Chinese tech company OnePlus is primarily known for creating ambitious mid-range devices with premium features. Their own flagships have been pushing the envelope too with the recent OnePlus 10 Pro.
The OnePlus T series of devices are upgraded versions of their latest flagship offering slightly enhanced specs, but the 10T might be offering more than an incremental enhancement here.
It’s funny that OnePlus’s motto is “Never Settle” as that looks like they have taken that rather literally with the OnePlus 10T, as rather than rest on their laurels with the excellent 10 Pro they have tried to outdo themselves.
But how can they top their already impressive flagship, and would any updates be worth it?
Firstly, the 10T is a thing of beauty and I liked the look of the 10 Pro a lot, but the flat glass panel and curved camera module are some nice touches that further refine the 10 series design.
At 163 mm × 75.37mm × 8.75 mm it’s large without being bulky or unwieldy and still feels like a premium device, with its metal and glass construction it also feels durable.
It comes in two colours: Jade Green and Moonstone Black. I looked at the Jade, which is a little opaque with just a subtle pop of colour.
The back is also quite glossy and like all glossy phones, you’ll want to put a case on it as it’s a fingerprint magnet. OnePlus have also made the controversial move of removing the alert slider, a staple of OnePlus devices since the OnePlus 2.
This is to allow more space for cooling and extra antenna, many fans will be disappointed as this is a great OnePlus feature that lots of users, including myself, enjoy.
Its almost edge-to-edge display and curved glass camera module and sleek curved appearance help it stand out compared to the blockier and flatter design of many current phones.
Its weight feels nicely distributed at 203g, which is about average for a flagship phone but lighter than the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G and the Google Pixel 6 Pro.
The screen is a brilliant 6.7” AMOLED display with a very sharp, FHD+ resolution of 1440 x 3216 and PPI of 394. While the resolution isn’t quite as high as the 10 Pro, it’s only a slight difference that most won’t notice.
Colours pop wonderfully on that bright 950 nit panel, and it can provide vibrant colours and accurate contrast. The screen also supports HDR10+.
Scrolling, gaming, and watching videos are silky smooth thanks to the adaptive 120Hz display which can also be lowered to 90 or 60 to save battery.
Gorilla glass 5 on THE front and back makes it incredibly scratch resistant and able to survive most moderate knocks and drops, it also comes with a built-in screen protector to keep that glorious display in great condition.
SPECIFICATIONS
Processor: Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 - 4 cores @ 2.02, 3 @ 2.75 and 1 @ 3.19Ghz
Display: 6.7” LTP02 AMOLED
RAM: 8GB / 16 GB LPDDR5
Storage: 128GB / 256GB (UFS 3.1)
The processor in the 10T is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, not to be confused with last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the 8+ being more graphically capable, faster and power efficient.
While it’s not all about raw horsepower, the 8+ Gen 1 is also supported by a whopping 16GB of RAM, depending on which version you pick up.
This not only adds to the swiftness of the device but allows you to become a multitasking master, with up to 35 apps open without impacting the device operation.
I wouldn’t have believed had I not tried it, but I had 4k video running, with games, YouTube, Twitch and many other apps running simultaneously with little or no impact on their performance.
If that wasn’t enough (you can never have too much memory), this can be further enhanced with the RAM Expansion feature that allows you to further increase this by using between 3, 5 or 7GB of storage to act as additional RAM.
You can also enable RAM Boost, this analyses your usage and will preload often used apps in memory so that they open fast when needed.
It’s not surprising it received some great benchmark scores with 1020 Single Core, 3485 Multicore and a whopping 6357 Computing. In 3D Mark’s Wild Life Extreme it scored 2799, outperforming most devices except the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro 13 Max.
But benchmarks can only get you so far, the best way to try out performance is by gaming, and I have to say it surpassed my expectations.
The 10T is a gaming titan, shrugging off practically everything I threw at it. Even on higher settings, frame rates for most games were very high.
It didn’t break a sweat with most of the games I played, chewing up COD Mobile and Player Unknown battlegrounds - even the beast that is Genshin Impact on its highest settings ran perfectly, although it did cause some heat up.
The 10T performance with emulations was impressive too, powerful enough to run some pretty decent consoles at full speed.
The cooling system has also been enhanced to really allow that new processor to open up and show what it can do, and I was very impressed.
