The moment you unbox this phone, you know you’ve got a premium device on your hands. Sporting a sleek aluminium build with a dual camera and a fingerprint (placed perfectly at the back – in my opinion), almost bezel-less, a USB-C charging and a headphone jack! The phone comes with a silicone case, a few stickers and a USB-C dash charger.
Hardware & Performance
A 6″ 1080p AMOLED screen and overall 6.15″ phone (or are we calling this a phablet?) with only top and bottom bezels, the power button to your right-hand side of the device and the volume button on the mid-left, and not forgetting their signature slider (which I believe every phone should adopt) on the top-left. The OnePlus 5T is a very slim device (7.33mm thick) and slightly heavier than most phones nowadays (around 165gm), with a pronounced dual lens camera with a flash at the back and a front-facing camera. You only get two options in the Slate Grey version (they now have a Sandstone White option), a 64GB with 6GB RAM and 128GB with 8GB RAM and as with all their phones comes with a dual SIM option. Although not like previous versions where you can swap one SIM for a micro SD Card. Some people think not having a micro SD card slot is bad, I personally believe with all the cloud storage options available – the onboard memory available is pretty good. Having a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 with a 3300 mAH battery = full days use. The efficiency is incredible! I’ve been using the phone for almost 2 weeks now and every day I still get impressed. I’m on WiFi for almost 24 hours (yes I leave it overnight to see how good the battery is!). The dash charge is another of OnePlus features! It really does give you a day’s charge in half an hour. I personally vouch for it!
After charging to 90% at 7 am. Almost 12 hours of heavy use.
Software
The OnePlus 5T is running Android 7.1.1 out of the box (maybe because it’s a late 2017 release, it should be running Android Oreo?) and immediately updates the phone. OnePlus has promised an Oreo update in Q1 2018 (looking forward to making this a complete experience on the phone). OxygenOS is probably one of the best Android experiences I’ve ever used! So sleek and simple! I love this phone mainly for the software experience. OnePlus has a super bloatware free ecosystem that I absolutely love. You don’ have a ton of apps taking up valuable memory (some of which you will never use). OnePlus go out of their way to provide users with a super experience. Multitasking on this phone is a dream, with the speed and abundant RAM available – you are almost guaranteed a flawless experience. One of the security features on this phone includes Face Unlock (it’s optional) – where you just look at the front facing camera (albeit in good light) and it unlocks blazingly fast! Its faster than unlocking with just the fingerprint sensor at the back (which is still faster than most phones). Another feature that’s made its way here is the use of Parallel Apps. It’s great for people who run multiple accounts on social media apps.
Camera
The Camera is a major talking point of this phone. With a dual lens, I thought I was getting a secondary telephoto lens but turns out OnePlus had other ideas – to make my low light photos better. I’m on the fence here with the camera, but the photos are superb. With 3 different ratios to play around with when taking pictures (18:9; 4:3; and 1:1), the quality is superb. OnePlus have had that constant ‘super’ camera on all their devices.
Conclusions
An absolute beast of a phone. The only regret I have is not buying it a month earlier so I could take super photo’s while on holiday.
Using this phone in Kenya on both Safaricom and Airtel (sorry Telkom and Faiba, although I do have Faiba MiFi device), I believe with the oncoming data wars we’ll have in Kenya it will super experience for those of us who are always connected.
I’m super impressed with this phone and probably the only thing missing is it being water resistant (so we can go back to throwing people in pools during pool parties without having to worry).
