Android darling OnePlus moves at a speed that often feels too fast. Didn’t the OnePlus 6 just come out six months ago and set the bar for a value-packed premium Android phone?

It sure did! But unlike other phones that cram more into a glass-and-metal sandwich to justify ballooning prices, OnePlus keeps pushing innovation forward without charging an arm and a leg.

As fantastic as the OnePlus 6 hardware and pricing is, mimicking the best parts of the most popular phones and selling them in your own device can only get you so far. At a certain point, a flagship phone needs to lead by other means to really step out of its competitors’ shadows.

And lead the new OnePlus 6T phone does. With a fingerprint sensor built into the display that’s nearly as fast as the physical reader it’s replacing, a larger display with a smaller notch, a bigger battery, vastly improved cameras, and pricing that starts at $549, the 6T offers the futuristic package other companies can’t or won’t give us.

Oh, and these are two big firsts for OnePlus: You can buy the phone from a carrier in the U.S. (T-Mobile), and it officially supports Verizon. Yes, OnePlus’ phones are no longer limited to work only on T-Mobile and AT&T in America. I’ve been using the 6T on Verizon and it’s been glorious.

I’ve reviewed every OnePlus phone except the OnePlus One and every time I get the latest model in my hands, I’m awestruck how the company can offer so much for less.

OnePlus phones gradually get pricier with each release, but not by so much to disgust you; the 6T still costs a good amount less than a Google Pixel 3, iPhone XR, Galaxy S9 or any of the more luxurious and expensive $1,000+ phones like the iPhone XS and Galaxy Note 9.

The entry-level 6T costs $549, which (if you’re keeping track) is only $20 more than the price of the OnePlus 6, and it comes with 128GB of storage (double the previous amount) and 6GB of RAM. The version I tested costs $579 and includes 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. And if you want even more storage, there’s a $629 6T with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM.

Cue the crybabies who are going to be upset over the hike for the entry-level model (the two other versions are identically priced as the 6), but $20 for double the storage is a steal especially when you compared it to the 50 bucks Apple charges to double the iPhone XR’s 64GB to 128GB or the $100 asks for the same on the Pixel 3.

Whether you like OnePlus phones or not, there’s nothing to dislike about their pricing. Find me a phone with the best specs (for a 2018 Android phone) and a near-stock and bloatware-free Android experience rolled up into a design that looks and feels so good for same cost, and I’ll eat my foot.

It’s both a blessing and a curse to review tech for a living. Particularly with phones, it’s a privilege to be able to try out so many new devices and see futuristic innovations such as pop-up cameras (motorized or not) before everyone else does.

But phones are phones and they’ve all started to look the same with almost all of them opting for the “glass-and-metal sandwich” design, where a metal frame is sandwiched by a glass display on the top and a glass back on the bottom.

I don’t have anything against this aesthetic, but I think it’s time for something new. One of the things I liked best about the OnePlus 6 was how different OnePlus approached the now-traditional smartphone design. The glass back was thinner and more curved around the sides than on an iPhone 8 (or newer) or Galaxy S6 (or newer) and the Midnight Black version with matte finish is a look Batman would approve of.

The OnePlus 6T is just as attractive as its predecessor. I miss the OnePlus 6’s slightly thinner profile (the 6T is 0.05 inches or 1.27mm thicker), and it weights a tad less, but I got used to the thicker 6T just like I did with switching from my iPhone XS to the iPhone XR during its review period.

If you’re a case person (the phone even comes with a TPU-style case, though I think it’s ugly), the design will be lost on you. If not, though, you’ll appreciate how the curves, smooth metal, and clicky buttons feel in your hands. It’s a beautiful phone with clean symmetry.

Those are the more subtle changes, but there are some pretty big ones on the OnePlus 6T that are impossible to miss.

The display, for one, is larger than the OnePlus 6’s 6.28-inch screen. Though the height is a hair shorter and the width is identical to the 6, OnePlus has squeezed a larger 6.41-inch Samsung-made AMOLED display by shrinking the bottom “chin” bezel.

