Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

After launching the OnePlus 5 earlier this year, OnePlus is back with an end-of-year upgrade for the device. The OnePlus 5T takes a winning formula—high-end specs with a low price tag and a metal body—and reworks the front of the phone to dedicate as much space as possible to the screen. This device has a new screen, a new button layout, a new fingerprint reader, and a new camera setup. It almost feels like a totally new device.

We liked the OnePlus 5 from earlier in the year, but, with the more modern design, OnePlus has fixed OnePlus 5's biggest downside. The result is something that is extremely compelling—a $500 phone that makes you question exactly why you'd give $800 to those other OEMs when this has nearly everything the more expensive phones have.

Design and build quality

There is so much to like about the OnePlus 5T hardware. The big addition is the new slim-bezel front design. The OnePlus 5 shipped with a 5.5-inch screen, but thanks to the smaller bezels on the 5T, OnePlus can now cram a 6-inch display into a body that—give or take a few millimeters—is about the same size as the 5.5-inch phone. The bigger display in the same size body makes the OnePlus 5T feel like a major upgrade over the previous device. This new release looks more modern and makes better use of the front space. The change puts the OnePlus 5T's phone design on par with those $800 flagships.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: OnePlus 5T SCREEN 2160×1080 6.01" (401ppi) AMOLED OS Android 7.1.1 (Oxygen OS) CPU Eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (Four 2.35GHz Kryo 280 Performance cores and four 1.90GHz Kryo 280 Efficiency cores) RAM 6GB or 8GB GPU Adreno 540 STORAGE 64GB or 128GB NETWORKING 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, NFC BANDS GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz WCDMA: Bands 1/2/4/5/8 FDD-LTE: Bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/17/18/19/ 20/25/26/28/29/30/66 TDD-LTE: Bands 38/39/40/41 TD-SCDMA: Bands 34/39

CDMA EVDO: BC0 PORTS USB 2.0 Type-C, 3.5mm headphone jack CAMERA Rear: 16MP main camera, 20MP low light camera Front: 16MP SIZE 156.1 x 75 x 7.3mm WEIGHT 162g (5.7 oz) BATTERY 3300mAh STARTING PRICE $499 OTHER PERKS "Dash" charging, three-position physical notification mode switch, fingerprint sensor, notification LED, Dual SIM slots

With the bigger display comes a slightly bigger price tag: the OnePlus 5T is $20 more than the OnePlus 5. OnePlus seems to bump up the price of its phone every year. The company started offering a flagship-class phone with the OnePlus One, which was only $300. The price creeped up to $329 with the OnePlus 2, then $399 with the OnePlus 3, then $439 with the OnePlus 3T. The $499 price is the highest ever, but flagships from the major OEMs have also jumped up in price for 2017. With the high-end of phones now priced at about $800 to $1,000, the 5T still feels like a bargain.

The display

The display is a 6-inch, 2160×1080 AMOLED panel with an 18:9 aspect ratio. It's still a "1080p" display, but this is a bit taller than the usual 16:9 aspect ratio. The display is built by Samsung, which is basically the only company that makes high-quality OLED panels for smartphones. The display looks great even in low lighting, and it doesn't have any of the weird artifacts present in the LG-made OLED panels that have been popping up lately.

The OnePlus 5T's 401 pixels per inch (PPI) isn't as outrageously dense as the 570 PPI Galaxy S8+ display, but that many pixels really seems like overkill for regular smartphone usage. 500+ PPI is great if you're strapping the phone into a VR headset, but for doing normal smartphone things, the display here is beautiful. Plus, at "only" 1080p, you should have slightly better battery life.

In the upgrade from the 5 to the 5T, OnePlus has also fixed a strange scrolling effect that occurred in some devices; the community dubbed this "jelly scrolling." OnePlus made an engineering decision to mount the OnePlus 5 display upside down and then flip the display orientation in software. This led to a funky, intermittent scrolling behavior that would somehow make UI components squish and stretch as you scrolled the screen. This year, the screen is mounted the right way, and the scrolling should be normal again.

To make room for the larger display, OnePlus is finally changing from capacitive navigation buttons that live below the screen to on-screen buttons drawn by the software. OnePlus' old hardware buttons could have their functionality swapped around, but that also meant the buttons were totally unlabeled, which often got confusing. You can still swap the software buttons around, but now the labels move, too.

