Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge

The OnePlus 5T keeps the overall look that was introduced with the 5 and that’s not a bad thing. This is a good-looking phone, with a black metal back that has a certain resemblance to the iPhone 7 Plus. The curved sides make it easy to hold and the fingerprint scanner is now below the camera sensor on the back. For those who aren’t happy with this placement, there’s now facial recognition too, which seems to work very well.

The fingerprint scanner has been moved because there’s no home button or capacitive keys on the OnePlus 5T. Instead, the screen on the front now stretches nearly edge to edge, with just a slim bezel running around the side.

Aside from looking a whole lot more modern, the bezel reduction also means you now get a 6.01-inch screen in the same body as the previous 5.5-inch screen. Getting more screen real-estate in a similarly size body is one of the reasons I really like this new direction phones are going in.

The screen itself has has a slight resolution bump to 2160 x 1080 (FHD+) but it doesn’t really make things any sharper. Instead it’s just there to add the extra pixels to the elongated display. It might not pack a quad-HD HDR panel like some of the pricier competition, but the AMOLED here is still perfectly adequate. Colours are punchy and vibrant, there’s a good hit of brightness and OnePlus has done some software trickery to make it work better in sunny conditions.

Unlike last year’s OnePlus 3T, which focussed on upgrading the internals over the OnePlus 3, the 5T keeps the same processor, RAM and storage. That means you’re getting a Snapdragon 835, 6/8GB RAM and 64/128GB of internal storage. These are all great options for such an affordable phone, but it means you won’t see any sort of performance boost if you’re coming from the OnePlus 5.