OnePlus 6T becomes official overnight in New York

One day earlier than first expected OnePlus have taken to the stage overnight to announce their second flagship for the year — the OnePlus 6T. OnePlus do not play the game of trying to keep phones secret anymore, happily slowly drip feeding us details surrounding their devices. As such there were very few surprises in New York this morning.

While the OnePlus 6 was fast and smooth the 6T is designed to be even faster and even smoother and have developed the FSE (fast stable efficient) team to accomplish this. Along with fast and smooth OnePlus threw around a lot of buzz words and phrases that are the basis of the new OnePlus 6T: Pursuit of perfection, user benefit that adds value, burdenless.

To be able to accomplish all of this the OnePlus 6T is packed full of some of the best specs you can find anywhere. Starting with the 6.41 inch Optic AMOLED display that houses a small teardrop notch (a big improvement) with a 19.5:9 display ratio with a 1080P resolution – the bezels at the top and bottom are even smaller than on the OnePlus 6. As you would expect OnePlus have included the best mobile processor available to all right now, the Snapdragon 845 with a massive 128GB or 256GB of internal memory and 6 or 8GB of RAM — no need for aggressive memory management here.

We have said it before but a smartphone’s success lives and dies on the quality of its camera. OnePlus are attempting to make sure their new flagship flourishes here with the addition of a dual rear camera – 16MP (f/1.7) and 20MP (f/1.7) and a 20MP front facing camera which also has an aperture size of f/1.7. The rear camera system has both OIS and EIS setting the scene for some high level photography.

OnePlus have worked hard on their camera software to bring their version of night photography called Nightscape. Nightscape only haves 2 seconds to take the photo, shorter than the time other manufacturers require. Nightscape is a HDR algorithm developed entirely by OnePlus with three parts to it: detail optimisation, multiframe stabilisation and noise reduction. The good news for OnePlus 6 owners is that Nightscape will be coming to their phones later this week.

Along with Nightscape OnePlus are bringing a new portrait feature called Studio Lighting: when the camera software detects a human face in portrait mode it accentuates facial features creating some great portrait photos.

OnePlus have also included their ultra-fast face detection and an in-display fingerprint sensor. All this is powered by possibly the best version of Android on the market, Oxygen OS, based on Android 9.0 Pie. Particular focus was directed at their software, not just for being the most user accepted/liked but for also having the lowest failure rate of any manufacturer (stable software).

The new in-display fingerprint sensor process (called “Screen Unlock” by OnePlus) is the fastest in the world and although they had originally planned to bring it to market in the OnePlus 5T it was not ready. Now it is — it can unlock the phone from the beginning on placing your finger on the display to when the phone is fully unlocked and ready to use in just 0.34 seconds. The software detection also gets faster the more you use the sensor.

All this is packed within a body that is 157.5mm tall, 74.9mm wide and 8.3mm thick wrapped in a Gorilla Glass 6. Powering it all is a 3700mAh battery which can be charged with their fast charging (no name anymore) which is 5V 4A charging. Once again there is no wireless charging but with the speed of the OnePlus charging and their long battery life it is debatable whether it is required.

Once again OnePlus have managed to undercut their competition in the high end phone market. The OnePlus 6T will sell for just US$549 for the 6GB/128GB, US$579 for 8GB/128GB and just US$629 for the 8GB/256GB version. The phone is available at launch in Midnight Black and Mirror Black with the high end version available in Midnight Black only and the lower specced version Mirror Black only. It will go on sale this week on November 1 for North America and November 6 in Europe.

Unfortunately, unless you are using a grey market importer there is no way to obtain one here – at this stage. Hopefully OnePlus will soon realise that we are just a short plane flight away from their offices in Shenzhen and there is nothing stopping them from bringing their products here.