OnePlus 5T Review Part 3: The small things

So far the OnePlus 5T has been above and beyond, ticking all the checkboxes and often blowing the competition out of the water. Boasting top-of-the-line internals and catching up with the trends, the OnePlus 5T does give its contenders a good run for their money. But how about the small things that OEMs often turn a blind eye to? Well, let’s find out.

Audio

The OnePlus 5T features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 SoC, which features an onboard “Aqstic” DAC – Qualcomm’s endeavor to providing good quality audio. Sure it does not feature any standalone DACs and/or amps – at least OnePlus isn’t marketing that officially – which might be a little bit annoying for those audiophiles seeking the best audio.

One of the many great things about my 5T is that it still has a headphone jack, which means I can plug it into my modest speaker system with zero dongles. More good news, music comes out with ample loudness and acceptably low noise and distortion levels. Maybe a tiny bit of distortion in the mids may be audible past the 14/15 volume level. That’s a pass in my book, considering its relatively modest price tag. Naturally, it has no problems driving any pair of your regular affordable earphones, though it may struggle a bit with high-impedance headphones. Overall the audio experience can be dubbed as “good enough” – just like its older sibling, or maybe slightly better.

Another thing that’s common between the OnePlus 5 and the 5T is that bottom-firing mono speaker, positioned on the left side of the USB-C port. While that may disappoint some audiophiles and gamers on the lookout for a new device, it is not all that gloomy. The speaker sounds quite loud and suffers from minimal distortion, even when pushed to the limit. The OnePlus 5T may sound a tiny bit quieter than the OnePlus 5 perhaps, but on the other hand, you get less audible distortion at max volume. A fair trade, I would say. 

It always keeps striking me how a modest audio setup would sound that good when other phones with similar setups don’t even sound close. A quick skim of the audio settings was enough to uncover an “Audio Tuner” option, which I thought was another cheap EQ with fancy-named presets. However, a more thorough inspection of the onboard system apps revealed that the OnePlus 5T supports Dirac’s audio effects. According to the Application List, the OnePlus 5T has a service Dirac app and a frontend Dirac Control Center app – just like the OnePlus 5. One could only say the presence of those apps attributes to the surprisingly decent audio quality out of that jack at least.

If you have already hopped on the Bluetooth bandwagon, then you would be glad to hear that the OnePlus 5T already supports Qualcomm’s AptX and AptX HD Bluetooth codecs, with LDAC support added to the blend with the Android Oreo update.

Battery Life

There’s no denying the fact that battery life is the biggest concern to any potential customer. After all, what’s the point of having unrivaled performance and all the bells and whistles when the phone won’t last long enough? With a 3300mAh battery under the bonnet, you could only predict that battery life isn’t something to be worried about. And from where I stand, I can only vouch for the phone’s superb efficiency. With my mixed usage pattern of Internet browsing, YouTube streaming, offscreen music playback, some photo shooting and endless chatting via WhatsApp, Telegram and 3 active Slack groups, I was able to get between 5 and 7 hours of screen-on time over a total time of 16-20 hours of total usage. Heck, I can even throw some little gaming without fretting over the phone’s battery. The idle drain is excellent as well. Most of the time I end up draining around 2-3% overnight with Flight mode engaged, and around 4-5% with flight mode disengaged and mobile data enabled, which is quite impressive indeed.

And if you ever felt like running low on fuel in the middle of the day, Dash Charge always got your back. I would even argue that it changes the way you treat your phone. Gone are the days where you have to carry around your charger, just because you forgot to plug your phone in to charge overnight. Instead, you just plug in your OnePlus 5T to charge while having a quick shower and a breakfast and get your phone almost fully charged. Planning to have a long night outside? Brim your phone’s battery with juice in almost an hour or less. You can call me a big fan of Dash Charge if you like. So much that I can’t think of purchasing any other phone that doesn’t have such quick charging rates.

Others

While many would be quick to come to the conclusion that OnePlus must have cut a lot of corners to keep the price low, I am happy to report that this isn’t the case. It’s true, things like the vibration motor and the earpiece quality during calls won’t be as good as a fully-fledged ~$700+ flagship phone from the likes of Samsung and Apple, but they aren’t bad either. Haptic feedback when typing is a bit on the weak side, though not as annoyingly weak as on the OnePlus 3. The vibration motor of the OnePlus 5 is a bit stronger though. I think it can only be described as “good enough.” Call quality could be similarly described as well. I haven’t had any glaring issues with hearing my friends via that earpiece. It sounds amply loud and crisp, though it might sound a bit tinny at max volume. Routing the phones via the speaker isn’t a hassle at all though.

