2019 has been a great year for the silent majority of people who can’t or don’t want to spend $1000 on a smartphone. And while there have been some excellent entries in the mid-range market, the OnePlus 7T stands above them all. Because this isn’t a mid-range handset. It’s a flagship handset sold at mid-range prices.
Put another way, the OnePlus 7T is built to last, but priced to sell. It is the epitome of value in a market gone insane with escalating prices.
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Consider the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+. It’s an excellent handset in so many ways, but then it should be at its $1100 selling price. Indeed, at that lofty price tag, the Note 10+ shouldn’t have any meaningful compromises. And yet it is full of compromise, from its terrible in-display fingerprint reader, decent but not marketing-leading camera system, often terrible Samsung app and service duplications, and its lack of a headphone jack. At $1100, you should be given everything.
Consider the Google Pixel 3a XL. It costs even less than $600—$480 to be exact—and at that pricing level, one expects some compromises, maybe even some big compromises. And you get ‘em: The Pixel 3a XL has an incredible camera system, of course, a fast fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, and a cool polycarbonate body. But it also has serious performance problems that pick away at you over time, plus an unacceptable amount (64 GB) of non-upgradeable storage, no Gorilla Glass display protection, no wireless charging, and no water resistance. The Pixel 3a XL may be a good value today, but it’s absolutely not future-proof. Its mid-level processor and low storage alone ensure that. And its lack of decent display protection means it’s a ticking timebomb.
Those compromises may be acceptable to you: That’s the deal you’re making when you spend about half the going price of a flagship smartphone.
Or is it?
The OnePlus 7T costs just $600, and as I was walking around Allentown last night, taking photos of places, food, and drink under increasingly dark conditions, I was thinking about compromise. Or, rather the lack of meaningful compromise.
The OnePlus 7T costs just $600, as noted, but it is the only smartphone in the world to ship with the Snapdragon 855+ processor, at a time when all Android flagships ship with a Snapdragon 855 or equivalent. This chipset is, basically, an overclocked version of the 855. Some of its cores run at higher clock speeds, and its graphics co-processor performs about 15 percent better. It’s future-proof.
The OnePlus 7T includes an incredible 8 GB of RAM. That’s more than an iPhone. It’s more than any Pixel. And it’s the same as the amount of RAM you get in a Note 10; the Note 10+ provides 12 GB.
The OnePlus 7T includes 128 GB of super-fast UFS 3.0 storage. This storage is faster than the storage used by any handset in the market, save one: The Note 10+ also uses UFS, but it uses the new F2FS file system instead of EXT4, making it a bit faster.
The OnePlus 7T, like the 7 Pro, offers an incredibly fast and accurate in-display fingerprint. It’s a joy to use after the frustrating unit in the Note 10+. It’s so good, I’m starting to get over my attachment to rear-mounted fingerprint readers. It’s the real deal.
So where’s the compromise? There must be some compromise.
And there is. The good news is that neither of these issues is a deal-breaker, at least for most people. Neither should prevent this handset from being future-proof, again, for most people.
The first is the display. Yes, it’s a super-smooth 90 Hz wonder, and yes it’s wonderful to use. But it lacks the curved display edges that mark most (non-iPhone) flagships these days. It’s just a normal, flat display with very small bezels (and a tiny, unobtrusive tear-drop notch). But two interesting points to that: Many people actually prefer a flat display and don’t like the curved edges or worry that they make the phone more fragile; there is some validity to that. More important to me, the flat display plays a role in the incredible thinness of this device. Compared to porkier flagships, the OnePlus 7T is svelte and light.
The second is that storage, not because of the F2FS/EXT4 issue, but because it’s non-upgradable. You can have a OnePlus 7T as long as 128 GB of storage is all you’ll ever want. And here’s the thing: That is all I’ll ever want. Maybe not forever, but for the foreseeable future. 128 GB is, from my perspective, the sweet spot in storage. And while microSD expansion would end that debate for good, we can at least agree that where 64 GB, like that in the Pixel 3a XL, is unacceptable, 128 GB is enough. For most.
The camera system will require more testing. But in looking at the shots I took last night, zooming in to view details, and assessing its performance in a variety of scenarios, I’m actually kind of impressed. This camera system is at least as good as that in the Galaxy Note 10+, at least as far as I can tell. Again, it costs barely more than half the price of that handset. I can accept less than perfect shots at that price range, yes. But these shots are very good, overall. I’m not compromising at all, regardless of price.
And I need to mention the fast charging. My God. It’s almost hilarious how fast this phone charges when you use the bundled Warp 30T fast charger. It’s amazing. It may literally be using alien technology.
Overall, I’m not getting up with a hangover this morning. Instead, I’m even more impressed by what OnePlus has accomplished with the OnePlus 7T. There are some questions, still, and some confusion over how this fits into the product lineup against the OnePlus 7 Pro. And how this new phone has completely obliterated the firm’s “one flagship” and mid-year “T”-model strategies. But whatever. I’ll just keep using it. And so far I really like what I see.
wocowboy
Premium Member<p>It is a red-herring to compare the amount of RAM on an Android phone with that of an iPhone. The operating systems, chipsets, etc are all totally different and are so tightly woven and tuned together so that they allow the iPhone to give users a vastly more fluid and smooth user experience than is possible on Android unless the device is equipped with a huge amount of RAM. This has always been the case, yet pundits and reviewers always slam Apple for putting a smaller amount of RAM into an iPhone compared with an Android device. It's just a plain and simple fact that an Android phone MUST have that sort of amount of RAM in order to give users a similar experience. It is amazing what Apple and iOS can do with much smaller amounts of RAM. </p><p><br></p><p>Having said this, OnePlus phones are excellent, I have owned the 5, 6, and now own the 7 Pro and am wowed by the performance and value of the phone. It is just fantastic. I am not a professional photographer by any means, so I am perfectly fine with the pictures and videos it takes. I would recommend a OnePlus phone to anyone. </p>
wocowboy
Premium Member<blockquote><em><a href="#472085">In reply to paul-thurrott:</a></em></blockquote><blockquote><em>I have never really cared about benchmarks, and I did not claim that iPhones are faster BECAUSE of benchmarks, in fact I did not claim that iPhones are faster at all. In fact, I never even mentioned benchmarks at all. I said that iPhones can produce a smoother operational user experience while they are equipped with vastly smaller amounts of RAM. Benchmark numbers are meaningless, what really matters to users is smoothness of the OS, whether scrolling is jerky or smooth, whether apps launch smoothly or take a couple of frames to appear on screen in a jerky fashion instead of emerging gradually as they were intended, whether windows minimize or maximize smoothly, and whether performance suffers when dozens of apps are "open" at any one time. These actions have always been somewhat of a problem on Android. I have owned Android phones where scrolling through a long web page or through a long settings page was a horribly jerky experience. Some of it has to do with the OS itself and how it treats window actions, scrolling, and application states, and how Android manages memory, and there have been improvements made over the years. Some of the improvements have come about because of the huge amounts of RAM that some Android devices now contain. </em></blockquote><p><br></p>