The OnePlus 6T’s screen is bigger than the OnePlus 6’s thanks to a thinner bottom “chin” bezel.

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And it looks so good. There are phones with higher resolution than the OnePlus 6T’s 2,340 x 1,080 (402 pixels per inch) display, but at this point counting pixels is a thing nobody should be worrying about. The screen looked great on the OnePlus 6, and it looks just as good if not better on the 6T.

It’s one of the brighter phone displays I’ve seen, with great colors (sRGB and DCI P3 color profiles are both supported), rich blacks, and wide viewing angles. I’m fine with the default display setting, but if you feel the colors are too saturated, you can change the color profile to one you like.

OnePlus says the display glass is made from Corning Gorilla Glass 6, which is more scratch-resistant than the Gorilla Glass 5 on the OnePlus 6, but I didn’t take knives or keys to the screen to test its durability. I’ll let the inevitable YouTubers who specialize in that kind of gadget teardown pull off such stunts.

I’m also happy to see that many apps like YouTube, which didn’t work properly to support the OnePlus 6’s edge-to-edge display and instead chopped content right below the notch, are now working properly.

A thinner chin? Yes, please!

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Missing on the 6T is a headphone jack. Yes, the 3.5mm audio jack is now officially dead on OnePlus’ flagship. I asked OnePlus why there’s no headphone jack, and it explained that there just wasn’t room for it. Looking over at images of the internals of the 6T, I was shown how the in-display fingerprint sensor literally takes up space where a headphone jack would have fit.

It sucks not having the jack, but you’ll live. Besides, the future is wireless headphones, and you can buy OnePlus’s cheap and good-sounding Bullets Wireless for $70 or a pair of Bullets wired USB-C earbuds for $20. It would’ve been nice to have some earbuds included with the phone, but at least there’s a 3.5mm-to-USB-C dongle in the box.

The OnePlus 6T also doesn’t have any official IP rating for water or dust resistance, though the company says it’s splash resistant. Nor does it have wireless charging. Both of these features have been absent from OnePlus phones, and while it would have been a good to finally see them both, neither is unforgivable. If I had to kill features to shave a few hundred bucks off a phone, these would be the ones I chose.

And how can I not talk about the notch? While the OnePlus 6 had one of the smaller phone notches, the 6T’s is even smaller. It’s the same “teardrop” notch used by the Oppo R17, which shouldn’t surprise you since OnePlus and Oppo are backed by the same Chinese electronics giant (BBK) and share supply chains.

I think the OnePlus 6T’s notch is elegant — the best-looking notch on any phone today (the ugliest being the Pixel 3 XL’s canyon-sized one). It’s also nice to see an option to “hide” it by blackening the status bar. The 6T’s small notch and thinner bezels isn’t a true all-screen phone like the Oppo Find X or the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, but it’s nearly there.

A smaller notch, however, comes with downsides as well. The people who hate on larger notches don’t understand they’re so big because there’s important tech inside of them. On the iPhone X phones, for instance, the notch houses the sophisticated array of sensors and cameras for the TrueDepth camera system that enables secure Face ID and face-tracking for features like Animoji and Memoji. On the Pixel 3 XL, the huge notch contains two selfie cameras and a speaker.

Now that’s a tiny notch.

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Shrinking the notch makes the OnePlus 6T look better than other phones, but the Face Unlock feature (fast as it is) is still less secure than Face ID. I’ve already confirmed it’s possible to bypass OnePlus’ Face Unlock using printed photos, but keep in mind that’s a worst-case scenario and the chances of someone breaking into your phone with a picture is unlikely (unless you’re someone really important).

Anyone who’s not sold on the security of Face Unlock has another option to biometrically lock it down their phone: fingerprints.

Past OnePlus phones have had a fingerprint reader on the front or the back, but the OnePlus 6T is the first model to have the sensor underneath the screen. I’ve tried several phones with in-display fingerprint readers this year, but most of them fell short on responsiveness and speed. Oftentimes, they just didn’t work as reliably as an external fingerprint sensor.

You can’t see it, but right below the Slack app icon in this photo is the in-display fingerprint sensor underneath the screen.

