OnePlus 5T hands-on review

Introduction

It's half past five on OnePlus time and the 5T has just been unveiled, the interim upgrade that repacks the OnePlus 5 to make it more enticing for the holiday shoppers. T is to the OnePlus what S is to the iPhone, which means the OnePlus 5T isn't a complete overhaul. It's mostly the same phone on the inside, but there are bigger changes on the outside this time.

The most obvious one is the display. No self-respecting smartphone maker would be seen exiting 2017 without a tall screen, and the 5T is OnePlus taking due care with an 18:9 6-inch FullHD AMOLED panel by Samsung - or a Full Optic AMOLED, as the company likes to call it.

The other change is the camera setup, and this has left us baffled so far. The OnePlus 5T comes with a couple of cameras on its back, one 16MP, the other 20MP, each paired with a 27mm-equivalent lens, and each of them capturing color images. So it's not a wide+tele, and it's not a color+monochrome, it's a OnePlus 5T.

That's pretty much all the T adds to the OnePlus 5 (or takes away, we're still debating). The rest is the same, but here's a refresher.

OnePlus 5T at a glance

• Body: Anodized aluminum body, 2.5D Gorilla Glass 5 display glass. Midnight Black and Slate Gray color schemes.
• Display: 6.01" AMOLED, 2,160x1,080px resolution, 401ppi; sRGB/DCI-P3 color space support.
• Rear cameras: Main camera: Sony IMX398 sensor, 16MP, 1.12µm pixel size, f/1.7 aperture, dual pixel phase detection autofocus, EIS; multi-shot noise reduction; 2160p/30fps video recording. Secondary camera: Sony IMX376K sensor, 20MP, 1.0µm pixel size, f/1.7 aperture.
• Front camera: Sony IMX371 sensor, 16MP, 1.0µm pixel size, f/2.0 aperture; 1080p/30fps video recording.
• OS/Software: Android 7.1.1 Nougat; custom OxygenOS overlay.
• Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835: octa-core CPU (Kryo 280, 4x2.45GHz + 4x1.9GHz), Adreno 540 GPU.
• Memory: 6/8GB of LPDDR4X RAM; 64/128GB UFS 2.1 storage.
• Battery: 3,300mAh Li-Po (sealed); Dash Charge proprietary fast charging (5V/4A).
• Connectivity: Dual SIM; 3-Band carrier aggregation, LTE Cat.12/13 (600Mbps/150Mbps); USB Type-C (v2.0); Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac; GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo; NFC; Bluetooth 5.0.
• Misc: Rear-mounted fingerprint reader; single speaker at the bottom; 3.5mm jack; tri-position Alert Slider.

We'll be testing both the display and camera in our usual in-depth fashion in the full review, which should be ready by next week. For now, we've gathered some initial impressions that we're eager to share. And the sharing starts on the next page.