OnePlus 7T Pro long-term review

Software

One of the things given with OnePlus phones is a good software experience. Since its release, OxygenOS has been the backbone of every OnePlus smartphone and has quickly become the favorite Android skin for a lot of people, some of us included. Users have always loved the combination of close to stock Android appearance and the tasteful implementation of extra features on top and, to its credit, OnePlus has managed to stick to the formula well, never careening closer to one side or the other.

To that effect, the software on the OnePlus 7T Pro is very good, both in terms of design and functionality. While not entirely bug-free, we never experienced any major issue with the OS in our many months of use and the minor issues would resolve on their own over time.

We did have some issues though that persisted, and these were mostly by design. The first is the lack above of any palm rejection to ignore accidental touches. The other is the sheer size of the navigation bar at the bottom. At the default DPI setting, it's just way too tall, taller than on most other phones, which makes it very close to the bottom of the on-screen keyboard. This does make typing a nightmare as you're constantly hitting the home button while typing, which, as you can imagine, isn't fun the first time it happens and by the third time in the same sentence you're close to either pulling your hair out or throwing the phone out the window.

A solution to this would be to simply use the navigation gestures. While that does solve the problem, not everyone prefers to use gestures. The gestures are also not ergonomic to use on such a large phone.

We are also continually disappointed by OnePlus choosing not to implement an always-on display mode. They have always cited battery life concerns as the reason, but if a user wants to run down their battery for their gains, that's on them. If we start removing useful features to increase the battery life, we wouldn't have any left, as they all use battery power.

In terms of updates, things have always been a bit of a mixed bag with OnePlus. The company has always been quick to update its newest smartphone to the latest version of Android, but as the phones age as products, they become less of a priority for the company and even phones as much as a year old often end up languishing months without the latest OS.

The OnePlus 7T Pro did launch with Android 10, so there's not much to complain about there, and the phone has been receiving Android security on a bimonthly basis, which isn't ideal but better than most OEMs. The frequency with which the updates come in has slowed down a bit, which usually means they are now focused on their upcoming devices but also that there aren't any major bugs to fix in the current device.

All things considered, we have mostly been happy with the software experience on the OnePlus 7T Pro. We aren't too thrilled about some things, and it's also possible getting updates will be more difficult going forward, but apart from that there's very little to complain about here.

Performance

One of the key differences between the OnePlus 7 Pro and the OnePlus 7T Pro is that the latter comes with the newer Snapdragon 855 Plus chipset. Like the phone itself, the 855 Plus is a modest upgrade over the standard 855, with minor bumps to the clock speed on the CPU and the GPU. The phone also comes with 8GB of LPDDR4X memory (12GB on the McLaren Edition) and 256GB of fast UFS 3.0 storage. There's no 6/128GB variant this time around.

You can't have specs like those on a phone and not have great performance. The OnePlus 7T Pro is, by all means, a great performing phone with fast response times and fluid animations. What really brings the best out of the hardware is the 90Hz display, which puts all that raw horsepower to great use and really makes a big difference in usability and perceived performance. It's one thing to just see big numbers on a benchmark score but having a high refresh rate display really lets you experience that performance in a more meaningful way.

It's unfortunate, then, that you don't experience this performance in most of the games. Most games still run at 30fps, since that's what they were designed for. Those that run at high frame rates usually run at 60fps, but that's pretty much it. There are supposedly some games that run at 90fps on this device, but in our experience, we didn't see any of them run beyond 60fps on our device.

That's not to say that games don't run well on the OnePlus 7T Pro. The phone is way more powerful than it needs to be for the current crop of Android games, and you could be gaming on this for another three years before facing any major performance bottlenecks. Hopefully, by then more games would have added support for high refresh rate displays.

Multimedia performance is great, too. The display is great for watching content, although it is annoying that the edges get frequently triggered while you're holding the phone sideways while watching a video, and the curved edges aren't ideal, either. There's also no headphone jack, no bundled headset nor any adapter in the box, although the stereo loudspeakers do sound great.

The OnePlus 7T Pro also features a newer version of the fingerprint sensor used on the original OnePlus 7 Pro. The original sensor was quite poor when it came to accuracy, speed or reliability. Fortunately, the sensor on the OnePlus 7T Pro is significantly better. There were still occasions where it didn't read the print correctly, but these were far fewer than the nearly unusable sensor on the OnePlus 7 Pro and overall worked quite well. It's unfortunate that optical fingerprint sensors are still not as good as the best capacitive sensors from a few years ago, but we do seem to be getting there.