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According to OnePlus, the in-display sensor isn’t made by Synaptics, which built the not-so-good one used in Vivo phones, but it does work similarly, meaning it’s an optical sensor that uses the OLED screen to light up your fingerprint and then authenticate it. OnePlus told me it wanted to include an in-display fingerprint sensor as far back as the OnePlus 5T, but the tech wasn’t good enough at the time.

It is now. On the OnePlus 6T, the Screen Unlock feature (as OnePlus calls it), unlocks with a fingerprint in 0.34 seconds, making it noticeably faster than the in-display sensors found other phones, and only 0.14 seconds slower than the external sensor on previous OnePlus phones.

The question of course is: Does it work as advertised? And the answer is yes, but there’s still room for improvement. Pressing into the in-display fingerprint sensor generates an animation, which illuminates your fingerprint. The 6T’s in-display sensor does unlock quickly, but I can tell it’s slower than an external sensor. It’s not significantly slower, but you will see there’s a pause just before the screen unlocks. You also need to hold your finger on the sensor for a second longer than you would with on the OnePlus 6’s rear sensor.

The OnePlus 6T’s Screen Unlock is quick, but not as quick or responsive as the OnePlus 6’s external fingerprint reader.

Raymond Wong/Mashable

I also got more failed fingerprint attempts with the in-display sensor compared to on the OnePlus 6. Turning on Face Unlock together with Screen Unlock helps for unlocking the phone if it fails to recognize your fingerprint, but that also makes it less secure. Alternatively, re-registering your fingerprints with more attention paid to scanning their edges and at different angles also improves responsiveness in my tests.

In its current form, Screen Unlock is vastly superior to anything similar out there, and kudos to OnePlus for accomplishing something Samsung and Google haven’t yet. It’s a good start and you need to turn it on if you want to use it for Android Pay, but I hope it gets faster on future OnePlus phones.

OnePlus has figured out premium design. It’s conquered performance and Android optimization (more on this later). Ditto for display and battery life.

As someone who has reviewed two OnePlus phones a year for the last few years, I know exactly where OnePlus’s cameras stand in the mobile landscape.

The OnePlus 6T’s cameras take better pictures than the 6, but they are still far from the best. If you want the very best cameras in a phone, the latest iPhone XS, XS Max, XR, and Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL are still the way to go.

However, if you set your expectations appropriately for a $550-$650 phone, you can get great shots — especially if you put in the work by tweaking camera settings and editing them to shine later. But if you’re looking for cameras that beat the best there is, you’re gonna be disappointed.

As far the 6T’s camera tech goes, it’s the same image sensors as on the OnePlus 6. On the rear is a dual-camera system with a 16-megapixel shooter with f/1.7 aperture, plus a secondary 20-megapixel camera with f/1.7 aperture to aid with portrait photos. The front’s 16-megapixel camera with f/2.0 aperture is identical to the OnePlus 6’s as well.

Compared to the OnePlus 6, the only thing that’s changed with the cameras is the software that processes your shots.

Raymond Wong/Mashable

The camera hardware themselves might not have changed, but the software algorithms that process the images has. OnePlus tells me it has incorporated a bunch of AI scene-detection and image-processing algorithms to get more accurate and lifelike photos.

These work kind of like the AI scene detection in Huawei and LG phones, but also completely differently, too. Simon Liu, OnePlus’s head of imaging, explained to me though the phone’s using AI to recognize people, objects, and scenes, they’ve tuned it to produce images that are more true to what your eyes see instead of exaggerating colors or contrast to create a more visually-appealing image (*ahem* Google *ahem*). Liu said the motivation behind the AI is to help preserve memories as you remembered them. As such, there’s no way to turn off the AI because it’s working invisibly in the background.

It’s a bold claim I was eager to test. And you guys know me and my comprehensive smartphone camera comparisons (If you haven’t seen them, you should check out our iPhone XS, XR, and Pixel 3 reviews), I literally went to town to see if the OnePlus 6T’s pictures are any good.

