminder: if OnePlus still offers the best performance, there are still areas in which you can do better if you pay a little more. The Samsung and Apple screens remain a clbad apart, although for most eyes this will be more than enough.
OnePlus 6T: Performance and battery life
In terms of specifications, the OnePlus 6T is virtually identical to the OnePlus 6 that preceded it. This is not surprising: the interns of OnePlus 6 were as good as the money we could buy at that time and it has not changed in six months.
So, you still have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 that powers the show, backed up with 6GB or 8GB of RAM. There is still no microSD card reader, but all configurations offer a large amount of internal storage: 128 GB for the basic model of 6 GB of RAM and up to 256 GB for the version with a little more than memory.
Our review unit was the £ 529, 8GB / 128GB model, to give some background to the benchmarks below.
It goes without saying that the performance of the OnePlus 6T is exceptional, but in reality, they are no more exceptional than the other leading brands of 2018, as shown in the table somewhat predictable below.
The Geekbench 4 scores of 2,394 and 9,016 are as good as on Android. Graphic performance is also first rate. Not only does the OnePlus 6T pbad the Manhattan 3.0 test with a resolution of 59 fps and an 83 fps resolution offline, it also offers an old attempt at the more demanding reference game of tracking of cars, respectively managing 31 and 35 frames per second.
Again, this is the best of the best on Android, and all the marginal differences you see in the scores are in practice. However, the company has an additional badet: SmartBoost. According to the company, it's a question of rethinking the way that Android manages processes in the background, which speeds up by 5 to 20% the speed at which your most used applications open up by learning your behavior and prioritizing your favorites. The four days I have been on the phone so far have not been long enough to understand how it affects real-world usage, but you can imagine that this is a case of marginal gains.
Nevertheless, the OnePlus 6T still has an additional advantage: it has a battery 12% larger than the 6.
Our first battery test surprised us a bit, so we will do it again. Here it is for the curious:
As you can see, the OnePlus 6T only lasted 15 hours and 47 minutes before stopping in our standard loop video test. Let's be clear, that's fine, but the fact that it is less than 17h18min OnePlus 6 suggests that something is wrong here. It's not that it's totally unprecedented: the OnePlus 5T lasted 20:52 in the same test before.
OnePlus 6T: Camera
The camera of OnePlus 6T is unchanged compared to OnePlus 6 from the material point of view. This means that you are considering a dual network, with the main camera f / 1.7, 16 megapixels supported by a secondary device to add depth and bokeh effects.
This may seem disappointing, but it's not really the case, given the strength of the snapper in the OnePlus 6 and 6T. Or at least it would be a triumph if OnePlus did not miss the software along the way. As you will see in the comparison pictures below, the company proceeded in a strange way to the treatment. When you zoom in at low light, you may see ugly compression artifacts surrounding the edges of objects.
However, under good lighting, the OnePlus 6T is slightly better, with slightly sharper details and a more natural color balance.
To be clear, these differences are only really apparent when you zoom in, but it's disappointing that the company takes a small step backwards as others move in the opposite direction.
Oh, and if you think that's a good reason to try to get yourself a OnePlus 6, stop yourself. As soon as we updated a OnePlus 6 to Android 9 Pie, the same effects were visible.
In short, the images are still very good, but a little before joining the top table with Huawei, Apple, Google and Samsung. In addition, similar price competitors are also doing more interesting things with the camera's second lens. The LG G7, priced at around £ 430, offers a wide lens on its second snapper, and some Huawei phones feature a dedicated monochrome camera. Depth mapping is nice, but it is not extremely imaginative.
^ Click on the image to view it in full resolution
There are some extra bonuses for a software side, the mind. OnePlus has also integrated Google Lens into the camera, which allows you to identify what you are looking at, whether it is a plant species or a species of plant. ;a product. This is not perfect, his mind: he labeled my short-haired domestic cat as a Bombay Cat, and he is far from this exotic. Another advantage: the night landscape mode illuminates scenes in which the light is limited, but as in previous implementations, the image gives the impression of losing something as a result.
^ Click on the image to view it in full resolution
OnePlus derives additional credit for the quality of its video capture. Where some manufacturers can not record in 4K at 60 fps, or only allow you to abandon optical image stabilization, the OnePlus video recording solution does not compromise. It's not quite as good as the iPhone XR, Xs or Xs Max, but it's still above most of its more expensive rivals, including the popular Huawei Mate 20 Pro.
OnePlus 6T: Verdict
No big surprise here: the OnePlus 6T is another excellent phone from the company. It will certainly occupy a deserved place in our list of the best smartphones until it is inevitably replaced by the OnePlus 7 in 2019. As usual, it offers 99% of what its competitors more expensive do it at about 60% of the price: hard not to like it.
However, the market is becoming more crowded and others are playing out space for OnePlus around the world. The arrival of Xiaomi in Europe could well be a problem for OnePlus if it can offer more at lower cost with the Pocophone F1 and other models. For now, however, the OnePlus 6T is another triumph. He should sell himself brilliantly, and he deserves it absolutely.
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