It might have only been released a few months after the OnePlus 5, but the 5T managed to stand up on its own and demonstrate why it was worth the quick turnaround. The biggest change for the 5T is the 18:9 display, which elevates the device to enable it to sit alongside more expensive flagships such as the Pixel 2 XLand Note 8.
Since its launch, the 5T has stood the test of time well; although the update to Oreo was halted following reports that it resulted in issues with older devices. From what I’ve seen, Oreo works well on the 5T. Alongside basic Android 8.0 features – such as floating windows for video and notification dots – the UI has had a spruce up, with the Face Unlock function brought to older devices.
Battery life remains decent – although I’d expect nothing less after a few months of use – and there have been plenty of bug fixes from OnePlus to iron out previously annoying issues.
The OnePlus 5T remains one of the best phones on the market, and for the £449 starting price I don’t think there’s a better option out there. Of course, you could hold out for the OnePlus 6, but it’s unlikely we’ll see this before summer at the earliest. Other decent options include the Honor V10 and Nokia 8, but even among these, it’s the 5T that stands out for me.

What is the OnePlus 5T?

The OnePlus 5T is one of the best deals in tech, offering fantastic features for a great price. But it does come only a few months after the OnePlus 5 was released.
This quick release cycle shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with OnePlus, but it’s still a bit of a kick in the teeth to anyone who recently picked up a OnePlus 5. I think I’d be OK with the move if it was simply a phone to go alongside the 5, but the 5T completely replaces its now out-of-stock predecessor.
Timing aside, the OnePlus 5T is a predictably great phone. That’s because it takes everything that made the OnePlus 5 one of my favourites of 2017 and adds in an 18:9 display, reduced bezel and slightly improved secondary camera.

OnePlus 5T Sandstone White edition: Hands-on

The OnePlus 5T is one of the best phones you can buy right now, made even better by the seriously competitive price. Initially it was only available in a fairly standard black hue, but that’s not the case anymore.
OnePlus has just announced a ‘Sandstone White’ version of the 5T, and it’s very nice. Not only is the white back a lovely contrast to the still black front, but the ‘Sandstone’ texture adds a hit more grip to a phone that could be quite slippery to hold.

The texture isn’t as coarse as the older OnePlus One and 2, but it’s still noticeable and certainly welcome. Other differences include a splash of colour in the form of a red alert-slider, and black volume and power buttons.
OnePlus says this is the most expensive phone it has ever produced, but it’ll still retail for the same price as the black version. It’ll only come in the 128GB storage/8GB RAM variety, though, so will set you back £499. Read on for our full OnePlus 5T review.

OnePlus 5T – Design

I really like the 5T’s industrial aluminium unibody design, even if it’s basically the same as the OnePlus 5’s. The edges are nicely curved, it’s not too big and it’s really thin.
Unlike with the 5, the 5T is only available in the Midnight Black hue, though I wouldn’t put it past OnePlus to release a gold or slightly lighter black variant later down the line. There’ll also probably be a partnership with some obscure fashion house at some point.
The biggest design change is that the fingerprint scanner now sits below the rear camera sensor, rather than on the phone’s front. OnePlus told me it went through multiple variations of this scanner to get it right and even tried colour matching it completely to the device, but in the end it stuck with the same ceramic construction as previous phones. The scanner itself is a tad on the small side for my liking, but it’s perfectly positioned just where your finger naturally rests.
OnePlus 5T
The fingerprint scanner has been moved to the back because the front of the phone has been completely redesigned. Gone is the chunky bezel around the display, gone is the home button and gone are those capacitive keys that flanked it. Instead, you’ve got an 18:9 aspect ratio, 6-inch design running nearly edge-to-edge.
Having a 6-inch display in a body that’s only a hair taller than the 5.5-inch OnePlus 5 is an impressive achievement and real selling point for the 5T.
Screen changes aside, the rest of the OnePlus 5T is very familiar. You’ve still got that handy alert-slider on the left for quickly switching the phone to silent and the other buttons are as clicky and tactile as ever. The increasingly rare headphone jack remains on the phone’s bottom next to the middling downward-firing speaker and Dash Charge enabled USB-C port. You’ll also find a dual-Nano SIM tray on the 5T’s side. I’d have preferred a microSD slot, or a hybrid slot, but at least there’s a decent amount of base storage here.
OnePlus 5T
My biggest criticism is the lack of any official IP-rating for the phone. The majority of flagships these days are at least IP67 rated for that extra peace of mind. Obviously some corners have to be cut to allow OnePlus to sell these phones at such competitive price-points, but I just wish this wasn’t one.

