DAY 01
TWO WEEKS WITH THE ONEPLUS 8T
from £549 / stuff.tv/8TCosmetic changes have cheapened the appearance of the latest OnePlus... but
a fortnight’s testing is more than enough for Andrew Williams to see past that
If you’re looking for a late-2020
OnePlus fix, the 8T could well
be it. We spy a 120Hz screen,
a thunderously pointless
monochrome camera, a better
macro camera and fast charging
that tears past the Samsung
Galaxy Note20 Ultra like a Tesla
racing a clown on a unicycle. The
flat front makes it seem less fancy
than the OnePlus 8, but is there
enough going on inside to make
us ignore that?
Using flat glass is a simple way
to make the phone cheaper to
produce, but it means the 8T
feels more like the Nord than
the 8. Yes, there’s zero functional
benefit to a curved-sided phone
these days, but as affordable
phones get better by the month
you’d better care about this kind
of guff if you’re spending £500
or more.
Other parts of the OnePlus
blueprint remain. The in-screen
fingerprint scanner feels as
quick and reliable as ever, and
the physical ‘silent mode’ switch
is here too – still love it.
While a bump from 35W to
65W charging sounds dull, I’ve
Acceptable in the 8T
While a bump from 35W to 65W
charging sounds dull, I’ve just gone
from flat to 93% in 30 minutesjust gone from flat to 93% in 30
minutes. Topping up while I’m in
the shower provides a massive
boost too, and the phone doesn’t
get particularly hot.
Choose from 128GB and 8GB
of RAM or, for another hundred
quid, 256GB and 12GB of RAM.
A Snapdragon 865 sits one step
below the 865+ used in some of
the best (and most expensive)
2020 Androids.
Is OnePlus stiffing us with an
obsolete CPU? Nah, the two are
pretty similar – the ‘plus’ version
just has higher clock speeds to
keep the wagon of tech progressrolling along. Any differences
in performance at this level are
going to be down to how the
software juggles resources,
rather than a disparity in raw
megahertz/gigaflops/janglepips
or whatever.
Fortnite won’t play at 60fps,
but that’s just because the
game’s developer hasn’t flipped
that switch in the settings. It plays
great at 30fps, and so far this
seems like a great gaming phone
boosted by a pair of solid stereo
speakers with enough volume to
listen to a podcast while wrestling
with a garlic press.