1+3t - T for Turbo. Review on OnePlus 3T

Many people dont know the brand Oneplus still now as it is a somewhat newcomer in the smartphone market. It is a china based smartphone manufacturer and probably a sister concern of OPPO. They first launched Oneplus One which was outright hit then and gained the tag "Flagship Killer". It was a nice fone having great specs with affordable price. It amused the critics across the globe. Oneplus's tagline is "Never Settle". Yes, indeed they never settled and manufactured Oneplus Two, Oneplus X, Oneplus 3, 3T, 5 and now 5T and gradually they improved their product as well as increased product prices.

Among these 6-7 models, I purchased Oneplus 3T in January, 2017 for approx Rs. 29000/- from Amazon India and used it till late September, 2017. Then I sold it through OLX and do u know how much price I got in time of sale? It is a staggering Rs. 19000/-. So this high resale price confirms the quality of the products they make. So as I said I used it for almost 9 months and now I will be sharing my thoughts about it. Let me divide my review in a few major features and make a 10 point performance scale.

Build Quality:

Build is excellent in this fone. It is metal everywhere. It has a unibody design mean to say battery is not removable. Volume Button, Power Button and Alert Slider have excellent tactile feel. The fone a bit slippery though and does not have any kind of waterproofing or splash proofing. Back is not fingerprint prone. Camera at the back protrudes a bit. The overall build quality is very good. It ensures quality.(9/10)

Display:

The display is an Optic Amoled one made by Samsung. It has deep blacks and excellent contrast. Brightness level and color reproduction are also very good. My only complaint is sunlight visibility. I felt the maximum brightness level could be better. Anyway, Amoled generally is better than IPS LCD(at least to me) and 401ppi was enough for me for day to day use. Apart from VR, the display suffice for everyday use. Needless to say, I prefer Samsung's Super Amoled to this Optic Amoled.(7/10)

Performance:

It had top notch specs for the then standard. Quadcore Snapdragon 821 coupled with 6GB RAM is a powerhouse. Each and every application ran smooth. There was no hiccups of any kind. In 9 months of usage, I did not feel any kind of lag in the fone. Even in the 9th month, it performed like the first day. I literally tortured the fone with my heavy usage but the speed was blazing fast every day. Qualcom's higher end Snapdragon processors are already known for their performances and 821 was no exception. So Oneplus 3T really delivered flagship like performance. RAM management was nothing but excellent keeping 15-20 apps in memory easily. They also used a new file system(F2fS or something like that instead of UFS, I just cant remember the names exactly) which made read and write speed faster and smoother.(10/10)

MIC performance, Speaker Output, Audio quality and Multimedia:

According to me Oneplus 3T has one of the best Mic for telephonic conversation. Clarity was good. Loudness was more than enough. Voices of other party came nice.

Though the fone has a single speaker, it is enough loud to be noticed via ringtone and good for listening music or watching videos etc. Dont compare it with stereo/dual speakers but it produced clear and crisp sound and did not distort heavily in higher volume.

Audio quality via headphone was very good if not spectacular. U certainly need to use a good pair of headphone and tweak the audio settings to get the best result. Do note that FM Radio is missing in all of the Oneplus models. But overall in sound department, the fone performed commendably.(8/10)

Camera:

16mp front and 16 mp rear camera are there. Rear camera has a Flash. The daylight pictures taken with the rear cam came out nice with enough details, good sharpness, good dynamic range but somewhat dull color reproduction. Some people like pure natural colors in their photos and I am not among them. I prefer a bit punchier color reproduction which Samsung Galaxy S7 or S8 produce. Anyway, overall daylight pics were very good. In low light it struggled a bit but that is the case with every smartphone. 4K video is possible and apart from a stabilization issue, the video clips in daylight came out nice. Sound recording was also very good.

Front camera is also above average. It takes nice and clear selphies. Overall, in this price point u cant expect more. Both the cameras are very capable. But as camera in the smartphones are becoming very important factor day by day and there are some smartphones with better camera in the market like Pixel XL, Galaxy S8 etc, I am giving a little bit conservative rating for this Oneplus camera. But actually in this price range, it is one of the best cameras out there.(7/10)

Battery:

It has a 3400 mah battery. For pushing a HD display, it is enough. Battery back up is good enough to last a full day. I used the fone heavily most of the days and it performed well. I consistently got screen on time of 4.5-5 hrs with 65-70% brightness level, 1-1.30 hrs of gameplay, a few calls, 30-40 minutes of youtube videos etc. I play Clash of Clan a lot and considering that, the battery back up was good.(7.5/10)

Software performance:

Oneplus uses its own skin namely Oxygen OS on stock android. This rom is light in nature and offers a few tweaks and completely devoid of any bloatware. There are some cool gestures, ambient display, button customizations, dark theme, shelf etc. which are handy and immediately makes your experience better. But I would like to see more useful features particularly some Homescreen customization. In Oneplus 3T's Stable GLobal ROM, there is no option to change Icon Grid layout from 4x5 to 5x5 or 5x6 etc. There are no Notification Badges for icons either. I also dont like the Quick Settings area in the notification panel; there should be more icons for quick access. Apart from these 2-3 issues, software performance was good.(7.5/10)

Now lest talk about a few features of the fone -

i) Alert Slider:

This is unique to Oneplus. There is a dedicated button in the left side for Full Ring, DND and Mute purpose. This is quite handy and the feature is really an innovative one. Just one complaint, the order should be reversed. Full up should be Full Ring mode instead of Mute.

ii) Dash Charge:

It is blazing fast. It is an alternative to Qualcom's Quick Charge and it is faster than that. Probably Oneplus developed it from the VOOC Charging Technology used by its parent company OPPO. However, I found it to be very efficient and for a 30 minutes charging u can fill the battery from 5% to approx 55-60%. It is great in one word.

Some ISSUES I faced -

i) Fingerprint scanner problem: Most of the users will not agree with me because all know that the fingerprint scanner in Oneplus 3T is one of the best, accurate and reliable in the market. I completely agree with that. But I faced an issue with it which is serious. Many times it simply did not work. I didnt know the reason but I guess the fone got into somewhat deep sleep mode. When the scanner worked it was breathtakingly fast but sometimes it did not work. I tried a factory reset but the problem was still there. During my uasge I also got 1-2 updates and those could not solve the issue either. May be my unit had some defects, I really dont know.

ii) Overheating: This is the major con of this fone. The fone gets hot and I mean HOT, not warm. It often got hot while charging, while playing games for a few minutes, or while using the fone for a long time. I live at Kolkata and in the summer, particularly in the months of April, May or June when there is scorching heat in daytime, the fone often got so hot that it was very uncomfortable to use.

In the upper mid range price segment this fone was a champ when I bought it. It has many things going right. Apart from the overheating issue, most other aspects of this fone is flagship like. I think very recently Amazon has stopped the sale of this fone as Oneplus 5 is available and 5T is already announced. It is cheaper than 5 and 5T. If you can find u can surely buy it, fully recommended in this price range.