OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei unveiled the OnePlus 5T today (Nov 16) in New York, while acknowledging the fledgling firm’s naivety.
Speaking on stage in a room with hundreds of media representatives, Pei admitted “cockiness” when launching the OnePlus 2 and X (second and third smartphones) which resulted in unsatisfactory financial results.
OnePlus forecasted sales of 30,000 for its first smartphone the OnePlus One, which went on to hit one million devices in the vendor’s first year of business (2013).
“We removed NFC for the OnePlus 2 and early we on we knew the thermal performance of the Snapdragon 810 was not very good but with our newly gained cockiness from year one, we thought we could handle it through software.
“In the end we couldn’t build a performance profile on the OnePlus 2. Either it became too laggy or too hot, in the end it wasn’t received well.
“The results of 2015 weren’t very great – it seemed like everything we said and did was wrong, we attracted a lot of criticism during that year”.
OnePlus 5T
It will be available in midnight black from November 21, retail prices start from £449 to £499 (64GB and 128GB versions respectively).
OnePlus will launch the 5T simultaneously in 32 countries including: The US, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium to name a few.
O2 will be exclusively ranging the 5T offering customers 12 months free Xbox Live Gold subscription (worth £39.99), on pre-orders or orders before December 5. The operator will offer 50GB of data for the price of 10GB, costing £49 per month and £9.99 upfront.
The operator will be setting up pop-ups in O2 stores from 2pm on launch day across the UK in: Oxford Street, Westfield Stratford, Manchester Arndale and in Belfast at O2 Castle Lane.
Specs
The stand out feature for the OnePlus 5T is the price for flagship specs. Users can unlock the 5T with their faces in a feature called ‘face unlock’, OnePlus stated access into the 5T is done in 0.2 seconds. Users can also access the smartphone using the rear-mounted ceramic fingerprint sensor.
Housed in a 156.1 x 75 x 7.25mm aluminium unibody (162g), is a 6.01-inch 1080p (FHD) AMOLED display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. OnePlus boasts better readability in sunlight thanks to in-built software algorithm, ‘Sunlight Display’.
It is powered by the Snapdragon 835 complemented with six or eight gigabytes of RAM. An Adreno 540 graphics chip is also onboard. Internal storage stands at 64GB to 128GB.
The non-removable battery is 3,300mAh, a day’s use can be achieved through half an hour of charge via USB-Type C. A feature the Chinese manufacturer calls ‘dash charge’.
Out of the box the 5T will run Android Nougat with the Oxygen OS 4.7 skin. Android Oreo will be rolled out in beta in December.
The software boasts a feature called ‘app priority’, where the 5T will learn most used apps and dedicate more processing power to them.
Camera
The main snapper runs a dual-camera system, one 16 megapixels with a large f/1.7 aperture lens and Sony IMX 398 sensor, and the second is 20 megapixels. It has dual LED flash and is capable of shooting video in 4K at 30 frames per second (fps).
The front-facing camera is 16 megapixels with a f/2.0 aperture, with the ability to shoot videos at 1080p at 30fps. A time-lapse mode is also included.