For the first test I shot a big pile of pumpkins and gourds. Shooting with multiple phones and comparing the shots is the only way to see which one has the best dynamic range. The OnePlus 6T took a brighter photo, but there seems to be just a little more detail and dynamic range on its predecessor, the OnePlus 6.

I usually side with an iPhone’s photos for its realistic colors, but in these shots both the iPhone XR and XS flattened all the oranges making them look like one big mass of round objects; you lose a lot of the subtle greens in many of the gourds. As expected, the Pixel 3 took the crispiest photo, but look at how dark it is — it looks nothing like what it did IRL. The Galaxy Note 9 camera actually did a good job splitting the difference between too bright and too dark.

Below is another outdoor comparison. Keeping with my Halloween theme, I photographed these skeletons trying to takeover this Victorian-style bar.

All six phones took sharp photos. This one’s a really tough call and shows the 6T is capable of getting really good photos when the lighting conditions are just right.

Moving on to the first of a couple of low-light tests (because that’s where the gap between phone cameras is the widest), I have to hand it to the OnePlus 6T for taking a really pretty photo of the good ol’ Empire State Building at sunset. 

The iPhone XR’s shot has the most accurate color temperature, reproducing the warmth of the sun hitting the buildings). The Pixel 3 is way over-processed and shrouds the entire foreground of buildings in shadows for no reason at all. The Galaxy Note 9’s is well-exposed, but the ESB acquired a sickly greenish cast.

Of the four photos, the OnePlus 6T seems to be a good middle ground between exposing details from corner-to-corner and color accuracy.

A phone camera’s real test is night photography. Which one can expose the scene with as little image noise as possible? These shots were taken 30 minutes after sunset at New York City’s High Line, a former elevated train line converted to a park.

The Note 9 took the brightest shot of the bunch. It’s a pleasing image, but it looks way too artificial. The two iPhones are once again the most true to life, but they’re a little dark. I’m not a fan of phones saturating night shots (see how yellow the lights in the building on the right are in the Pixel 3 and OnePlus 6T photos), but if you’d rather trade that for sharpness, that’s not a bad way to go.

Zoom in and it’s clear the OnePlus 6T falls apart fast. Details are extremely distorted and mushed together. The Pixel 3 takes the sharpest pic, but the ol’ OnePlus 6 manages to hold up too. In a surprising twist, the OnePlus 6 took a sharper pic than the 6T!

The OnePlus 6T has a separate Night Mode designed specifically to take better night shots. Liu told me Night Mode works best with tripods — it’s essentially taking many photos and compositing them together — but I didn’t have one on me during my shootouts. Neither will most people.

With that in mind, I shot the same scene above with Night Mode, and, as you can see in the side-by-side below, the Night Mode shot definitely is brighter and sharper (the details in the buildings aren’t destroyed). The color temperature is even more yellow, although you can easily correct that in a photo editing app. Not bad, OnePlus!

Now, onto selfies! I have said on many occasions I’m not big on selfies, but I know many people are. If you’re posting to Instagram Stories or Snapchat, you’re not gonna see many flaws to the OnePlus 6T’s selfies.

However, comparing it with the OnePlus 6 and the other phones, we can determine it’s not the best, at least not in this backlit scenario. The 6T does a better job exposing the sky — the Pixel 3 is the only other phone that catches the blue sky and clouds while every other shot is overblown — but you can see there’s a weird outline, almost like a camera’s chromatic aberration, around my ear (left as you see it, right on my head).

The Note 9’s still doing its beautification thing and softening my face. Personally, I like the iPhone selfies — they’re sharp and even though they don’t make my skin glow, they feel real. There’s no weird lens distortion from an wider selfie camera, and there are better highlights in my hair and face. That said, the Pixel 3 takes a great selfie with the best overall exposure for me and the background.

The front cameras on six phones are capable of taking portrait selfies with a blurred-out background. Again, I shot these with the sun behind me to see how well they’d expose the entire shot.

The iPhone XS and XR took the best shots with the most defined background isolation of them all. The Pixel 3’s selfie camera (not the second, ultra-wide lens) is wider and captures more of my body and background, but even its intelligent machine learning can’t isolate the borders of my hair, head, and jacket that well. 