OnePlus 5T – Screen

For the price, you won’t find a better display. The OnePlus 5T uses a Samsung OLED. It’s a big, bright 6-inch panel with a slightly odd 2160 x 1080 resolution. This is classed as FHD+, but really it just adds extra pixels to the top so you don’t lose any sharpness with the elongated screen. This resolution doesn’t match the quad-HD panels used by some of the competition, even at this price-point, but the OnePlus 5T’s screen is sharp enough so you won’t be able to distinguish individual pixels. There’s also no support for HDR or Dolby Vision.
OnePlus 5T
Unlike the OLED panels used in the LG V30 and Google Pixel 2 XL, the OnePlus 5T’s doesn’t suffer from wild oversaturation or terrible viewing angles. Yes; there is a mild shift to blue if you tilt off axis, but it’s only noticeable if you really go looking for it.
OnePlus lets you fiddle about with the screen calibration if you’re not a fan of the vivid default setting. I switched it to the DCI-P3 option and this levels out colours a bit without washing anything out. There’s an sRGB mode too, plus a custom setting with a slider for making the panel warmer or cooler.

OnePlus 5T – Performance

In my review of the OnePlus 5 earlier in 2017 I said it was one of the fastest Android phones I had ever used. The OnePlus 5T isn’t any faster than the 5, but it still offers one of the smoothest Android experiences out there – right alongside the Google Pixel 2.
Inside the OnePlus 5T is the Snapdragon 835, 6/8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 64/128GB UFS 2.1 storage. I still think that much RAM is complete overkill and it doesn’t really seem to make any difference to how long apps stay in memory, but it’s there if you love specs.
I have been using the top-spec version during the review period, but I previously used the 6GB OnePlus 5 and there wasn’t a noticeable drop in performance. I would only plump for the pricier model if it’s storage you want, especially as there’s no microSD card slot.
Specs are one thing, but actual performance is far more important and thankfully the OnePlus 5T uses its components effectively. There’s no lag, apps open instantly and I haven’t noticed that ‘jelly-lag’ scrolling effect that has plagued previous OnePlus devices.
OnePlus 5T

In our range of synthetic benchmark tests, the OnePlus 5T also impressed. It picked up 6789 in Geekbench 4’s multi-core test and the single-core score is about the same as the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG V30 at 1989. These numbers are nothing out of the ordinary, and nowhere near the scores achieved by the iPhone 8 Plus, but they do mean the OnePlus 5T hits the current ceiling for Android performance.
Performance is great, but the downward-facing speaker is poor. It’s loud enough, but gets blocked so easily when you’re watching anything in landscape. I also still get the same poor Wi-Fi performance I experienced with the OnePlus 5.

OnePlus 5T – Software

The version of tweaked Android OnePlus uses on its phones is still one of the best out there. It’s light, looks a lot like stock Android but adds in a load of genuinely thoughtful and useful additions.
‘Face Unlock’ is a key new feature on the 5T. It’s a self-explanatory security measure that’s sort of like Face ID on the iPhone X. Even though it’s not as tech-fuelled as Apple’s offering – Face Unlock only uses the front-facing camera, not an array of dedicated sensors – it works surprisingly well. The setup is simple and if you’re looking straight at the phone when you unlock it’ll completely bypass the lock-screen. It’s almost feels too fast to be actually doing anything, but point it in someone else’s face and it’ll do nothing.
I tried fooling it with a photo of myself and it didn’t unlock, but it’ll be interesting to see how easy it is to fool. If you’re particularly concerned about security I would stick with the the fingerprint sensor or passcode unlock, but if you value efficiency then it’s a great option. You’ll still need to use your code or finger to authorise purchases and unlock apps, though.
OnePlus 5T

Another new software addition is Parallel Apps: this allows you to create secondary versions of apps like LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook for your work profiles. It’s a neat trick, especially if you use for phone for both personal and work reasons – or if you have a secret second identity.
The rest of the software is almost identical to the OnePlus 5. You’ve got an excellent ‘Night Mode’ that works great with the OLED panel, deep customisation for icons and a fantastic ‘Reading Mode’ for making the display nicer to view in certain apps like Kindle and Pocket.
OnePlus 5T

One strange omission that keeps affecting OnePlus phones is that there isn’t the correct DRM to allow streaming of Netflix, Google Play Movies or Amazon Prime in HD. Instead, it caps you at SD and sometimes forces you manually alter the resolution in YouTube. It’s a really strange missing feature that I haven’t seen on any other phone and considering this big screen is perfect for watching videos it’s even more annoying you can’t watch it in HD.

