Advertisement
Engadget has been testing and reviewing consumer tech since 2004. Our stories may include affiliate links; if you buy something through a link, we may earn a commission. Read more about how we evaluate products.

The OnePlus 8T can be fully charged in 39 minutes

Is there such a thing as a mid-range flagship?

OnePlus

OnePlus’ long-teased 8T has arrived. It lands, predictably perhaps, somewhere between the 8 and 8 Pro when it comes to specifications, but there are some interesting new additions too.

It has a 6.55-inch 2,400 x 1,080 AMOLED display which packs a 120Hz refresh rate -- better than the vanilla OnePlus 8, and matching (at least in refresh-rates) the OnePlus 8 Pro’s 6.78-inch screen. Notably, the 8T doesn’t have a curved screen, however, which should make it more resistant to drops and bangs.

OnePlus says the display itself has the highest color accuracy of any smartphone, with a Just Noticeable Color Difference (JNCD) of around 0.3, screen fans. It can also crank out up to 1,100 nits of light and has 8,192 levels of brightness to smooth out transitions between different environments.

One spec that suggests this isn’t the company’s most-powerful phone is the processor. There’s a Snapdragon 865 processor, with 5G, that helps to keep the device price down. That ensures there’s still a reason for the OnePlus 8 Pro to exist.

With the 8T, OnePlus forges ahead in the realm of charging these devices. The OnePlus 8T will ship with the company’s new Warp Charge 65 charger, which can juice the device to full in just 39 minutes. If you need a top-up, it’ll take even less time to get you to 50 percent charged. And yes, it might sound familiar if you follow all the smartphone competition closely.

OnePlus adds that the phone itself is equipped with 12 temperature sensors, along with an encryption chip in the adapter and cable, to keep charging temperatures at a safe level when it’s using all 65 watts of charge.

OnePlus’ OxygenOS 11 adds some cool new features, even if a lot of them won’t arrive on devices until November. These include interesting new uses for the always-on display. One is integration with Bitmoji avatars, while another, Canvas, can make an outline image from your photo gallery, and use it as a black-and-white wallpaper for your phone when it’s on standby.

There’s also an Insight AOD mode, and this one is live on devices already. OnePlus partnered with students from the Parsons School of Design to create a new screensaver that shows you when you’re unlocking and using your phone, adding notches to a colored line that runs up and down the display.

The quad-camera system looks less, well, “OnePlus” this time around. The company has shifted the imaging array from a central column to a rectangle in the top left corner, a la Samsung and countless other phone makers. For the OnePlus 8T includes a 48-megapixel main camera with optical image stabilization (OIS), a new monochrome sensor for improving image fidelity, a 16-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens, and a new 5-megapixel macro sensor too.

The OnePlus 8T comes in two new color options, Aquamarine Green and Lunar Silver. The latter has a matte effect, while the company says the Green version gives a shimmery lighting effect that helps to obscure pesky finger smudges.

In the US, you’ll get the model with 12 gigs of RAM and 256GB of storage, for $749. (As a reminder, the OnePlus 8 costs $699, and the 8 Pro is priced from $899.)

The OnePlus 8T will be available on October 23rd, and preorders are open now both on OnePlus’ own site. It’ll also be available on Amazon too. But before you do that, we already tested it: read our full review.