OnePlus claim the 10T uses their largest and most advanced cooling system ever, which is great as it allows the devices to really uses all that impressive performance for sustained periods of time.
Despite all this power and the intensive games and tests I ran on it, I never felt the device get uncomfortably hot. It’s not perfect, and it did get a little warm, but it was never hot and I noticed it cooled down rapidly once I stopped taxing the device..
Even basic functions such as signal strength and latency have been upgraded with the 10T using 15 antennae to improve connectivity, call quality and add extra redundancies.
Download speeds were incredible, the upgraded Snapdragon modem along with the enhanced performance supports up to 10Gbps, which allowed me to download and updates games quickly and get into the action straight away or stream 4k films with no stutter or issues.
There are two storage options available, 128GB and 256GB, both support UFS 3.1 for faster read and write speeds.
Usually, I go for the cheaper option, however, if you are doing demanding tasks, I would recommend the 256GB model as sadly there is no expandible storage.
While not as impressive as the 10 Pro’s camera it’s still a phenomenal shooter offering 4 decent cameras.
The main camera is a 50MP Sony IMX 766 with optical image stabilisation included. The impressive mid-range sensor did a great job recording details and colour reproduction was accurate.
Low light performance was hit and miss with some night-time landscapes looking great and retaining details but even slow-moving subjects often blurred or came out too soft.
There is also an 8 MP Ultra-wide that covers a 119.9° field of view allowing you to fit even more in the frame, but it's obviously nowhere near the quality of the primary camera.
There is also a 2 MP Macro camera, and while most would scoff at it only being 2MP, the dedicated macro still did a great job.
Unlike the 10 Pro the camera wasn’t made in collaboration with Hasselblad, but like the Pro, it can shoot in 10-bit colour and shoot RAW format to give photographers data for editing pics.
On the front of the device is a 16MP front camera which was great for selfies and video calls. It also supports rich 4K video at 30/60 FPS and 1080p video at 30/60FPD and 720p video at the same.
The battery on the 10T has had some very interesting upgrades, on first glance, it appears to have a slightly lower capacity battery than the 10Pro at 4800 mAh.
However, its main upgrade here is that it's a duel cell battery allowing for ridiculously fast charging speeds. The 150 Watt charging will give you 29% in only 3 mins and it can be fully charged in 19 mins although in my tests I got a full charge in 26mins.
From a full charge I got around 22 hours of use, but it did vary depending on how much gaming and films I watched. The 10T doesn’t support wireless charging which doesn’t bother me, but it can charge supported laptops, which is really convenient when you are travelling.
This accelerated charging speed could raise concerns about safety but the 10T isn’t only faster it comes equipped with several sensors to monitor your battery's health and modulate its charging speed depending on the demands on the phone.
So, if you plug the phone in to charge while doing higher-performance tasks like gaming or rendering its speed will be reduced to stop the device from overheating.
OnePlus claims that its battery can last 1600 charging cycles, which is one of the longest in the industry so the battery will degrade less over time and last longer.
While not a revolution on the 10Pro I can’t deny that I did feel the edge in performance, However, if you are already the owner of a 10 Pro I couldn’t really recommend the upgrade to the T, unless you’re making videos with the phone out in the field and really need that slight extra oomph that the T offers for editing.
The 10T I was using currently has the Oxygen OS 12, which was neat snappy and responsive with minimal extra bloatware and some great customisation options.
The OnePlus 10T will also receive three Android updates as well as four years of security updates.
Verdict 5/5
The OnePlus 10T is a predator. It’s a flagship killer designed to take on Apple, Samsung and Google and it’s actually got the tools to do it. It's the most impressive OnePlus device ever and that’s a pretty high bar.
The 10T is an absolute juggernaut of a device, with its fantastic screen and cutting-edge processor making it the perfect device for the high-end mobile gamer who wants the best performance available, or for a filmmaker or vlogger who wants the processing power for Pro level editing on the go.
The 10T feels like a phone that’s transported in from the near future with its beautiful design, bleeding edge performance and rapid charging making it feel a few steps in front of the pack.
My only real criticism is the loss of the alert slider which is not only handy but losing it feels like losing a small bit of OnePlus’s character.
But if you want a phone that delivers some of the best performance possible on an android device and that can shrug off most workloads the latest OnePlus will suit you down to a T.
The OnePlus 10T is out on 25 August now for £629 for the 8GB - 128 version and £729 for the 256GB - 16GB available from the OnePlus Website
