OnePlus 7T long-term review

Display

Like its predecessors in the 'flagship killer' line (so the OnePlus 7 Pro doesn't count here), the 7T has a notch, of the 'waterdrop' variety, although it's among the smallest we've ever seen. It's very easy to get used to as it's not intrusive at all, and especially because it's centered and there are no icons there in the status bar anyway that would need to be awkwardly moved around. You can 'hide' the notch in software but we got used to it in less than a day and decided to keep it 'visible' for it didn't bother us at all.

The bottom screen bezel is still a bit larger than the others, but (continuing the trend described above) it's the smallest yet on a OnePlus 'flagship killer'. At this point it's getting rather hard to even notice, in day to day use, and without a magnifying glass, that it's even there at all. The 7T definitely doesn't have the Pro models' almost bezel-less look, but it's not far off and you do save some cash by choosing it.

The AMOLED screen itself is very high quality, which is commendable. The quality of panels OnePlus uses has constantly improved over the years, and this is among the best yet. Our lab tests show that its max brightness is 525 nits in manual mode and goes up to a whopping 743 nits when auto mode is enabled, which is very close to the level of recent flagship Samsungs. Still not matching those, but close enough that you won't really be able to tell a difference.

The numbers match the subjective experience we've had with it in day to day use. There was never a point where we felt like the screen was too dark to be usable, even in the brightest of sunny days. The panel gets darker than most too, which is a great bonus for people who like to use their phones in dark environments.

Additionally, the Night mode blue light filter has been revamped and now has two sliders - one for the color temperature of the effect as before, the other for lightness. Turn that one all the way towards the Darkest end of the scale and your screen will become dimmer than before, even if it was at minimum brightness to begin with. This is a very neat new customization option that should probably find its way into more Android skins.

Night mode settings

OnePlus software still doesn't have an always-on display, and it's still a huge mystery as to why that is. Most phones out there with OLED panels employ something like this in one form or another, and OnePlus' only official explanation talks about a negative impact on battery life, but at this point that should really be up to the user to decide. The Ambient display OnePlus does have is useful but you will need to touch the screen or pick the phone up for it to show itself.

You get the time and date, as well as upcoming alarm info and notification icons on it, upcoming events, and there's even now playing information for music and videos as a nice bonus (and we've peeked at this a lot, we have to admit). Weirdly enough, while you can customize the way the clock looks, that setting is not in the Ambient display section in Display settings, but in the Customization menu. Sure, it makes sense on some level, but it was confusing at first, because we expected every setting that's associated with the Ambient display to be in the same place.

Ambient display settings

What is unique about the brand's UI is that whenever a new notification comes in, you can read it for a short while on the lockscreen before it fades away. And that's without the screen turning on - the notification text appears inverted on the black screen. In comparison, a Samsung might only show you an icon for the notification, while an iPhone would light up the entire screen.

The 7T's screen has 2400x1080 resolution, which makes for an extra tall 20:9 aspect ratio, that's getting very close to Sony's preferred 21:9. The added tallness works well for apps that display content as a vertical scrollable list - think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, that sort of thing. There's simply less scrolling required. On the other hand, 16:9 videos now have even bigger black bars on the sides, and 'pinching to zoom' them to fit the screen means even more top and bottom content is cropped out. And if you capture photos in the sensor's natural 4:3 aspect ratio, viewing those shots on the handset's screen gets a bit ridiculous with the giant black bars. At least pinching to zoom is a breeze, but maybe we need wide camera sensors now that displays are getting like this?

The Display settings let you pick between a few screen calibration modes. Of Vivid, Natural, and Advanced, we went with the latter one, which, when selected, also gives you the option to calibrate to the sRGB color space, Display P3, or just use the entire color gamut of the AMOLED panel. Additionally, here you can also customize the white point to suit your heart's content.

Display settings

90Hz

The OnePlus 7T's screen may be very high-quality, but you're probably all here for this particular aspect of it, to find out how it behaves in day to day use. The 7T is the first OnePlus 'flagship killer' to go with a 90Hz refresh rate, and it only took a few months for this feature to trickle down to this range from the OnePlus 7 Pro, which is praiseworthy.

Look, there are no two ways around this - having a 90Hz refresh rate just makes everything seem much smoother than at 60Hz. Animations, touches, scrolling, interactions, transitions - everything. OnePlus already made some of the fastest and smoothest phones out there, even at 60Hz, but with 90Hz that's just taken to an entirely new level. It's impossible to show this effect with pictures, or even video, so you'll have to trust us.

Screen refresh rate setting

Here's the one thing you need to remember: using a 90Hz display on a phone for weeks on end and then going back to 60Hz feels painful, even if the rest of the hardware is still high-end. It's just one of those small things that definitely improves the user experience in immeasurable (but definitely obvious) ways. Now, that said, 90Hz is clearly not a must for anyone. You can live without it, and if you haven't touched a phone with a 90Hz display (or more), you won't know what you're missing - which might be a good thing, to be honest.

Next year we expect most upper-midrange and premium handsets to employ high refresh rate panels, so this is going to become less of a differentiating feature for OnePlus devices, although the implementation matters too, not just the hardware - remember how the Pixel 4 only allowed 90Hz above a specific brightness level threshold?

On that note, the 7T's battery life is affected by turning 90Hz mode on, but not by a lot. And we'd argue that since the 90Hz refresh rate is one of its key selling points, it makes no sense to buy this phone and then just use 60Hz to add an hour or two of battery life. But obviously to each their own.

Fingerprint sensor

Unsurprisingly, the OnePlus 7T employs an optical in-display fingerprint sensor, and unsurprisingly, it's still one of the best out there. It's fast, it's accurate, and it very very rarely errors out on the first try. We're not sure if the tip of enrolling your fingers in a pitch black room still makes performance better, but it probably doesn't hurt to try that just to be on the safe side. You can't enroll the same finger multiple times as you can with ultrasonic sensors (found in Samsung devices), but honestly that's not necessary.

This scanner performs so close to a very good capacitive one that, even if it's not strictly on par, it won't feel any slower in day to day use, unless you have another phone around that you can do direct comparisons with. On the other hand, that does not have the cool factor of unlocking just by placing your finger on the screen glass.

OnePlus has a few different unlocking animations for the sensor area, which are tucked in the Customization section in Settings, and you can also have a quick menu of apps available right after you unlock if you want to, in order to immediately jump to your most used apps, for example.

Biometric authentication settings

Face unlock is present and still the fastest on the market, but as before it only uses the front-facing camera, so it's way less secure than the fingerprint sensor or a face unlock solution akin to Apple's or Google's on the Pixel 4 series. You gain some convenience by using this on the 7T, but lose a lot of security, keep that in mind.