While most metal constructed phones tend to suffer from relatively bad signal reception, this isn’t the case here, not at all. WiFi reception is fine – I was able to stay connected while moving around the premises of my home, where the iPhone 6s struggled to keep a stable connection pretty badly. While watching videos on YouTube, the phone was able to reach and sustain my connection’s peak speed with no problems, so that’s a pass in my book. And thanks to OnePlus including the option to display my network speed in the status bar, I didn’t need a 3rd party app to check my network speeds. GPS performance is on par with all other flagships as well – no issues here whatsoever while using Google Maps, Waze or Uber.

There are, however, a few quirks that I stumbled across. Weirdly, it’s the software implementation of several features. For starters, you can’t switch to Do Not Disturb mode -by sliding the alert slider to the middle – while the phone is set to Vibration only. You either have to switch to Silent mode (slide the alert slider all the way up) and then tap on that gear icon to enable/disable vibration or switch to Do Not Disturb mode (slide the alert slider to the middle position). While that didn’t particularly annoy me, OnePlus’ Adaptive Brightness certainly did. It’s come to my attention that the phone tends to favor brightness levels lower than optimal indoors. Of course, this is something highly subjective – not everyone’s eyes are the same. However, OnePlus has opted for a slightly unconventional implementation, where sliding the brightness slider while in Auto mode would temporarily disable adaptive brightness and manually set the screen brightness. This is very different from what you find in native Android and other phones like Samsung, where sliding the brightness slider will constantly increase/decrease the automatically determined screen brightness level by a small margin. This way the phone “knows” that the automatically set brightness is too dim or bright for the user and will automatically brighten or dim the screen. I personally didn’t like OnePlus’ software implementation of adaptive brightness at all. It was pretty annoying for me to constantly slide the brightness slider to the right.

Another drawback of the OnePlus 5T that might be a big bummer for most of the customers is the lack of support for HD video playback on Netflix and Amazon Prime out of the box. To be quite frank, I often wonder what’s the reason behind such a decision. True, the OnePlus 5T isn’t particularly designed with media junkies fully in mind – whom which would appreciate additional features like micro SD card support and a higher resolution screen – but that still doesn’t justify such a decision, especially when a wide range of Android phones already support playing HD content in Netflix. Clearly, the backlash was huge, so much that OnePlus was kinda forced to correct their mistake, even if it meant involving the end user in a needlessly complicated process of physically mailing their devices. Not to mention that you might need to shell out some money to ship your phone to OnePlus if you reside outside of their service region, and remain phone-less for 5 days at least.

Last but not least, I would like to touch on one of the issues that might deeply concern some of the photographers, more specifically those who are interested in capturing some images in RAW format. While the OnePlus 5T supports shooting in RAW in the Pro mode, images come out with evident dot patterns that are very visible in the brightest areas of the image when shot with third-party apps. And in the case of the increasingly popular Gcam app, this issue renders those superb HDR+ photos unviewable on large screens. Whether it is a hardware limitation is yet to be determined, but according to this Reddit post, there is a very big chance that this issue could be addressed via a software update. 

Developer Support

The tech enthusiasts might not be the majority of the customers – far from it – but that didn’t let OnePlus ignore them. In fact, OnePlus has made it extremely easy to unlock the phone’s bootloader and root it. Just a couple of command lines and your phone would be ready for some custom ROM fun. The only ordeal the user has to deal with is backing up the data to an external drive beforehand, since unlocking the phone’s bootloader will wipe all the data in the process. And if the forums of previous OnePlus devices are any indication, you would probably be spoilt for choice. The OnePlus devices forums are actually the most active ones on XDA. Even the original OnePlus One is still getting love from a lot of the famous developers. This can only mean that the OnePlus 5T is the best phone for the enthusiastic tinkerer.

The Verdict

The OnePlus 5T is a solid device that is very hard to overlook. Featuring a quality display, feature-packed software, as much of RAM as your laptop – even if not fully leveraged, decent cameras and enough battery to easily hold all that up till evening that can be filled to the brim within an hour, it checks all the boxes for a great smartphone. All of which fairly justifies its $500 price tag. However, unlike all OnePlus phones, other flagship phones have received considerable price cuts that are hard to ignore. You can shell out an extra hundred bucks and get a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S8 or an HTC U11, both of which feature a charming design, higher-res screens, USB 3.0 and are water-resistance certified – officially. Not to mention that both have better camera performance, though you’re going to miss these portrait shots with that shallow depth. And with the Galaxy S9/S9+ around the corners, its predecessor can get even cheaper. But as far as list prices go, the OnePlus 5T is among the best phones in that price bracket. If you are looking for a phone that nails all the essentials, look no further. 

Featured-Image: Digital Trends