OnePlus 5T: here are all the new features

New display aspect ratio

Of course, the huge new change and probably the most prominent one — the new display. OnePlus basically got in line with the 2017 trend of producing elongated, 18:9 screens surrounded by thin bezels. As a result, we have a 6-inch display on a phone that fits in the footprint of the OnePlus 5 (well, the 5T is only ever so slightly larger). It's a longer display, yes, but not necessarily a bigger one — since a lot of content out there is still produced in the standard 16:9 format, you will see some letterboxing on your display and said content will be sized as if it's playing on a 5.5-inch screen.

That said, the camera viewfinder, website content, and apps and games that are optimized for the new ratio look really great on the new ratio.

Sunlight Display

The OnePlus 5T still has an Optic AMOLED panel on its display, made by none other but Samsung, too. With the new phone, OnePlus also has the so-called Sunlight Display feature. Basically, if your phone detects strong lighting, it will boost the brightness considerably, making it easy to use the phone under direct sunlight. It remains to be seen if said boosting will also affect color reproduction and mess with your display mode of choice. Granted, if you are looking at your phone's screen under the harsh sunlight, accurate colors are probably not the first thing on your mind — actually seeing an image is the priority here.

The fingerprint scanner has moved

With so little room on the phone's "chin", OnePlus has chosen to do what others have done, too — get rid of the physical navigation controls on the front. That includes the home button with the embedded fingerprint scanner as well. It has now moved to the back of the device, but, thankfully, it's in the center, not in some weird offside position.

Whether this is a positive change is debatable — some users swear by the back-mounted fingerprint scanners, while others are often annoyed when they can't quickly unlock their device if it lays on a desk, fingerprint reader facing down.

Bye bye, telephoto camera

The OnePlus 5's dual camera module on the back had a "main" camera with a 16 MP sensor and an F1.7 aperture lens neighbored by a 20 MP shooter with a 1.6x optical zoom telephoto lens with an F2.6 aperture. While the standard camera remains the same on the OnePlus 5T, the secondary one has been entirely reworked.



Gone is the telephoto lens, we now have a 20 MP camera with another F1.7 aperture lens, which will only activate for low light shots. With a new software algorithm, which OnePlus calls Intelligent Pixel Technology, the phone will split the sensor's individual pixels into groups of 4 and merge their data. The desired result is more light collection and less noise when taking pictures in the dark. It sounds a bit like the HTC UltraPixel concept of the past when HTC put sensors with huge pixels in their phones to achieve something similar.

Improved Portrait Mode

Now, the loss of a telephoto camera does not mean the loss of Portrait Mode. In fact, the OnePlus 5 actually used its regular camera for the portrait shots, the secondary one was only used to assist in depth detection. The background-blurring mode is making a return and, for what we can tell, will use the main camera again, just like before.

With the release of the OnePlus 5T, the company states that software improvements have been made to further reduce noise and improve imagery of the Portrait Mode. Since these are entirely software-based, we might see them arrive via an update to the OnePlus 5? We'll see...

Face Unlock

The build of Oxygen OS that the OnePlus 5T ships with will have a new Face Unlock feature. Yeah, it does pretty much what it sounds like — the phone will use the selfie camera to scan your face and unlock. It's worth noting that there are no IR dot projectors or retinal scanners attached, so the feature is probably not as secure as it is on the Samsung flagships or the Apple iPhone X. Also, since it's entirely software-based, we might see it arrive on the OnePlus 5 via an update.