OnePlus 5T Review​: It never settles!

Unboxing

Let’s unbox and take a look at what’s inside. But before that, let’s look at the box itself.

On the front of the box, is the ‘5’ logo, yup the ‘5’ logo and not ‘5T’, Strange? The red OnePlus logo looks pretty though.


The back of the box has the usual details.


Opening the box, we have the OnePlus 5T itself. The all black device is looking glorious sitting on the red tray in the box. Lift the tray up and you will find that the tray is actually a box, containing the a translucent back case for the device as well as the quick start and safety info leaflets, there is also a sim ejector tool present.




The case included, as you can see, is a soft case, the quality is on par. Good job of including a seriously high quality case with the phone.


Going further in, we have the Dash Charge adapter as well as the Dash Charge cable. We all know what Dash Charge is, but for the sake of completeness, let’s look at the power figures of the adapter. Surprisingly, it is a 5V 6A adapter! What?! JK, it’s the good ol’ 5V 4A adapter. The adapter is high quality, as expected, same goes with the Dash Charge cable, high quality flaunting the signature red color. Beautiful and Fast.


Well, we saw all the things included in the box. Nope, we didn’t! You didn’t forget the OnePlus 5T, did you? Let’s look at the device in the next section of the review.

Design/Display

Let’s look at the design and display of the device. The overall design is very similar to the OnePlus 5 with a few changes here and there; we will see them all further in the review.
At the back, the body is an anodized aluminum body with the antenna lines running on the top and bottom of the device. On the top left is the dual-camera setup, the main camera is a Sony IMX398 sensor, 16MP, 1.12µm pixel size, f/1.7 aperture, dual pixel PDAF with EIS while the secondary one is a Sony IMX376K sensor, 20MP, 1.0µm pixel size, f/1.7 aperture.
Below that we have the fingerprint sensor (Yes, it’s on the back now!), which is located at a very convenient location and is easily reachable, unlike other phones which just mess up the position of the fingerprint sensor (*cough* S8 *cough*). Below the fingerprint sensor is the OnePlus logo in all it’s glory.


At the front, from top, is a 16MP, f/2.0 selfie shooter which is a Sony IMX371 sensor with 1.0µm pixel size, with the primary speaker and the usual sensors. Below that, is a 6.0 inch 18:9 Optic AMOLED display which despite being a 1080p (2160x1080px actually) panel is very crisp and supports sRGB/DCI-P3 color gamuts. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5 and has a 2.5D curve to it which I personally love. The sunlight visibility is solid, the contrast is on point and the screen is just a delight to look at, I have personally never saw a 1080p screen this beautiful, OnePlus just nailed it with the screen, as always. The screen just blends in with the bezels surrounding it when the screen is in off state. Below the screen is nothing this time as the fingerprint sensor is placed on the rear of the device.


The top of the device has nothing.

On the left is the volume rocker and alert slider.

While on the right is the power button and a dual sim card tray.

On the bottom of the device is the USB type-C charging port in the middle with the secondary speaker on the left and on the right is a....Wait For It....3.5mm headphone jack (All hail OnePlus for keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack).

The device feels great in the hand, the anodized aluminum body is premium and the overall build quality is solid. The device, while having a 6.0 inch screen is very handy and one doesn’t have to use the device with both the hands, thus fulfilling the actual purpose of shortening the bezels, to increase the screen estate but be handy at the same time.

Camera

Almost every smartphone now-a-days features a dual camera setup on the back. These cameras are usually a duo of a normal lens and a telephoto lens. These duos were also present on the OnePlus 5. But, on the 5T, things are way more different and interesting, instead of having a normal and a telephoto lens, OnePlus skipped the telephoto secondary lens in favor of a 20MP secondary lens having the same aperture. So, the duo we have here is a 16MP+20MP f/1.7 lenses on the back. The secondary 20MP lens is mainly for low light photography. OnePlus claims that the low light photography is very much improved over the previous generation devices.

