For a phone this big of a size, it’s pretty thin & fits in the hand perfectly. Premium metal body looks and feels great. Fingerprint scanner on rear gives phone a decent look. Change in display style has had an indirect effect on the design. The camera groove looks fine but will make the edges scratchy. Sim-card slot is ideal, doesn’t catch the eye in first look.
OnePlus added a new feature which complements the phone perfectly – the face recognition. It is fast, easy & effective. It is super easy to set-up and works even under low light conditions. Phone unlocking is incredibly quick, with almost no delay after pressing the lock key or tapping the screen. It works at some impressive angles, holding the phone right up in front of your face is not necessary. The face recognition unlocking doesn’t work while wearing tinted glasses though.
The volume rocker on the left is easily accessible in portrait mode. OnePlus 5T supports Dash charging, charges about 55% in 30 minutes. The speaker sound & quality is amazing both with & without headphones. The headphone slot on the bottom is uncomfortable with headphones put-on while gaming.
The screen resolution and display is amazing, gives you right amount of colour that suits the eyes. The 6 inches wide display adds extra pixels on the top & does not lose any sharpness with the elongated screen. The bezels are really thin, and this makes the OnePlus 5T a pleasure to hold and view. Consuming content like movies and TV shows, or simple scrolling down through pictures on Instagram is a joyful experience. The HD Panel is good but in reference to the price range, it should have been better though. The touch is really smooth – no need to click or scroll more than once for any task.
OnePlus has added Parallel Apps mode, with Parallel Apps, users can login to the same app two different accounts.
The OnePlus 5T doesn’t provide any extra feature dedicated to gaming as such, the control sensors are not as good as they should have been & can ruin the gaming experience. We did an initial test run with Asphalt 8 on this phone, and the game ran beautifully. The load times were one of the quickest we have ever seen. The game ran smoothly without any jitters. The controls however, were not as intuitive as we would have expected from the 5T.
Next up, we had WWE Immortals. The visual graphics were good and there was no lag whatsoever. Played Dead Trigger 2, the visuals were great, the larger screen size was a dream for this game and the sound output during gaming is really good. In Dream League Soccer – the effects, the touch on the OnePlus 5T were better than any other phone that I had played this game on, including the iPhone 8. In FIFA Mobile – the game itself has amazing graphics and the amazing display of the phone was like a cherry on the icing. The phone’s 8GB RAM does not allow any lag while gaming, even after installing a heavy game. The battery drained nearly 35% after gaming for nearly 80 minutes. Also, the phone barely heated up during our intense game benchmarking.
One thing we didn’t like much about this phone was the location of the speakers, it’s on the bottom left corner & hand consistently blocks the speaker slot while gaming which can spoil the gaming audio experience. I guess that is a caveat that we’ll have to face in all smartphones, since nearly 95% of phones have the speaker in the same position as the OnePlus 5T. There’s not much that OnePlus can really do something about this, so I guess we just have to accept it as it is.
Also, it is worthy to mention that this phone lack any sort of certification for water or dust proofing. In the day and age when most flagship phones are offering such features, OnePlus being the “flagship killer” should have had a bare minimum IP67 certification for basic dust and water proofing.
Concluding on a quick review, we would recommend the OnePlus 5T to anyone. The phone offers some serious value by being priced in the sub INR 30,000 range. It offers features and specifications at par with flagship phones such as Samsung Galaxy S8 and iPhone 8, both phones cost double of what the OnePlus 5T costs. It does cut a few corners, but at its price proposition, we don’t really mind. The OnePlus 5T is a great package.