Switching to a slim bezel design means moving the fingerprint reader, so now you get a big, round fingerprint sensor on the back just like on a Google or LG phone. The sensor is center-mounted about 3/4 of the way up the back of the phone, putting it in a great spot to easily hit with your index finger. It's made out of ceramic, and I found it to be fast and accurate. The back still looks too much like an iPhone 7 Plus knockoff for our liking, although that is diminished somewhat with the relocation of the fingerprint sensor.

The phone has an aluminum unibody, and the back is made completely out of anodized aluminum, save for the antenna bands on the top and bottom of the phone. A metal back is increasingly becoming a rarity as easier RF engineering and wireless charging pushes more and more manufacturers toward making all-glass phones. With nearly all the $800-$1,000 phones (save for the Pixel 2) switching to a fragile glass back, the OnePlus 5T's metal body is one of the best you can buy at any price. The one downside is that you don't get wireless charging, but that still always seems slow, finicky, and obsolete now that we have the reversible USB-C plug with super-fast wireless charging.

And speaking of charging, the OnePlus 5T still comes with OnePlus' "Dash" charging. This is actually pretty neat: the heat-generating power management circuitry that normally lives in the phone is also duplicated in the power brick. When you're using a "Dash" charger, the power management circuitry in the phone turns off, and the charging setup does power conversion in the power brick. This means the brick gets hot instead of the phone, allowing the phone to charge optimally. This also really helps if you're trying to use the phone while it's charging, since a hot phone equals a slow phone. And remember: the power management is duplicated in the power brick so that if you don't have a dash charger, a normal one will still work.

On the audio front there's a single, bottom-firing speaker that actually sounds pretty good. It's loud, clear, and better than you'd expect it to be. There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Still, there are a few items on the phone that fall in the "indifferent" category. OnePlus is again including its three-way hardware silence switch. You can slide between "silent," "do not disturb," (which is just Android's "Priority" mode, where you can choose which apps or people can make noise in this mode), and "Off." The switch does feel very well made, though, with a nice knurling pattern and a solid click action.

OnePlus also developed its own version of "Face unlock," a feature Android has had since 2011. Obviously this is aimed at the iPhone X, which ships with a fancy 3D face recognition system, but OnePlus is only using the front facing camera for facial recognition. OnePlus admits that this feature is mainly for "ease of access" and isn't as secure as a fingerprint sensor. It is very fast at times—if the phone is aimed right, and if the phone is in a good mood, you won't even see the lock screen when you turn it on. When even OnePlus won't vouch for the security of the feature, though, I'm not sure if I should be impressed or alarmed by such speed.

If you want some legit hardware complaints: the phone isn't waterproof, and there's no expandable storage. That's about it, really.

OnePlus has simply made one of the best phones of 2017 from a hardware perspective. The slim bezel design and Samsung AMOLED display is every bit as good as what you get on the $800 flagships, and the metal back makes the phone better than most $800 flagships. The OnePlus 5 was already great hardware for the price, but with the new design, the OnePlus 5T is great hardware at any price.

Oxygen OS is the usual breath of fresh air

















OnePlus' software package—called "Oxygen OS"—should be the blueprint for what "customizing Android" means. OnePlus sticks to the same "Material Design" aesthetic that Android, the Google apps, and third-party apps all follow, but the company adds its own features and options. This is a much better approach than what you get on a Samsung or LG, as both companies re-skin the entire OS to look like a totally different beast. Since you can't re-skin the Google apps or third party apps, however, applying a custom design to the core OS results in a fractured interface if the OS has one design style, and all the apps have another. OnePlus' design definitely feels like the right way to go, allowing OnePlus to add features while still giving users a cohesive software product.

As a result, the basic OS interfaces are pretty much unchanged from stock Android. The lockscreen, notification panel, settings, and recent apps all function the way you would expect them to with only a few minor tweaks from OnePlus. The home screen has a panel on the left side, which shows the weather, recent apps, and some device specs like storage use. This is super easy to replace if you don't like it. Similarly, the calculator, clock, and file manager all get custom OnePlus versions that don't feel that much different from stock Android. If you want, you can seek out alternatives in the Play Store.