Talking about the front facing selfie shooter, it is a 16MP f/2.0 unit, nothing innovative here in terms of specs but the camera delivers.

Let’s dive deep into the camera samples and look at how the camera fairs in different scenarios. Also, we will look into the different camera modes provided by OnePlus. The samples are enough to decide the quality of the images

Manual Camera interface:
This is how the camera app looks like in manual mode.



Daylight pictures:
Here are a few shots in day-lighting conditions. All the pics are clicked at auto settings with HDR mode off.






In day-lighting conditions, the camera does a superb job. The color reproduction is accurate with good dynamic range. One thing I like about the camera is that the sharpness is on point, which makes the pics even better!

Portrait shots:
Here are a few shots in good lighting conditions. First pic of the duos is without the portrait mode depth effect with the respective pic with the depth effect on just below them.












Despite removing the telephoto lens, the portrait mode is still present and works as expected. The images thus produced are fairly good. The edges are a little bit jagged sometimes but that doesn't happen much.

HDR Mode:
Here are a few shots in day lighting conditions. First pic of the duos is with HDR off with the respective pic with HDR on just below them.







The HDR mode works pretty well most of the times, but sometimes it just doesn't produce accurate shadows. Can be improved a little bit.

Macro shots:
A couple of macro shots.




Clicking macros are a delight on the 5T, the phone focuses easily and quickly on near object and the macros come out beautiful.

 
Indoor lighting condition:
Here are a few shots in indoor lighting. First pic of the duos is with HDR off with the respective pic with HDR on just below them.










In indoor lighting, the camera struggles a bit. The images are sharp but with noise. The HDR mode helps a lot in indoor lighting conditions but overall this department has to be improved.

Night shots:
Here are a few shots in night lighting conditions. First pic of the duos is with HDR off with the respective pic with HDR on just below them.







The night shots are pretty decent. Though the pics I clicked were mostly in street lights(as seen above). I also clicked some other pics in night lighting conditions, I am a little dissapointed by the performance of the camera in the night, but that's my personal preference. Low light performance of the camera is between average to good.

Panorama:
Here is a panorama shot.



The panoramas I clicked turned out very well. One of them is above, take a look at it.
By looking at the photos above, one can easily understand the quality of the images.

Video:
Here is the sample video I took using the 5T in normal light conditions, the video is a 1080p 60FPS sample. Impressive.

Day Four: Performance

Whenever someone talks about performance of a android device, the first few things that comes to mind are Antutu benchmark and Geekbench. Although, they don’t represent the real world performance of the device, they sure give us a rough idea of the performance of the device. So, let’s look how the OnePlus 5T does in these benchmarks. Also, I personally don’t believe in benchmarks, but they are here for the audience who want to see them.

Antutu:

Geekbench 4:


As seen in the above benchmarks, the OnePlus 5T did score pretty well. Do note that I am using the 8GB variant of the device, the scores may vary for the 6GB variant.
Now, let’s look at the multitasking of the device. I don’t think I have to prove this point; the device is a beast when it comes to multitasking apps. I had around 25+ apps in memory at one time, including two games (Asphalt Nitro and Dead trigger 2). None of the apps got reloaded when I switched between them. It is so delightful to use, you are going to love it, just take my word for it! Also, the multiwindow mode works as it’s supposed to be working.


Let’s look at some games now; the gaming experience is smooth and vivid. Thanks to the Adreno 540 GPU coupled with the 8GB of RAM, the gaming experience is smooth as a knife on a butter cube. Apart from the smoothness, the 18:9 ratio 6 inch screen adds to the enjoyment and enhances the gaming experience. Added to this is the loud and crisp secondary loadspeaker which, the output is crisp with good highs and punchy bass. Here are some of the games I played the device:


As expected, all the games played well and I enjoyed them all.

Dash Charge/Power Consumption Day​

Dash Charge:
In the world of smartphones, when the argument is about “Charging”, Dash Charge is the first name which comes to an android enthusiast’s mind (at least it is the case with me). OnePlus revolutionized the smartphone industry by bringing in the Dash Charge technology.

