OnePlus 5T review: polished to a T

 

The best phone without a great camera

nePlus is one of those beguiling companies that seem to promise impossibly wonderful things. Flagship products at budget prices. The assiduous elegance of an iPhone at the attainable cost of a midrange Motorola. It’s a company that constantly flirts with the “too good to be true” label, sometimes delivering on its lofty claims and at other times failing to live up to its own hype.

I like the new OnePlus 5T for many of the same reasons that I like OnePlus itself. This device is full of all the right ideas — hardware design, software responsiveness, and overall usability — and if I were tasked with the job of assembling a phone, my specification would read a lot like the OnePlus 5T does on paper. In practice, this phone isn’t the total fulfillment of every objective that OnePlus set for itself, nor every promise the company has made. But it’s damn close. It takes the imperfect OnePlus 5 from five months ago and fixes much of what ailed it. This is the most refined OnePlus phone yet.

At a starting price of $499, the OnePlus 5T combines many of the most sought-after flagship features and specs of 2017 inside a design that’s as handsome and high-end as any Galaxy S or iPhone competitor. The cost is more than any OnePlus phone before it, but in the current era of $1,000 flagships from Samsung and Apple, it seems a very fair price.

A premium feel right out of the box

If you know me, you’ll know how long I’ve been writing phone reviews and how difficult it is for any new product to impress me. The OnePlus 5T is that rare device that made me pause and appreciate its premium feel as I was unboxing it. The packaging is perfectly standard for OnePlus — that’s not what did it — but the phone itself is so beautifully dominated by the 6-inch OLED display, with neatly symmetrical bezels at top and bottom just holding the thing together.

The sense evoked by the 5T’s design is one of efficiency and optimization, and comparing this new device against anything previous from OnePlus, even the five-month-old OnePlus 5, makes the older model feel inadequate. You’re free to disagree, and you might think I’m overreacting to the thin-bezel craze that OnePlus is now participating in, but I challenge you to think forward a few months. Thin-bezel phones are quickly going to take over the market, and anyone stuck with a fat-bezel device will feel behind the curve. This OnePlus 5T looks lovely today and I can be confident in saying it will still look modern and fresh a year from now.

The move of the fingerprint sensor from the front to the back of the phone has been a total triumph. Covered by a smooth ceramic, the reader sits exactly where you’d find it on Google’s Pixels and LG’s G6 and V30: horizontally centered and a third of the way down. I find it perfectly usable and reliable, but for those situations where you might still want to access the phone without lifting it off a table to ID yourself, OnePlus has also added a new Face Unlock feature to the 5T. I’ve found Face Unlock both delightful and frustrating, like most other face-identification systems thus far. (More on that later.) The important thing is that OnePlus has preempted a complaint, while at the same time feature-matching The iPhone X’s Face ID.

After the LG V30, which I reviewed last month, the OnePlus 5T is the second phone I’ve had the pleasure of handling with a 6-inch screen crammed inside the frame of a 5.5-inch handset. The 5T is scarcely any larger than its predecessor OnePlus 5, which means it’s big, but not overwhelmingly so. Single-handed use of a 6-inch phone still sounds futuristic to me, but the V30, Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Plus, Xiaomi’s Mi Mix 2, and now the OnePlus 5T have all accomplished it (even if the 18:9 aspect ratio breaks the screen size math a little bit).

I have been using a Google Pixel 2 XL most recently, and coming from that hulking device to the leaner and smoother 5T makes a tangible difference. The 2 XL feels blocky without the tapered sides of the 5T, and the difference in heft seems bigger than it is — 175g on the Pixel, 162g on the 5T — because of the better weight distribution of the OnePlus device. Am I saying OnePlus has done a better design job than Google? Yes, absolutely.

The camera bump has grown taller, but otherwise the OnePlus 5T’s design is practically faultless

My sole complaint about the OnePlus 5T’s industrial design is the camera bump. It’s taller than it was on the OnePlus 5, which the company explains as having been caused by the screen occupying more space inside the phone. The 5’s camera module was built into the space that sat behind bezel on the front, whereas the new camera system resides behind the screen, and so it protrudes a couple of millimeters more. I now find the bump just large enough to be noticeable and to irritate me, though I’m conscious that most people won’t be as nitpicky as I am, and many will put a case on the phone anyway. One thing I do know from the earlier OnePlus 5, though: the camera protrusion ends up collecting a ton of scratches and scuffs, so if you’re not a case person, prepare yourself mentally for some very rapid wear and tear there.

Beside punching above its weight in design, the OnePlus 5T also happens to have one of the better displays on the market today. My initial reaction upon hearing that this device has a 6-inch 18:9 OLED screen was to fear it was another of those poor LG OLED panels that has plagued the V30 and Google’s Pixel 2 XL. It was an unfounded fear, however, as OnePlus wisely waited until it could secure a Samsung OLED screen, and I’ve been super satisfied with that choice.

On your first look, you might not even recognize this as an OLED display: it exhibits none of the telltale signs like lurid over-saturation or color-shifting (at anything but extreme viewing angles). It’s just a very good and reliable screen, and OnePlus has gone to the trouble of providing sRGB and DCI-P3 color calibration options for those among us who care. Knowing the company’s geeky target audience, there’ll be plenty of us who do make use of that facility, and I myself have opted for the sRGB option.

Reading Mode

The OnePlus 5 and 5T share a killer feature I haven’t seen elsewhere: a monochromatic Reading Mode. This can be enabled per app or via a quick toggle. It desaturates the screen and adjusts the sharpness and brightness to your environment so it essentially emulates a Kindle (which itself tries to emulate real paper). It’s a huge relief from eye strain and really makes reading much easier. Short of having an actual E Ink screen, as the YotaPhone did, this is the closest any phone has yet gotten to re-creating the Kindle reading experience.

The biggest advantage of this display over the majority of others is the slimness of its bezels, which OnePlus enhances with a thoughtful software tweak. The on-screen Android buttons, which are typically pervasive across all apps that don’t take over in full-screen mode, can be “minimized” on the 5T. You can choose to have them hidden until you want to use them, at which point you can bring them back with a swipe up from the bottom. That gives you the entire 6-inch screen to read tweets and compose emails on, freeing up yet more space. The OnePlus 5T can feel downright luxurious compared to other Android phones in an information-dense app like Gmail, Slack, or Kindle. That being said, I do find myself needing those Android keys a little too often in my daily use to keep them hidden; so this new change is beneficial, but only in circumstances where you don’t have to do much multitasking.