Undoubtedly, the OnePlus is ruling the charts since its inception in the Indian market. Following the launch of much-celebrated OnePlus 6, the company has launched the mid-cycle refresh of the device called as OnePlus 6T. In this case, there are a couple of noteworthy upgrades — Screen Unlock and bigger battery. We got hold of the device for some time and came up with a review. Do swirl through.
Display, Hardware and Design
OnePlus 6T sports a 6.41-inch FHD+ Optic AMOLED 19.5:9 aspect ratio display with a resolution of 2340 × 1080 pixels translating to a pixel density of about 402 PPI and with a water-drop notch. It has rounded corners with bare minimum bezels just to make more space for the display. It has an 85.6% screen-to-body ratio. Talking about the display, the Blacks are deep, the colour reproduction and viewing angles are good, it has a perfectly readable display under bright sunlight too. The display is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 6 to avoid scratches.
Just like its predecessor, the OnePlus 6T gets the DCI-P3 colour profile, along with the standard sRGB, Adaptive mode, and a Custom colour profile. It retains Reading Mode, which completely changes the display to black and white, which gives you an impression of reading an e-reader/paper when using it.
The OnePlus 6T houses a 16MP front camera on the waterdrop notch, and an earpiece on top it. Since it doesn’t have a proper space, the notification LED has been removed.
The OnePlus 6T still retains the alert slider on the right side above the power/lock button and the volume rocker has been moved to the left side, below the Dual SIM slot (nano + nano) slot. Unlike OnePlus 6, the 6T doesn’t come with a 3.5mm audio jack. At the bottom, we have a loudspeaker grill, USB Type-C port and the primary microphone.
On the back, there is a dual-camera setup arranged vertically just like OnePlus 6. It has a new 16-megapixel Sony IMX 519 primary camera with an f/1.7 aperture with support for OIS, in addition to EIS but the company has retained the 20-megapixel Sony IMX 376K secondary rear camera. Dual-LED flash is present below the camera.
OnePlus 6T has a glass back and comes in Mirror Black version that has Corning Gorilla Glass 6 protection. It has a subtle curvature that creates patterns and highlights when the light hits the back. The Midnight Black and Thunder Purple version also have a glass back, but with a matte finish. The jagged texture was etched onto the film to produce a subtle S-shaped line when the phone is reflected in the light. This device measures 8.2mm in thickness and weighs around 185grams.
Camera
The OnePlus 6T comes with the same camera setup as OnePlus 6. Talking about the specification, the device sports a 16-megapixel primary rear camera with a f/1.7 aperture with Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) along with Electronic Image Stabilisation (EIS). The secondary camera is 20-megapixel with f/1.7 aperture. The front side of the device is taken care of the 16-megapixel camera with Sony IMX371 sensor, and f/2.0 aperture.
The Camera UI is simple with toggles for the timer, aspect ratio, Flash on top and front or rear camera toggle, shutter button and image preview button on the bottom. You can just swipe left or right to switch between video, photo, portrait, and Night. Moreover, there are new bokeh effects, including hearts, circles and stars so that lights in the background of your portrait shots will change based on your selection.
Talking about the camera performance, the OnePlus 6T takes good photos under daylight condition with very good details, colour, and vibrancy. Moreover, the images taken in HDR mode is better with improved contrast and saturation. The portrait shots are better with good edge-detection.
The company has added new ‘Night’ mode, which we saw earlier with Huawei P20 Pro. With long exposure, it brightens up the subject but has a lot of noise in it. Having said that, it is nowhere nearly as good. In addition to it, handheld shots, in this case, produce less sharp images than the regular one. The front camera is good for selfies and video chats. It has beautify option in both front and rear cameras.
Check out the camera samples below (Click the image to view full resolution sample)
Software, UI and Apps
Coming to the software, the OnePlus 6T runs on OxygenOS 9.0 based on Android 9 (Pie) on top. If you follow OnePlus, you must be knowing by now that It is pretty much stock with added features like Shelf that shows weather, recent contacts, recent apps, Dashboard (with data used, available storage and battery) and Membership card details.
It has all the features that are already available on the OnePlus 6 including Gestures, actions for Home, Recent and Back buttons, double tap to wake, Music control, flip to mute, three-finger screenshot, swipe fingerprint for notification, option to customise functions of the alert slider key by choosing what to keep active and what to silence in each mode.
