- Hey guys, this is Austin.
We are almost halfway through 2018,
which means that flagship phones are coming.
And to start out this new wave,
we have the brand new OnePlus 6.
So, in a world of thousand dollar flagships,
the idea that you can pick up a phone
like the OnePlus 6 for starting at $530.00
means that you're really getting
a lot of those same specs, a lot of the same features
but at a much lower price.
But, as always, the question is, is it worth it?
So, what we have here is the mid spec model.
So, not only is this going to have eight gigabytes of ram,
but it's also gonna have 128 gigs of storage.
This is in the Midnight Black color.
And if we remove the little sticky here,
you can see that is, well, not only incredibly shiny,
but the last time this will ever be completely perfect
until I get my grimey finger prints on it.
So, if you put the OnePlus 6 side by side
with the 5T, one of the main things
you'll notice that instead of the metal back
that they've had for quite a few years,
instead we do have that all Gorilla Glass 5 look.
Now it is going to be slightly tapered on the back.
And honestly, it kind of feels nice,
sort of similar to what you would find on
something like the Galaxy S8, or Galaxy S9.
Before we get too far into it though,
I want to take a look inside the box.
And what we're going to find is not only
our USB-C to USB-A cable,
but also the rather large Dash charger.
Something that OnePlus has been known for
for quite a few years now is the idea that
they have some of the fastest charging phones out there.
Fire up the OnePlus 6, and the first thing
you'll see is the notch.
Yes, my friends, like basically all smartphones of 2018
the OnePlus has gotten onto the notch train.
But, I will say they've actually done
it a little bit differently here.
So, the first thing you'll notice
is that the notch is actually one
of the smallest that you'll see.
Most of that is because there's really not a whole lot here
besides the front facing camera,
the light sensor, as well as your ear piece.
But something else to pay attention to
is how small the rest of the bezels are.
So, there's basically nothing on the sides of the display.
And even the chin is going to be really, really minimal.
Where this is really noticeable is when you
put it side by side with the OnePlus 5T.
Even with the overall footprint of the phones,
they're almost identical.
What you're getting here is going to be
a little bit of a larger display
because you don't have that forehead,
and the chin is going to be smaller.
And because of that, you're going from a six inch display
to a 6.3 in that same size body.
This guy is rocking a 6.3 inch, 2280 by 1080 AMOLED display.
That is going to be a slightly unusual
19 by 9 aspect ratio, but what it does mean
is that while its not going to be
the most high-res screen in the world,
you are going to be something that, again,
covers pretty much the entire front of the phone.
Now generally speaking, I feel like a 1080p resolution
is pretty solid on a phone this size,
however, because it is AMOLED, if you do look up close
you're going to see some slight jaggys,
it's not gonna be quite as sharp
as something like a Galaxy S9 screen,
but as soon as you get it more than a few inches
away from your face, I think it's going to be totally solid.
And, importantly, the screen quality itself
is actually super-high with this guy.
So, not only is the OnePlus 6 color-calibrated
straight from the factory,
but you also do have extra modes inside the settings.
You can set it to the Default mode,
which, to my eyes, a little bit oversaturated.
You also have sRGB, you have DCI-P3,
as well as the Adaptive mode.
But, I like going to the Custom color
and just tweaking it to be a little bit more natural.
- [Voice On Phone] Now, with the S9,
you're really not going to be losing anything.
They're also--
- So, you will see that the screen,
even when you do the custom profile,
is going to be slightly oversaturated.
That's almost more of an OLED thing.
Now, speaking of OLED things,
if you do look at it slightly off-axis
you're going to see the viewing angles are good
but not amazing, however, that's going to be
pretty much any AMOLED panel.
But, what isn't going to be quite so great
is the HDR playback.
This does support HDR video, however
it actually does it at a little bit of a choppy rate,
at least on YouTube.
Don't get me wrong, though,
this is an incredibly nice display.
In a lot of ways, it's right up there
with stuff like the Galaxy S9 as well as the iPhone.
The only thing that really holds it back
is going to be the slightly lower resolution.
But, as long as you're sort of at a normal viewing distance,
it's really not going to be an issue.
The OnePlus 6 does still have dual SIM card slots,
which is definitely appreciated,
but you do not have any kind of microSD expandability.
If you want any more storage,
you're going to have to buy it ahead of time.
But, thankfully, it's actually not going to be that pricey.
The base model, at $530.00 does have 64 gigs of storage,
but another $50.00 will bump you up to 128,
and if you wanna spend another $100.00,
you're going to be getting 256 gigs of storage.
Pretty reasonable in my opinion.
Take a look at the bottom of the phone.
In addition to the USB-C port,
you're also going to find the headphone jack.
Yes, my friends, a high-end phone in 2018
that does come standard with a headphone jack.
("Hotel California" by Eagles)
One thing the OnePlus 6 does not have is a great speaker.
So, like the previous models, there's only going to be
a single mono speaker that fires down.
It's going to be reasonably loud,
but it would be really nice to join
the rest of the high-end flagships
by adding a front-firing speaker up top
that doubles as your speaker grill thing,
whatever they call it, headset, what,
I always forget what it's called.
The stupid, uh, ear piece, ear piece.
Now, because we do have a glass back,
the phone is fairly slippery,
but there's actually going to be
a fairly hard chamfer on the side,
which does kinda give you a little bit of grip.
And something else the OnePlus really nailed
are the buttons.
This is not something I talk about very often
because, well, for the most part, a button is a button,
but not only are they going to be pretty raised up,
but they're not going to be flush at all,
but they're nicely spaced,
and they actually feel really good.
There's this nice tactile click.
And, especially with the volume rockers
and as well as the little OnePlus slider
that will turn on and off the mute or the vibrate switch.
