Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

OnePlus is back with another end-of-year "T" upgrade for its flagship. Last year it bumped the OnePlus 3 to "3T" with a slightly newer processor and a bigger battery. This year, there's not much in the way of new specs to boast about, but the OnePlus 5T has an all-new front. OnePlus has taken a big leap with the 5T and modernized the design with slim bezels, software navigation buttons, and a rear fingerprint reader. This makes it look a lot like every other 2017 flagship, but the key for OnePlus is that the 5T is only $499 (€499, £449). This means you get flagship-class specs and design for $300 less than the competition.

OnePlus' slim bezel design means the front is now sporting a 6-inch, 2160×1080 OLED display with an extra-tall 18:9 aspect ratio. OnePlus describes this as an "AMOLED" display, which is a Samsung trademark, so this is a Samsung display. Sure enough, you get a high-quality, crystal clear image even at low brightness, with none of the issues that have been plaguing LG-made OLED displays. Slimming down the bezels means removing nearly everything from the front that isn't made of pixels, so in addition to moving the fingerprint reader to the back, the OnePlus 5's capacitive navigation buttons are gone, replaced with on-screen buttons. The result is that OnePlus can upgrade from a 5.5-inch screen to 6 inches while keeping the phone body essentially the same size. In person, the OnePlus 5T looks every bit as good as an $800-$1,000 flagship smartphone.

The back is actually a step above most $800 flagships. OnePlus is still using an aluminum unibody with an anodized finish that looks and feels great. This is a lot more durable than the glass sandwich design you get on a Samsung, Apple, or LG flagship, and the antenna lines on the phone still allow various RF signals in and out. The anodized finish does a great job of keeping the phone nice looking—it never turns into the smudgy mess of fingerprints that the glass or ceramic phones quickly accumulate.

The rest of the specs haven't changed much. You still get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, a baseline of 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage (with a beefier "8GB RAM/128GB storage" option), and a 3300mAh battery. There is still a dual, rear-camera setup, with one 16MP main lens and one 20MP secondary camera. OnePlus says this is the same main camera as on the OnePlus 5, but the secondary rear lens has changed from telephoto to something that specializes in low-light photography. The front still uses a 16MP sensor.

You still get OnePlus' trademark Dash charging, which offloads the heat-generating power conversion circuitry into the charger for a lower-temperature charge. On the bottom there's a USB-C port for charging, a headphone jack (woo-hoo!), and a decent speaker. OnePlus' three-way hardware volume switch remains, which switches between the "silent," "priority," and "normal" volume modes. There's no Micro SD slot or wireless charging.

OnePlus is making a big deal out of its custom "Face Unlock" feature, which "uses over 100 identifiers to securely unlock the OnePlus 5T." This is no doubt a shot at the iPhone X, but Apple's phone uses 3D sensors to scan your face, while OnePlus is just using the front-facing camera.

The software is still Android 7.1 with OnePlus' "Oxygen OS." If you're going to mess with Android, OnePlus takes one of the best approaches to it: minimal tweaks to the existing UI, with added features and apps that more or less fit with Google's Material Design language. I'm not sure a lot of the work here is necessary (is recoloring the calculator supposed to benefit anyone?), but it doesn't clash with the design used in Google and third-party apps, which is great.

The OnePlus 5 was a great phone, with our main complaint being that the design couldn't keep up with the $800 slim-bezel flagships that were launching all year. With the 5T's modernized design, OnePlus seems to be offering the same specs and design as the competition, but for a much lower price. The OnePlus 5T launches in North America and Europe on November 21. We should have a full review out around that time, but so far it seems like OnePlus has a real winner on its hands.