Want an easy way to get a straightforward, no-nonsense look at the state of the art in smartphones? Just check out whatever's new from OnePlus. The Chinese company quietly takes all the best mainstream tech it can find, sticks it in a chassis, and sells it on its website. It's never the first to experiment with wild new ideas, opting instead to wait for things to be a little more mature and a little more readily available.
So it is with the new OnePlus 5T. For the most part, the phone matches the OnePlus 5[1], which came out less than six months ago. Same specs, even the same overall size and shape. What's changed since then, at least according to this device, mostly has to do with the display. The 5T's 6-inch AMOLED screen matches the latest from Samsung and Apple, right down to the taller aspect ratio. (Samsung manufactures the panel for pretty much the whole industry.) OnePlus recognized that phone design now entails getting rid of everything but the screen, and it followed suit.
As with all the other just-the-screen phones, the 5T makes a few design changes to accommodate all that display. For the first time, OnePlus put a fingerprint reader on the back of the device, rather than in a button on the front. It's still wickedly fast. And if you don't want to pick up your phone just to look at it, you can use the new facial recognition feature. OnePlus is careful not to bill it as some hugely secure feature—you can't pay for things with your face, or even open apps—but rather as a quick way to just get into the phone. And man, is it fast. Way faster than even the iPhone X...