The OnePlus 6T and 6 seem to have no idea what is foreground and what is background, choosing to blur partial sections and leave others unblurred. And the Note 9’s pic is just too soft and looks too dreamlike. It’s not bad, but I don’t want that in a selfie.

Lastly, I took some selfies (non-portrait ones) with the front-facing camera about 20 minutes after sunset. All six phones chose to automatically use the screen as a flash to light up my face.

As I’ve said in my Pixel 3 review, these kinds of photos are bound to look like trash. They don’t look natural and they tend to lack detail. All of the selfies are soft in the face, but if I had to pick one, it’d be the OnePlus 6T’s if only because it preserved the most details on my face (namely, the tiny spots).

So there you have it! These are just some selects of the dozens and dozens of comparison photos I shot across all phone cameras. The 6T’s cameras are decent. They’re by no means garbage, but they could still be better. But for $550, they’re not bad at all.

To really get a better sense of what kind of image quality and colors the OnePlus 6T cameras produce, you have to shoot with it yourself. I’ve provided a batch of photos taken all around New York City to give you an idea of what the cameras are capable of, but different lighting conditions and scenarios will of course change the look of the shots. The below photos are all straight out of the 6T’s camera with no edits made to them.

As always, I welcome anyone to a conversation on Twitter (@raywongy) or on Instagram (@sourlemons) about the shots in this review or phone photography in general. It’s so fascinating to see how each phone handles photos and I’m always down to geek out more on how to get better shots.

There’s really not much to say about the OnePlus 6T’s performance that I haven’t already said in our OnePlus 6 review.

With the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip, and the same 6GB (or 8GB, if you splurge) of RAM, and the same OxygenOS 9 (based on Android 9 Pie) system software, the OnePlus 6T and OnePlus 6 perform almost identically.

Running processor benchmarks using Geekbench 4, the OnePlus 6T scored 2,384 on the single-core test and 8,937 on the multi-core test compared to the OnePlus 6’s 2,399 on single-core and 9,005 on multi-core. On paper at least, that means OnePlus’ phones are faster than the Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL as well as Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and Note 9.

The only phones that I know and have tested that are more powerful and faster are Apple’s iPhones. Apple’s custom A-series chips have a huge advantage over Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. Even an iPhone 8 Plus with an A11 Bionic chip consistently benchmarks up to 80 percent faster on single-core operations and 20 percent faster on multi-core than the OnePlus phones. The performance gap is even larger comparing the OnePlus 6T to the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR which are powered by an even beefier A12 Bionic chip.

Putting aside the iPhones, the 6T is the fastest Android phone I’ve used all year. And it’s not just speed, but smoothness. OxygenOS 9, which is the company’s lightly modified version of Android 9 Pie, is more responsive than even the Pixel 3’s.

Even Google’s Pixel 3 phones locked up on me here and there, but I didn’t encounter any lockups on the OnePlus 6T. In my experience, OnePlus’ tuning of Android for speed and fluidity is the best on any phone. Android 9 Pie has its share of sweet new features such as more AI infused in more places, digital wellness charts, app actions, and a new gesture-based navigation.

Android purists will tout Google’s vision of the ideal Android software experience on the Pixel 3’s, but the gesture navigation is far from perfect (particularly the strange gesture to switch between apps without entering the whole Recent Apps view).

On the OnePlus 6T, the gestures work better IMO. Swiping up from the bottom middle brings up all your recently opened apps. Swiping on the left or right of the bottom bezel is a “back” action. There are two new gestures for quickly switching between apps and activating the Google Assistant. To quickly switch apps, make an arc gesture from the bottom bezel towards the right of the display. And to launch on the Assistant, press and hold the power button for 0.5 seconds (bringing up the power off/reboot/screenshot menu becomes a three-second-long press).

For the general Android software, OnePlus seems to be leapfrogging Google with better performance and more intuitive gestures. Google’s leaning more on AI and machine learning to perform magic on things like photos and screen calls, but I’d say if those things don’t matter much to you (they don’t to me), the 6T’s crushing it.

