Thinking About the OnePlus 8T (Premium)

My OnePlus 8T review unit was supposed to arrive today, but what arrived instead was a torn-up package from which the phone was stolen, only to be replaced by a stack of stickers or coupons, taped back up, and then delivered by FedEx as if nothing had happened.

So, I contacted OnePlus and they’ve promised to send another review unit. It certainly wasn’t their fault, but with a new iPhone season underway, and shipment thefts at an all-time high, it’s perhaps best not to be sending phone-sized packages at the moment.

In any event, I’ve been thinking about smartphones a lot recently, and about the OnePlus 8T specifically since, again, I was supposed to get one today. And I will admit to some confusion. And a bit of disappointment. That is, I don’t quite “get” the OnePlus 8T. It’s not Pixel 5 bad, I mean come on. But … I have concerns.

The easiest way to explain this handset, I guess, is that it’s a mid-season upgrade to the OnePlus 8, and not the OnePlus 8 Pro, though both of those handsets remain available for sale as well. It’s about the same size and weight as the OnePlus 8, and it has a nearly identical form factor. It has the same size display, with the same 1080p+ resolution. The same basic internal components. And the same basic communications capabilities.

And that’s all great: The OnePlus 8 is a gorgeous handset, and the OnePlus 8T looks to continue that tradition. Great.

But what about the upgrades? Where does the OnePlus 8T improve on its predecessor?

While it utilizes a 6.55-inch Fluid AMOLED display with HDR10+ capabilities, a resolution of 2440 x 1080, and a tall 20:9 aspect ratio just like the OnePlus 8, the OnePlus 8T display can run at up to 120 Hz, as opposed to 90 Hz for its predecessor. No one will complain about that.

While it ships with the same processor and graphics—an octa-core Snapdragon 865 and Adreno 650, respectively, and the same 8 GB/128 GB and 12 GB/256 GB RAM/storage configurations, the OnePlus 8T offers faster UFS 3.1 storage compared to the UFS 3.0 storage provided by the OnePlus 8. That’s fine, though it’s a bit odd that the OnePlus 8T doesn’t ship with the slightly improved Snapdragon 865+.

And while the two handsets’ front selfie cameras are literally identical—they both use a single 16 MP wide-angle lens with an f/2.4 aperture—there’s been a bit of movement on the rear camera system. But here, I’m worried that OnePlus hasn’t gone far enough, given that the OnePlus 8T doesn’t even meet the OnePlus 8 Pro camera system capabilities on paper.

This is unfortunate. But let’s step through it.

The OnePlus 8 offers a three-lens camera system. There’s a 48 MP main (wide) lens with an f/1.75 aperture and optical image stabilization (OIS), a 16 MP ultra-wide lens with a 116-degree field of view and an f/2.2 aperture, and a 2 MP macro lens with an f/2.4 aperture. So it’s really more of a two-lens system since the macro lens is a bit esoteric.

The OnePlus 8T offers a four-lens camera system. There’s a 48 MP main (wide) lens with an f/1.7 aperture and OIS, a 16 MP ultra-wide lens with a 123-degree field of view and an f/2.2 aperture, a 5 MP macro lens with an f/2.4 aperture, and a 2 MP monochrome lens with an f/2.4 aperture.

This is not much of an upgrade.

The main lenses, despite the slightly different apertures, appear to be the same Sony IMX586 on both handsets, but it’s interesting that OnePlus is finally coming clean with the OnePlus 8T that this sensor is “really” a 12 MP unit that combines grids of 4 adjacent pixels into larger single pixels. This pixel binning, as it’s called, helps the camera capture more light and create images with less noise. And all phone makers do this with higher-resolution lenses; otherwise, the pictures would be too noisy.

The ultra-wide lens is a bit more, um, ultra-wide, which is fine. But the macro lens, while a decent improvement, is uninteresting. And the monochrome lens, which comes over from the OnePlus 8T, is beyond useless. In other words, like the OnePlus 8, the OnePlus 8T is, for all intents and purposes, really just a two-lens camera system.

Looking anew at the OnePlus 8 Pro, we find a four-lens camera system. There’s a 48 MP main (wide) lens with an f/1.78 aperture and OIS, a 48 MP ultra-wide lens with a 120-degree field of view and an f/2.2 aperture, an 8 MP telephoto lens with 3x hybrid zoom, OIS, and an f/2.44 aperture, and a 5 MP “color filter” (monochrome) lens with an f/2.4 aperture. So that system, now 6 months old, is superior to that in the new OnePlus 8T, though to be fair, that telephoto lens wasn’t all that impressive in my tests earlier this year.

Aside from not matching the OnePlus 8 Pro camera system, the OnePlus 8T is missing a few other niceties from that higher-end device. There’s no official IP rating, though I suspect that’s a cost-savings on OnePlus’ part, since the T-Mobile version of the 8T does have an IP rating. And there’s no wireless charging at all, let alone 30-watt fast wireless charging as with the 8 Pro. (In the plus column, the OnePlus 8T does come with an even faster wired charger, which is really cool.)

And then there’s the pricing. This is where things get really weird.

When the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro debuted this past Spring, the big story was that OnePlus was raising its pricing significantly, largely because it was all-in on 5G networking and Qualcomm’s 5G chipsets were (still are) expensive. The OnePlus 8 started at $699 while the 8 Pro started at $899.

Today, the OnePlus 8T starts at $749. That’s not so bad when you consider that it includes an improved 12 GB/256 GB configuration in the U.S. plus the other minor improvements over the standard OnePlus 8. But the two older handsets are also effectively less expensive now: The OnePlus 8 still starts at $699, but that’s for the upper-tier 12 GB/256 GB configuration now. And the OnePlus 8 Pro still starts at $899, but again with that same higher configuration.

I’m not sure what to make of this.

Which, when you think about it, is kind of par for the course when it comes to OnePlus.

OnePlus, like the phones it makes, is a bit quirky. There’s a lot of talk about “Never Settle,” the brand’s (in)famous slogan, but each of the OnePlus handsets, in particular its flagships, is a study in compromise. And the features that OnePlus leaves out—like no telephoto lens in the OnePlus 8T—are often as goofy as the features they put in, like the macro and monochrome lenses in the 8T. Seriously, guys. This was something your fans were asking for?

That said, I love the whole vibe of OnePlus, and I feel that it is the most community-driven smartphone maker out there. But those quirky compromises are hard to understand. They get in the way.

As confusing, OnePlus seems to change its release strategy almost every year now.

For the past few years, the firm has moved from releasing one flagship each year to releasing two, one in the first half of the year, and the second, a “T” model, in the second half. But this past year, it released two flagships in the first half of the year—the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro—plus a more affordable mid-market offering, the Nord, which didn’t originally come to the U.S. OnePlus says it will, however. Someday. And now the OnePlus 8T is here. There were four OnePlus releases in 2020.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that my OnePlus 8T was stolen by a thief at a FedEx facility that is most likely in the New Jersey/New York area. And I hope they like it. Most of all, I wish they’d let me know what they think about the camera system in particular. I’m really curious about that.