Oneplus 3T

This mid-range phone is a real plus

Oneplus started out by crowdfunding, inviting customers to place pre-orders, and their success allowed them to develop a more conventional business model. It’s made some of the best-value phones of the past couple of years. At first glance, the 3T looks like a move in the wrong direction. When we first reviewed the Oneplus 3 (see Issue 480), it was a fantastic phone for a very reasonable £309. Then, as sterling fell, it went up to £329. Now it’s been replaced by a new model at £399.

So far, so disappointing. In fact, though, the 3T remains a great bargain. For a start, you get a sensible 64GB of storage as standard. As with iphones, there’s no microsd card slot to add capacity, but if you think you might need more, a 128GB model is available for £439. Bear in mind that Apple still only offers 32GB in its basic configurations, and charges £100 extra for 128GB.

The Oneplus 3’s attractive aluminiumminium case, decent 16- megapixel rear cameramera and excellent AMOLED screen are left unchanged. The processor is even better,etter, matching much pricier phones, and the battery has been tweaked to chargege faster. Strangely, our video-playback test ran it down in just 13 hours 22 minutes,nutes, compared with nearly 17 hours forr the original Oneplus 3. However, in daily use the 3T did seem to last longer – a reminder that improving battery life is a complicated business. The one new feature that did fail to impress us was the 16-megapixel selfie camera, whichh often got exposure and colour balance wrong.

What may persuade you more iss news that an upgrade to its Oxygenos software (based on Android 7.0 Nougat) is alreadylready available in a beta version and will soon be finished. Oneplus says it’ll take this opportunity to sort out a software problem that at times in our tests made the touchscreen feel slow to respond. We wish it was £309, but Oneplus is still showing the big brands how it’s done.

With improved screen, speed and storage it remains a great bargain