At long last, the OnePlus 6T is the first phone from the company to work on Verizon.

Raymond Wong/Mashable

I also want to highlight how superior the cellular network modem inside of the OnePlus 6T is. Apple added LTE-Advanced to the iPhone XR and Gigabit LTE to the iPhone XS and XS Max, but the OnePlus 6T’s LTE modems are more powerful.

With Verizon SIM cards in the OnePlus 6T, iPhone XR, and iPhone XS, I tested their LTE download and upload speeds using Ookla’s Speedtest app (disclosure: Mashable parent company Ziff Davis also owns Ookla) and just as I saw when I pitted the OnePlus 6 versus iPhone X, the 6T came out on top.

Using the same server connection, the OnePlus 6T managed to pull down 121 Mbps downloads and 11.8 Mbps uploads. Meanwhile, the iPhone XR had a respectable 86.6 Mbps for downloads and 4.5 Mbps for uploads. The worst-preforming was my iPhone XS, which despite multiple tests only mustered a high of 68.5 Mbps for downloads and 2.84 Mbps for uploads within the 10-minute span of tests I performed on all three phones.

Arguably the biggest shortcoming for previous OnePlus phones was cellular network compatibility. In the U.S., the phones only worked on T-Mobile and AT&T, or any network that runs on GSM. The OnePlus 6T is the first phone from the company to work with Verizon’s CDMA network. It won’t work with Sprint, which is also a CDMA carrier, but supporting Verizon is a big win for OnePlus expanding its presence in the U.S.

T-Mobile is the first official partner to sell the OnePlus 6T in its U.S. retail stores, but being able to buy the phone unlocked from OnePlus and bring it to Verizon is the moment Americans have been waiting years for.

The OnePlus 6T is the first time OnePlus has increased the battery capacity in years. The 3T was the last OnePlus phone to have a larger battery, jumping to 3,400 mAh from the 3’s 3,000 mAh.

Despite displays getting larger, OnePlus has stuck with a 3,300 mAh battery since the OnePlus 5. The 6T has a 3,700 mAh battery which is 12.1 percent larger than the 6’s. However, a 12.1 percent bigger battery doesn’t mean it lasts 12.1 percent longer.

In fact, because of more power-efficient processors and better software tuning, OnePlus says the 6T lasts up to 20 percent longer than the 6.

I can’t confirm that claim, though. In my nearly week-long use of the OnePlus 6T set up as my daily driver with my typical torrent of emails and notifications flying in, I managed to get around the same battery life as on the OnePlus 6 — a day to a day and a half.

I’m sure you could make it to two full days on a single charge if you’re super conservative in your usage and display settings, but that comes at the cost of your sharing-way-too-much-on-Instagram-Stories habit (something I refuse to curb).

Like all OnePlus phones, the 6T has fast charging with the included fast power adapter and cable. In practical terms, it means 30 minutes of charging gets you an additional 60 percent charge, which is still the fastest I’ve seen on a phone. The lack of wireless charging is less concerning when you can “top off” the phone so quickly.

If you had told me years ago the most-anticipated Android phone wouldn’t come from Samsung, or LG, or Sony, or Google, I don’t think I would have believed it.

With each new phone, OnePlus inches closer towards the pantheon of phones. The OnePlus 6T is the company’s best phone and arguably the best Android phone of the year. I sound like a really broken record by now, but the 6T offers the best bang for your buck out of any Android phone.

The reasons to get an iPhone are different — iOS, iMessage, and the Apple brand prestige are valid ones — but if you’ve got no reason to lock yourself to Apple’s ecosystem, my recommendation for the OnePlus 6T couldn’t be greater.

The OnePlus 6T improves on its predecessor and pushes mobile innovation further with choices like a smaller notch and an in-display fingerprint sensor. There’s still work to be done with the cameras to get to the Pixel and iPhone’s level, but they’re close, and OnePlus is improving them with every phone release.

So unless you’re on Sprint (sorry!), there’s no good reason for a budget-conscious Android user to not get the OnePlus 6T. It’s that good.

• Senior Tech Correspondent

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