I remember, back in 2015, the OnePlus 2 got released, which has a standard 5V2A (10W) charging rate and just after one year, in 2016, the OnePlus 3 got released with Dash Charge technology, which enabled the device to get charged at a whooping 5V4A (20W) charging rate. Since then, OnePlus is still using the same super fast Dash Charge technology till date and that’s great, because ‘Don’t fix what ain’t broken’!



The device took exactly 1 hour 23 minutes to get charged from 4% to 100% while the phone was on, sounds super fast on paper no? Well, it feels way faster in reality. Once you go Dash, you can never come back.

Power Consumption:
Power consumption is a very subjective area and depends upon an individual’s usage pattern. I consider myself as a heavy mutlitasker. My typical day’s usage includes the usage of the usual social media apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and so on, and also listening to music while using the device. There is also pretty much of browsing and YouTuve and of course the phone calls. The device is almost always connected to the internet, either via WiFi or LTE. For the sake of testing out the battery, I also did play some games, mostly Dead Trigger 2 (like it alot) also the camera was also used quite a bit.



The consumption graph above shows the battery drop. The overnight battery drop is negligible at only ~1%.

The screen on time (SoT) can be seen at 6 hours 30 minutes, which is great. Despite being an average capacity battery, it lasts way to much, thanks to the bloat free software present on the device.

OxygenOS

OxygenOS, in my opinion is a very accurate name, what is a performance car without a good driver? It is just a normal car. Same applies to many things, one of them is smartphones. A good hardware is nothing without proper software. While OnePlus nails it in the hardware department, it is the same in the software department too.

OxygenOS is simply the vanilla android OS we love with little added tweaks on top which actually improve the user experience, cherry on top of a already delicious cake!

Starting from one of my favorite features of OxygenOS, the dark theme. It is a very simple concept, a plain dark overall UI theme, but it serves two important purposes. Apart from looking so damn sweet, it takes full advantage of the AMOLED panel and saves a lot of battery.


There is also a screen calibration option present under the display settings, which lets you choose your desired display colors. I personally prefer the DCI-P3 as it looks more natural and accurate than the default setting.


There are also options for many gestures throughout the OS. Like swiping the fingerprint scanner for bringing down the notification panel or making an ‘<’ or ’>’ on the screen when the device is sleeping to seek previous and next songs respectively. There is also an option for extended screenshot when you click a screenshot. An extended screenshot is shown below.


Other options like changing the system font or tweaking the status bar. I loved the OnePlus’ Slate font while on the other hand, I like my status bar clean now-a-days




Apart from these tweaks there is also a Gaming Do Not Disturb mode, which is very useful for heavy gamers.


All these and other small features seem very small, but they actually add to the functionality of the device a lot and make life a little bit less cruel!

Conclusion

OnePlus as a brand has always been close to their customers, taking feedbacks and implementing that feedback in their products, it is a big deal! And this is what sets OnePlus devices apart from other devices in the market.
The OnePlus 5T just screams the company’s anthem: NEVER SETTLE! In simple words, it is an android enthusiasts’ dream phone and a sweet overall package for a normal smartphone user. The OnePlus 5T is a beautiful device, be it the hardware, the software or the design of the device.
The device checks almost all the boxes. Yup, ‘almost’ all. Yeah, you guessed it right, the back camera setup. The only real con of the device is the camera. While the camera is not bad, but it could have been better, I hope OnePlus gives an update to improve the quality of the camera. Apart from that, everything about the device is a pro, I personally enjoyed the device a lot. The flagship level experience is very apparent and you will start to feel it as soon as you take the device in your hands and fire it up.
From the lockscreen to the app you want to open and then switching from that app to another app…and then switching between a bucket load of apps without any hiccups, damn that’s how I want my smartphone to be: Fluid!
I have always been a fan of OnePlus, for making the ‘Flagship killers’ and making them to perfection. I am recommending and would continue recommending the OnePlus 5T to my friends and family, not because I am a fan of OnePlus but because the device is just that good!