The OnePlus 5T – The Best Phone of 2017!

OnePlus 5TThree months ago, I made a bold statement.  I said that the OnePlus 5 was looking like it was my favorite phone of 2017.  I liked it better than my Galaxy S8, better than my Honor 9, and a lot of other phones I had tried.  Fast forward to now, and it is still one of my favorite phones.  I now have the Razer Phone, the Pixel 2 XL, and have tried several others.  But now the OnePlus 5 has been dethroned.  By none other than its successor, the OnePlus 5T!

The OnePlus 5 was my first OnePlus phone and I fell instantly in love.  It wasn’t a perfect device, but it was close to it.  The OnePlus 5T improves on almost every aspect of the OnePlus 5 and is my new favorite device of 2017.

The OnePlus 5T comes with a 6-inch 2160×1080 AMOLED display that fills almost the entire front of the device with an 18:9 aspect ratio.  The display is a 1080p instead of the higher resolutions we are starting to see, but it still looks amazing. Sticking with 1080p allows the device to milk even more battery life out of the 3,300mAh battery.

OnePlus 5TFor $500 you get 6GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, and the same octa-core Qualcomm MSM8998 Snapdragon 835 processor that you do on the Pixel 2, the Galaxy S8, and the Razer Phone.  For an extra $60 you get an extra 2GB of RAM for a total of 8GB and double the storage.

There are a lot of great things to love about the OnePlus 5T.  It’s got USB-C, it’s got a headphone jack, the near bezel-less screen, the rear-facing fingerprint scanner, the insanely fast face unlock, the aluminum body, it is super easy to root, and so much more!

But what is it about the 5T that makes it stand out as my favorite device of the year?  If I had to sum it up there would be three things. 

The first reason is Oxygen OS.  Oxygen OS is OnePlus’s take on Android.  It is a mostly stock Android with some enhancements on top of it.  Almost every manufacturer has their own version of Android.  Rather than taking the Samsung approach and burying Android beneath all the extra stuff that nobody really uses, they stuck to the least enhancements and maintained an extremely usable, mostly stock experience.

OnePlus 5TMy second reason is the overall experience.  This combination of specs and Oxygen OS delivers an incredibly solid experience.  It’s impossible to get this phone to slow down or stutter!  And I’ve only got the 6GB version!  I can’t imagine how much better it would be with the 8GB!  And the experience isn’t just with the software.  With the aluminum body and the curved edges, the 5T sits very comfortably in the hand and just feels good.

My last and biggest reason is the price.  For $500 you are getting better specs than the Galaxy S8 and Pixel 2.  For $60 more you get specs that are the same as the Razer Phone.  So for between two and three hundred dollars less you get more phone and a better experience than you do with every major flagship device!

Now if I had to get nitpicky and come up with something I don’t like, I really only have one complaint.  When OnePlus shipped the 5T it came with the Oxygen OS version of Android Nougat, instead of Android Oreo.  But, that’s me being super nitpicky.  Oreo adds a lot of great features to Android, but OnePlus did such a great job with Oxygen OS that I don’t really miss them.  And even better, they’ve been working on an update to bring Oreo to the 5T.

I thought the OnePlus 5 was a hard phone to beat, but OnePlus managed to do it with the 5T.  I love my 5T and don’t have any plans to part with it anytime soon.  Thank you, OnePlus, for making me a true believer and for making such an awesome phone!  You can bet I’ll be getting the OnePlus 6 when it comes out!

If you guys want a 5T for yourselves you can get one here: http://amzn.to/2HmyOqd.

Want to learn more about the device? Check out our video review below.