In the last couple of years, OnePlus has emerged as the company to go to if you want an extremely powerful and reliable phone with great battery life and decent camera that does not break the bank.
Its newest OnePlus 7T is its most refined such phone: priced at just $600, it outperforms more expensive Android rivals with a smoother, 90-hertz display that also happens to look great and an incredibly well optimized interface that runs fast. Its battery life is also solid. The only thing that is not quite flagship grade is the camera.
I have been using the OnePlus 7T for more than a week now, and there are a lot of subtle tweaks and changes that make this one of the best “affordable flagship” phones that you can buy in 2019.
Top-notch screen
A flat screen is a better screen
The 7T sports a Full HD AMOLED display with rich colors and the screen looks beautiful. You have two pre-set color options: vivid and natural, where the natural one features more toned down colors, plus you can also manually tweak the color reproduction.
The quality is great: we measured a peak brightness that was even higher than you get on the Samsung Galaxy S10, so the screen is easy to see outdoors, plus it’s very impactful if you turn up the brightness to the max.
It’s also a 90-hertz screen, meaning that it refreshes 90 times per second compared to 60 times for regular screens, and the effect is a sense of faster response to every action. Everything just moves with incredible agility and while we would not say that 2019 flagships are slow, this one feature gives the OnePlus 7T an edge that others don’t have.
We also appreciate that the screen is flat. A flat screen is definitely better for watching videos full-screen and it also reduces accidental touches that you get on other phones. It might look a bit old school, but it’s definitely something that you appreciate in terms of actual use.
You do have a tiny notch here (30% smaller than on the OnePlus 7, in case you care), and we find it unobtrusive and we really don’t mind.
