OnePlus 6T Review: Revised Formula, Same Results

OnePlus is like an endless Kickstarter campaign. It's a community-driven product development creed that makes every OnePlus phone buyer feel like the owner of the brand's fortune. Of course, as with Kickstarter, it's more of a marketing half-truth than a reality. The new OnePlus 6T represents a company ready to challenge and disappoint its most ardent fans.

A year ago, Pete Lau, CEO of OnePlus, wrote that 80% of OnePlus users still used the headphone jack. Today, Lau is launching a phone without a headphone jack. More recently, co-founder Carl Pei told me that the notification light was so important to OnePlus users that its inclusion even affected the size of the OnePlus 6 screen. Today, Pei and his company launch a phone without a notification light.

The compromises OnePlus has created are easily visible: the 3.5mm jack leaves room for a larger battery, while the absent LED allows a smaller notch at the top of the screen. Both decisions bring OnePlus closer to the mass market and move it away from its origins as a tech – savvy alien wishing to create a dedicated phone to the needs and desires of an enthusiastic audience. With extensive worldwide mobile operator offerings, sales at T-Mobile stores and Verizon's support in the United States, OnePlus, as a company, announces a stronger willingness to compete in the market General public.

OnePlus has integrated the fingerprint reader directly into the OnePlus 6T display – a feature that is already familiar in China, but has never been experienced in the United States. OnePlus pricing is also atypical for the US market. It starts at $ 549 for 128 GB of storage and 6 GB of RAM, making the OnePlus 6T the most affordable flagship product.

With a larger 6.4-inch screen and a slightly thicker profile due to the larger 3,700 mAh battery, the OnePlus 6T is simply the OnePlus 6's jumbo phone. Quite counter-intuitive, I find that the new 6T is easier to handle because of its greater weight and thickness. It is more natural to adhere than the 6 flatter and flatter. That said, you still have to deal with a big phone, consistent with the dimensions of Google Pixel 3 XL and iPhone XS Max. If you do not like the ergonomics of these devices, which is full of slippery (and fragile) windows at the front and back, OnePlus does not really offer you any other solution.

The fit and finish of the OnePlus 6T are almost perfect. Unpacking this phone and inspecting its fitness, I'm not less impressed than when opening an iPhone. OnePlus even adds a touch of customer service by pre-applying a discreet and discreet screen protector to its phone. The design of OnePlus has improved at the same pace as the entire mobile phone industry, to the point that it is difficult to find flagship phones that do not look like precision electronic jewelry. The only minor complaint I would make is that the 6T's headset – located on the top edge of the phone, pushed out of the ultra-minimalist notch – tends to accumulate dust and debris a little too easily.

The latest addition to the OnePlus 6T over the previous OnePlus 6 is a built-in fingerprint sensor. OnePlus said it has tested the new biometric reader so that it can run up to 300,000 unlockings without showing any deterioration in accuracy or speed. It also works in wet weather and through screen protectors. The company is convinced that this fingerprint reader will not lose precision over time, but I am not impressed by the precision or consistency it has when it is brand new.

I recorded my two thumbprints with the OnePlus 6T and I got an extremely disappointing success rate by unlocking the phone the first time. Sometimes it would be a simple unlocking experience, although significantly slower than the previous discrete fingerprint reader that OnePlus had before. Most of the time, however, I had to reposition my finger several times before the phone identified me. And yes, I made sure to re-register my thumb analysis more than once in case the original identity information would not be sufficient.

The brightness of the fingerprint identification graphic at the bottom of the screen is also not ideal. It does not adhere to the brightness setting of the overall display (nor are ambient screen notifications, but they are easier to forgive because I want to read them), so they look extremely bright in environments dark. OnePlus accompanies the unlocking process with a huge animated electric sphere around my finger. This is partly to dress up the bright green light needed to brighten my finger to get a clear reading, but I find it still shocking. It would be a cool unlocking process for something that I only have access to a few times a day – there is a certain sense of opportunity with all this fuss – but it quickly becomes tiring when you unlock your phone a hundred times a day . The fingerprint readers in display are undeniably cool, but they must be very well implemented, and OnePlus has not done it yet with its latest flagship product.

The display of the 6T impresses me more and more I use it. At first, I noticed the characteristic color change of the OLEDs when I tilted the phone: the whites were starting to present red and green hues. But as I began to use the phone (instead of examining it in too much detail), I really had to appreciate the colors, contrast and sharpness of this screen. This is an extra-large 1080p screen (19.5: 9 aspect ratio) that does not match the extreme pixel density of a Huawei Mate 20 Pro or Samsung Galaxy Note 9, but it's not not necessary. Whatever the case may be, these two devices intelligently reduce their resolution to preserve battery life.

One thing I've seen both with the OnePlus 6T in its adaptive mode and the Mate 20 Pro in its Natural Tone mode is that they seem to exhibit darker shadows and darker areas. than the Google Pixel 3 XL or the Samsung Note 9. Now, I think the pixel and the note are the most accurate and faithful representations, but in practice, I find the level of visibility of the shadows more important than OnePlus and Huawei give me more useful. They always produce black of a splendid depth, like all OLED screens, if any. But it is these last shades before absolute black that are a little brighter with these two phones.

OnePlus offers the sRGB and DCI-P3 color modes on the OnePlus 6T, the first one saturating and the second seeming to have exactly the same amount. I do not quite understand how the adaptive mode differs, it seems very close to the P3 profile, but whatever you do, make sure to immediately escape the default mode. The default setting on the 6T is the visibly over-saturated assault on the eyes for which OLED displays are traditionally known. It is also worth mentioning here the mode of reading of OnePlus, which, as far as I know, remains a unique characteristic of the telephones of this company. It makes the screen a monochrome optimized for playback and can be assigned to activate when you are in certain applications. I find this particularly useful with Twitter because its dull appearance helps me get out of the application faster than usual.

Regarding this drop-shaped notch, I do not think it's an asset (being smaller than the competition) or a burden (existing). At first, I thought it was small enough for me to tolerate it, but over time I found it more important than a flatter, wider notch. I've therefore switched to the notch hiding option and got a reasonably sized top executive that allowed me to view my notifications and status icons. No, it does not fit the curvature of the bottom of the screen, but I'm not pedantic enough to notice that.

However, I am very pedantic about the camera's performance on phones, and that's where OnePlus lets me down again. A year ago, I wrote that the OnePlus 5T is the best phone without a great camera, and nothing has changed about this situation. In fact, a year in which Apple, Google and Huawei have all made significant progress in image processing, OnePlus has decided to leave the hardware of its OnePlus 6 camera fully unchanged in the OnePlus 6T. The company has tweaked and optimized some software: new noise reduction algorithms, better contour detection in portrait mode, and improved scene detection. 6T will apply treatment images differently depending on whether it detects content in text, food, night scenes, or photos filled with greenery. This is a rudimentary form of advanced AI calculations used by Huawei and Google's camera systems.