There are Gaming Mode, Pocket Mode and Parallel Apps that lets you clone apps including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more, which allows you to login to the same app two different accounts. In addition to it, there is a Smart Boost option, when activated, it leverages the performance of loading apps and games.
Apart from the usual set of utility apps and Google Apps, this comes with Amazon and Amazon Kindle apps and doesn’t have any other bloatware. There is a quick search option to search apps based on the category that are automatically tagged.
Fingerprint Sensor and Face unlock
Unlike other OnePlus devices, the OnePlus 6T comes with the in-display fingerprint scanner called as ‘Screen Unlock’. The fingerprint scanner is placed at the bottom of the display which will be highlighted when the device is idle.
OnePlus 6T features a new optical fingerprint module housing a small lens that can accurately register your fingerprint when pressed down on the cover glass. In this case, the display acts a light source to mark the boundary of your fingerprint including dimensions and shapes.
The process of adding fingerprint is slow, so does unlocking the device. But soon it unlocks in a jiffy as the time progresses. You can add up to five fingerprints. There is Face Unlock, which is fast that can unlock to unlock the phone in 0.4 seconds. Face unlocks works well in the bright environment, for dark conditions, there is assistive lighting that uses screen’s light to help the camera recognise you.
Connectivity
The OnePlus 6T supports various connectivity options including 4G (4×4 MIMO) and VoLTE for Reliance Jio, Airtel and others. It also has Dual 4G VoLTE support so that you can use VoLTE on both the SIMs and also switch data between two Jio SIMs easily. It has Wi-Fi 802.11ac dual-band (2×2 MU-MIMO ), Bluetooth 5.0 aptX HD, GPS/GLONASS/Beidou, USB 2.0 Type-C with support for USB OTG, USB Type-C audio and NFC.
Performance and Benchmarks
The OnePlus 6T is powered by the latest Octa-Core Snapdragon 845 64-bit 10nm Mobile Platform clocked at 2.8GHz within AIE and Adreno 630 taking care of the graphics department. The performance of the device is just excellent, and the gaming performance is good as well with good graphics even in graphics intensive games, giving no room for frame drops or hangs. Check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
Check out the complete set of OnePlus 6T Benchmarks here. Also, check out the gaming review and PUBG gameplay below.
Gaming performance
PUBG
Battery life
The OnePlus 6T is powered by a 3700mAh battery with Dash Charging technology, which the company mentions as Fast Charging on its site. In reality, the OnePlus 6T lasted more than a day with average use and should last for the whole day with heavy use. The company says that half an hour of charge using the fast charger will offer a day’s battery life, which is fine for casual use, but not for heavy users. It also doesn’t have wireless charging even though it has a glass back.
In our One Charge rating, the OnePlus 6 achieved 18 hours and 49 minutes, which is better that the OnePlus 6’s charge rating of 16 hours and 44 minutes mainly due to larger battery. It took just 28 minutes to charge from 0 to 50%, but it took 1 hour and 31 minutes to charge from 0 to 100%, almost same as OnePlus 6 even with larger battery. We will bring you the complete set of battery test results soon.
Conclusion
The OnePlus 6T is not a quiet revolutionary upgrade from its predecessor, even though it does come with a few noteworthy changes on board. If you are a OnePlus 6 user, we can certainly understand your situation. If you are happy with the OnePlus 6, you can wait for the major upgrade next year. The OnePlus 6T comes in Mirror Black, Midnight Black and Thunder Purple colours. The 6GB RAM with 128GB version is priced at Rs. 37,999, 8GB RAM with 128GB storage version costs Rs. 41,999 and the top-end 8GB RAM with 256GB storage version cost Rs. 45,999, making the 8GB + 128GB version Rs. 2000 costlier than the predecessor. You can get the smartphone from Amazon.in,OnePlus.in, OnePlus stores, Reliance Digital and Croma stores offline. To summarize, here are the pros and cons of the smartphone.
Pros
- Large 6.41-inch AMOLED screen
- Smooth performance
- In-display fingerprint sensor
- Good Battery life
Cons
- No wireless charging
- No IP rating for water resistance
- Lacks 3.5mm audio jack