OnePlus 5T – Camera

In the run-up to the launch of the OnePlus 5, all the hype surrounded the new camera, but I found it was the weakest part of the phone. For the 5T, OnePlus seems to have reigned in its expectations slightly and focussed less on the camera, which is probably a good thing.
Even though there are still two cameras on the back of this phone, they work very differently to how they did on the OnePlus 5. Previously, the secondary sensor was telephoto, with a longer focal-length for giving you a bit more freedom with zooming. That’s been ditched here – which is fine, it was kind of terrible – and now both cameras have the same focal-length and f/1.7 aperture. The ‘main’ sensor is still 16-megapixels, but those pixels are much bigger than the pixels in secondary 20-megapixel sensor.
This might seem a strange move: what’s the point of having two cameras on the back that are virtually the same? Well, OnePlus says the new secondary sensor is there just for low-light performance and that when the light is under 10 lux it’ll automatically switch. This low-light sensor also benefits from ‘Intelligent Pixel Technology’ which merges four pixels into one. OnePlus says this reduces noise and enhances clarity, but I can’t say I am entirely convinced.
The low-light shots I have captured are quite good, but not noticeably better than before. Noise is marginally reduced and there’s a good hit of detail, but I don’t really feel it’s worth having an entire dedicated sensor for this.
Shots taken in bright light are reliably decent: colours are bright and vivid, detail is crisp and there’s a good amount of dynamic range. It’s not going to trouble the likes of the iPhone 8 or Google Pixel 2, but I can’t criticise too much at this price. It’s also a far better camera than the terrible effort on the Razer Phone.


Even though the telephoto zoom lens has been ditched, OnePlus has kept around the quick 2x zoom jump and portrait mode. Both are fine, but the portraits still look super artificial.
I really like the camera app OnePlus has built and it’s one of the only ones I have tried that manages to cram in a deep suite of manual controls without it being overbearing. You can alter the ISO, white balance and exposure and capture images in RAW.
Video can be captured in 4K and the electronic image stabilisation (EIS) does a good job at making up for the lack of proper optical image stabilisation (OIS) but it can sometimes have an artificial finish in particularly fast-moving video.
The 16-megapixel front-facing is the same as previous OnePlus devices and it’s still pretty good. The screen can be utilised as a flash and there’s HDR here too, which can level out exposure when you’re snapping selfies in bright sunlight.

OnePlus 5T – Battery life

When the OnePlus 5T first leaked it was rumoured the new 18:9 display would be complemented by a much bigger battery. Those rumblings didn’t come to pass though, and the 5T ships with the same 3300mAh cell as its predecessor.
A huge battery like the ones used in both the Huawei Mate 10 and HTC U11+ would of been great, but the OnePlus 5T is still impressive when it comes to endurance. Even though the screen is larger, I have been getting similar battery performance to the OnePlus 5.
I can comfortably get through the day with mixed-to-heavy use, and normally I have about 10-15% spare come bedtime. An hour of SD Netflix streaming eats up 8-9%, and it’s about half that for music streaming with the screen off.
OnePlus 5T

When the phone does run out of battery, there’s Dash Charge to quickly juice it back up again. Dash Charge is easily the most efficient fast charge solution out there and it’ll get your phone back to 100% in barely over an hour. It also doesn’t heat the phone up too much and won’t slow-down charging when you’re playing games. The only downside is you’re restricted to using the bundled plug and cable if you want these speeds and things will drastically slow down if you use a different set.

Why buy the OnePlus 5T?

If you’ve recently picked up a OnePlus 5, there isn’t much to entice you to upgrade. The screen is nicer, but everything else is the same or very similar. I really think this update could have waited until next year when there was more to update, but here we are.
Quick release cycle aside, the OnePlus 5T is a fantastic phone for the price. It’s display is gorgeous, software slick and camera reliable. It’s also supremely fast and the performance can easily be compared to phones that cost hundreds of pounds more.
If you’re looking for a great Android phone but can’t quite stomach the prices being asked for the Google Pixel 2, Samsung Galaxy Note 8 or Huawei Mate 10 Pro, then you really won’t be disappointed with the OnePlus 5T.

Verdict

OnePlus keeps on churning out the best value-for-money phones around.