IN CAPABLE HANDS
The latest OnePlus has some important upgrades and other unnecessary ones, writes Khalid Anzar
China-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus, after coming up with a few affordable flagship devices, has now set a new benchmark by launching two flagships in a year. The company recently launched the OnePlus 5T, a flagship smartphone that breaks away from OnePlus’s 5.5-inch display culture in favour of an ultra-wide 6-inch 18:9 aspect ratio screen.
The new screen is a welcome move. But continuing with a full HD resolution seems to limit the otherwise perfect display. Competitors have long been offering quadHD screens in their flagships. With the new ultrawide format screen in the OnePlus 5T, the quadHD screen resolution might have been a real upgrade. The display offers good sunlight legibility, contrast ratio and saturation.
The camera is another area where the phone carries some tweaks over the previous version. It still sports a dual camera set-up — 16+20 megapixels (MP). But the 20MP telephoto lens is now replaced by a 20MP camera of 27-mm focal length and f/1.7 aperture — similar to the primary 16MP camera. This upgrade promises to offer enhanced low-light photography, albeit at the cost of the 1.6x optical zoom available in the OnePlus 5. But, low-light shooting is not improved enough to make up for the loss of an optical zoom.
The other hardware isn’t much of an upgrade over the OnePlus 5. Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and the Adreno 540 GPU, the phone comes in 64 GB and 128 GB variants, with 6 GB and 8 GB RAM options, respectively. It runs the Android Nougat-based Oxygen OS out of the box, with an Oreo update scheduled for late December. The OS comes with the “face unlock” feature, which is blazing fast and unlocks the phone almost instantly. But the company says this feature isn’t secure, and suggests using a PIN. The fingerprint scanner has been moved to the back of the device; the placement is perfect and the sensor is as quick as in earlier devices.
Priced at ~37,999 for the 8GB/128GB version, the OnePlus 5T is a mixed bag of worthy and unnecessary upgrades. The phone’s new ultrawide screen, coupled with a software-based face unlock feature, the new dual-camera setup and the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner do add to the list of upgrades. But considering that most of these features are not properly polished, I’d like to wait to see the sixth iteration of the device next year.