OnePlus loves to pack its OS with customization options, and if you dive into the OS settings you can tweak a ton of stuff. You can fully customize what shows up in the status bar, showing or hiding things like the clock, auto rotate status, Wi-Fi, and cellular network. You can set the battery to be the normal battery icon, a circle, or show a percentage readout. You can add seconds to the clock, or show the network speed in kbps. There are a number of options in the "Gestures" settings, too: You can swipe down on the fingerprint reader to open the status bar, or use the fingerprint reader as a shutter button inside the camera app. If the screen is off, you can double tap to wake it or draw a letter gesture on the screen to open something. For instance, drawing a "V" on a turned-off screen could launch the flashlight. There are two system fonts to pick from—Google's default "Roboto" and OnePlus' "Slate"—and you can customize the color of the notification LED. There's also a dark theme, which will recolor the OS and built-in apps, as well as a million other options.







OnePlus' software navigation buttons are really weird. The spacing is all wrong—OnePlus has them crunched together in the middle of the screen, almost as if the company made space for five buttons but decided only to draw the middle three. The spacing here doesn't seem like a preference, it just looks incorrect and ugly when the buttons are all squished together. OnePlus has done optional on-screen buttons in the past, and those were properly spaced, so why the change? OnePlus has ten thousand options for everything under the sun, except restoring the buttons to the proper spacing.

There are some options for the on-screen buttons. You can add an optional fourth button on the left-hand side, which can hide the navigation bar—but that's it. The spacing on this fourth button doesn't make any sense either. It lives in the left-hand corner of the navigation bar, and it isn't equally spaced with the other buttons. There's an option to reverse the button order from the normal "back/home/recents" to a Samsung style "recents/home/back." You can also pick from a few double-tap and long-press functions for each button.

Overall, I still love this software package. It's mostly additive to Android rather than trying to be a full replacement, a blueprint I wish more OEMs would follow. OnePlus' "customization" route serves both types of consumers. There are those who want to tweak the phone to their heart's content—they can dive into the options and do so. And there are those who don't care—they can just ignore the extra options.

OnePlus' device support outlook

OnePlus' Android update policy hasn't really changed from the OnePlus 5, which is to say, there is no official update policy. Even after asking OnePlus, we were told there's no promise of monthly updates, and there's no designated "x years of support" window. OnePlus reps we spoke to would only say to look at what the company has done in the past.

So, let's do that: OnePlus supported the OnePlus 2 with major updates for less than one year. The device, released in August 2015, did not get an update to Android 7.0 Nougat, which was released in August 2016. OnePlus does still ship quarterly security updates for the Android 6.0 device, though, with the most recent one arriving in October.

Things seem a little better for the OnePlus 3 and 3T, which got an official upgrade to Oreo over the weekend. There's no telling how long OnePlus will support the 3 and 3T, but so far the support window seems longer than the OnePlus 2. OnePlus told us the 5 and 5T will have an Oreo beta by the end of the year and a final release by Q1 2018.

The OnePlus 5, 3T, and 3 have been getting new updates several times a month, which usually arrive in the latest security update. Sometimes these are about a month late, and other times they are on time with the more security-conscious OEMs. OnePlus also seems to go out of its way to ship fixes for high-profile vulnerabilities, like when it shipped the KRACK WPA2 vulnerability in October (making it one of the first OEMs to patch it). OnePlus posts every update release on its website for each device, making update history and release notes very easy to track.

While OnePlus makes great hardware and software at a great price, the company often seems determined to shoot itself in the foot with software oversights or anti-consumer moves that generate terrible PR. This month, for instance, it left an engineering APK in its production software that contained a root backdoor. Last month, it was caught collecting personally identifiable analytics data (like phone numbers!) without informing users or asking them if they want to opt in. Earlier this year, the company sent push ads to customers.

At the end of its various controversies, OnePlus usually does the right thing. It is issuing an update to remove the engineering APK, it's deleting analytics data and updating phones to requiring an opt in, and it's allowing users to block the push ads. But why does the company keep doing these things in the first place? OnePlus' continual stream of stupid blunders and lack of concrete update promises makes it hard to trust the company. Right now it feels like OnePlus could do something bad to your software or drop support for the device at any time. So I'll say the same thing I said with the OnePlus 5: the best thing OnePlus can do to improve the outlook of this phone is immediately announce a standard update program with timely monthly updates and two years of major update support.

If you want to get really technical and install your own software, the OnePlus 5T has an unlockable bootloader, allowing you to replace OnePlus' software builds with whatever you want. OnePlus devices are usually extremely popular in the modding community, to the point where modding tools are being released for the OnePlus 5T before it even hits store shelves. I'd expect to see official support from Android's most popular aftermarket ROM, Lineage OS, and tons of ROMs and mods from other developers.