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All results achieved using a OnePlus 6T with 8GB of RAM With real-world use that means faultless fluid performance. Whether you’re swiping around, streaming video, multitasking or gaming the OnePlus 6T is more than powerful enough. Speaking of gaming, OnePlus has augmented gaming performance with its dedicated gaming mode. It’s similar to experiences on rival smartphones, not only letting you manage call and notification behaviour but also limiting the background network usage of other apps and optimising CPU, GPU and memory performance each time you launch a game. You could turn the feature off if you wanted and you have fine-grain control over how it behaves but for the most part, it’s best left to do its thing. Another fire-and-forget feature adjacent to gaming mode is OnePlus’ Smart Boost functionality.

Buried away in the phone’s settings menu (under ‘OnePlus Laboratory’) and enabled by default, Smart Boost analyses your usage and starts to proactively reallocate memory resources to help keep the phone feeling fast. It’s again hard to test what it’s like without a feature like this enabled without testing it over a matter of months but I’m glad it’s there out the box. As for call quality, the earpiece is a touch on the tinny side which might be down to its position up against the top-most fringe of the phone’s bezel, but it’s wholly usable and background noise suppression seems decent – with recipients confirming that I was coming through loud and clear, despite walking down the noisy streets of York. OnePlus 6T – Software OnePlus was among a handful of manufacturers that promised to deliver fast Android updates and with the OnePlus 6, it certainly delivered.

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The OnePlus 6T runs an enhanced version of that same Android 9.0 Pie experience out the box with OnePlus’ OxygenOS overlay on top. Thanks to the company’s proactive approach you can enjoy features native to Android Pie out-the-box, such as the navigation buttons used by the Pixel 3, as well as OxygenOS-specific features like parallel apps and shortcut gestures. There are some long-standing but meaningful tweaks as part of OxygenOS that make a phone as large as the 6T that much more enjoyable and easy to use. You can customise quick-launch actions – activated by drawing various shapes on the lock screen – letting you jump to the camera, media playback or switch on the flashlight. You can also swipe down anywhere on a home screen to summon notifications – making one-handed use that much more approachable.

With most of the functionality falling to the performance tools I’ve already mentioned, along with a handful of camera tweaks, the base software experience feels markedly the same as Android Pie on the OnePlus 6, but that’s no bad thing. The Shelf – one swipe to the left of your default home screen – is one of the best ways of handling widgets and quick actions that I’ve seen on Android, Hidden Space is an easy way to hide apps from prying eyes without making it too tricky to get back to them yourself and the rich functionality of the apps tray works like a charm. There’s little more I can say that I want from OnePlus’ take on Android here. I’d like a one-handed mode that actually shrinks the entire UI but I think I’m in the minority there, and I’m curious to try out the promised fingerprint-sensor based shortcuts feature but beyond that, perhaps a few fewer of OnePlus’ own apps stepping on Google’s toes wouldn’t hurt. OnePlus 6T – Camera The camera hardware at play here appears to be identical to that of its predecessor, with a dual 16/20-megapixel snapper taking point, rocking a respectably wide f/1.7 aperture and PDAF (phase detection autofocus), along with OIS