OnePlus 6T review

What is it?

The latest iteration of the original flagship killer. It’s the first OnePlus phone to sport the cool in-display fingerprint scanner, but like it or not, it also drops the 3.5 mm headphone jack.

Design & Construction

• The 6T adopts the currently trending waterdrop notch in place of its predecessor’s wider screen cutout. While the waterdrop notch looks good, the problem is that this design is increasingly being adopted by more and more phones making all of them indistinguishable.
• The rest of the phone is a standard glass sandwich affair. The rear is identical to the OnePlus 6’s, minus the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, of course.
• While our test unit is in Gloss Black colour, the OnePlus 6T has also gained a Thunder Purple gradient colour, which looks pretty unique. Also, the McLaren Edition of the phone comes in a carbon fibre look along with orange accents.

Display

• There’s a 6.4-inch AMOLED screen on the phone with FHD+ resolution. The new, smaller notch makes content viewing less obstructive on the 6T.
• Typical of AMOLEDs, the display here produces saturated colours and great blacks. It’s also visible pretty well under direct sunlight.

User Interface & Performance

• The OnePlus 6T is one of the first phones to come with Android Pie 9 out of the box. Of crouse, there is Oxygen OS on top of Android and it’s a super-light custom skin.
• Our tester here is the base model with 6GB RAM, which is a perfect capacity for any Android phone. If you like bragging about your phone’s spec sheet, then you can opt for the new Mclaren Edition which has a whopping 10GB of RAM.
• This 6GB of RAM combined with the Snapdragon 845 SoC and Oxygen OS ensures that the 6T is one of the fastest Android devices around. Be it opening heavy games or switching between apps, the phone swiftly glides through these tasks.
• The OnePlus 6T also embraces swipe-based navigation that’s seen on new phones with Android Pie.

Cameras

• The primary camera setup on the OnePlus 6T consists of a 16MP f/1.7 main sensor and a 20MP f/1.7 secondary sensor. Disappointingly, the 20MP camera is just kept for portraits. Phones in this price bracket have more useful secondary cameras (wide-angle/ telephoto) and we wish OnePlus gave us something better here.
• Coming to the primary sensor, it’s an optically stabilised unit which is carried over from its predecessor. So, the dynamic range on the photos is wide and details are good during daytime shots.
• OnePlus created a lot of hype around the phone’s improved night time photography thanks to Nightscape, a new HDR algorithm. While Nightscape takes lowlight better shots than the previous software, it cannot compete against the top dogs from Google, Samsung, Apple and Huawei.
• The front camera is another 16MP unit that takes detailed photos along with very good software-based bokeh.
• The 6T records videos in both 2160p and 1080p at 60/ 30 fps. The OIS works well at ironing out the inevitable shakes during filming videos.

Camera samples of the OnePlus 6T can be seen below:

Battery Life

• OnePlus’ excuse to kill the headphone jack on the 6T was to increase the phone’s battery capacity to 3,700mAh from 3,300mAh on the OnePlus 6.
• While that excuse may be a bit hard to digest, the battery life for sure is a boon. The phone won’t go out of charge on a normal day until you hammer it with demanding games or watch a lot of movies on it.
• The renowned Dash Charge fast charging is also standard which helps with rapid battery top-ups if you happen to go out of charge.
• However, the new 6T Mclaren Edition gains Warp Charge, which pushes 30W current into the battery as opposed to 20W of Dash Charge. We wish this new tech was standard on the entire 6T range and not just the top-end variant.

What Else?

• The new in-display fingerprint scanner is a nice trick up the 6T’s sleeve. It’s reasonably accurate and gives a cool sci-fi feeling every time you unlock the device.
• Those looking for super-quick unlocks can use the camera-based face unlock instead.
• The OnePlus 6T comes with 128GB of base storage as opposed to 64GB of the OnePlus 6. A good move to justify the price increase that comes with the new phone.
• Our test phone is the base variant that costs Rs 37,999, however, you can shell out as much as Rs 50,999 on the top-end variant of the phone. A lot of people believe that this price is a bit too much for a OnePlus phone.

Verdict

• While you may argue that OnePlus phones are getting dearer with every new generation, it’s pretty evident that the company still sticks to its philosophy of offering great performing phones at ‘relatively’ affordable prices.
• The OnePlus 6T is a flagship rivalling phone in most regards, except for, maybe the camera. However, if you want the maximum bang for your buck, you should opt for the base model that we’ve tested here. Honestly, 8/ 10GB of RAM isn’t required on phones as yet.