Everything feels really solid.
They did a good job here.
The fingerprint sensor around back
works just as you would expect,
so it is going to be right below the camera bump,
which is a little bit large on the phone,
but just kinda helps you find the fingerprint sensor.
And, on top of that, this does also have
an upgraded version of Face Unlock.
Now, it's not going to be as secure
as something like the iPhone X,
but it does work pretty well.
So, I kinda hold it up here and hit the button,
it pretty much immediately unlocks
as if I didn't even have a passcode.
Maybe not the most secure thing in the world,
but it is definitely fast.
This is the first time the OnePlus has gone
with an all glass construction for one of their phones.
And it does look pretty nice and allow them to do
multiple colors.
The Midnight Black is interesting looking
even though it is going to be super, super fingerprinty.
However, there are going to be some interesting trade-offs.
So, yes, it feels nice in the hand,
especially because it is going to be curved on back,
but it's not really going to be all that unique.
It's very, very common for flagship phones,
and even some budget options to go with
a glass construction in 2018.
Now, the trade-off when you go with glass,
even with something high-end like this Gorilla Glass 5,
is that you're going to be losing some durability.
Now, of course, you can get
sort of micro-scratches and stuff,
but that kinda happen on any phone.
The real worry is if you drop it,
you could totally shatter not only the front,
but also the back of the phone.
The worst part is, you're really not going to be getting
anything besides the aesthetics.
So, while a metal phone generally will not allow you
to wireless charge because the metal will interfere,
most of the time a glass phone will.
However, for some odd reason, OnePlus decided to opt out
of adding any kind of wireless charging capabilities
to the OnePlus 6.
Sure, it's got the super-fast Dash charging,
and honestly I end up using sort of normal wire charging
a lot more than wireless anyway,
but it would be really nice to have that option,
especially considering that it's not even that expensive.
It's kind of weird that they didn't include it.
Now, there is going to be some waterproofing
inside the phone, however, OnePlus did not opt to do
any kind of IP67 or IP68 rating.
Basically, what that means is that
it actually might not be that far off
from something like an iPhone or Galaxy
as far as being waterproof,
but if you actually get it wet and kill it,
it's not going to be warranty supported,
so you're on your own on that one.
There are some other nice features,
including a full RGB notification light,
as well as an ambient display mode.
So, like something like the Pixel or the Galaxy S9,
you can see, at a quick glance, your notifications
and the time, and date, however, unlike those phones,
it's not going to be always on.
You're going to either have to tap the display
or actually raise it up for it to trigger.
Inside, you're going find full flagship level specs.
So, it's going to be rocking a Snapdragon 845 processor
with eight cores, as well as either
six or eight gigabytes or RAM,
depending on which model you pick up.
Now, in the Android space, that's about as good as it gets.
It's right on par with something like the Galaxy S9,
and if you look at it side-by-side
with other phones like the iPhone as well as the OnePlus 5T,
it does do a pretty solid job.
The performance, generally speaking, is very good,
exactly like you would expect with this level of specs.
So, the UI is going to be nice and smooth.
And one of the nice things is
is that with that kind of level of performance,
you are going to be future-proof to some degree,
especially with these kind of graphics.
A lot of games in the future should run pretty well
on the OnePlus 6.
The OnePlus 6 is running Android 8.1 Oreo,
with OxygenOS on top.
Now, it's going to be a fairly light skin
so, generally speaking, OnePlus doesn't add
a lot of bloat, and they add
actually legitimately useful features.
And, one of which has to do with the notch.
Now, if for some reason you hate the look of a notch,
you can actually turn it off in the settings.
All you need to do is go into the Notch display option
and hit Hide the notch area.
What that will mean is that any kind of app
cannot actually take advantage of that top area.
Although, thankfully you are still going to able
to use stuff like your status bar,
and everything that's going to be tucked up in the corner.
There's also going to be a built-in reading mode.
So, you can turn this on for the entire OS
or just for specific apps, but, once you turn it on,
it turns everything full grayscale,
and it warms up the display just a little bit.
It kind of looks like you're reading off of a newspaper.
Now, this is going to be a little bit of a niche option,
but especially where you're sitting in bed late at night
and you don't wanna sort of sear your eyes
with super bright colors, it actually is pretty calming,
although you probably wanna use this for text and not video.
There's not a lot to complain about
with the software on this guy.
Sure, you're not going to be getting Android updates
quite as fast as on a Pixel,
but OnePlus does have a good track record
for keeping things up-to-date in a reasonable time frame.
And, on top of that, you're also going to be getting
a pretty bloat-free experience.
As far as the cameras go, while on paper
it looks very similar, the OnePlus 6
has seen some major upgrades.
So, around back you're still going to be getting
a 16 megapixel main sensor as well as a 20 megapixel
telephoto option, but that main sensor's been upgraded
with not only optical image stabilization,
but it also is now going to be a little bit larger
than it was before.
So, if we line up a shot here of Ken,
we're gonna see that not only does the HDR
immediately pop up, but something that's really impressive
is that it takes pictures fast.
Feel like I've been using a lot of
budget Android phones that take a while.
This one's pretty much instant.
This shot's actually pretty nice, too.
Does a really good job of keeping in
all of those highlights with HDR.
There's really not anything that we're missing.
So, with the telephoto camera,
we're going to be losing a little bit of sharpness,
but I'm actually not that disappointed.
A lot of times with smartphones that do have dual cameras,
while the main camera might look great,
a lot of times when you switch over to the 2X zoom,
it doesn't look so great.
But, this is not bad at all.
So, something else that the OnePlus 6 has now
is going to be a portrait mode.
So, if we switch over to it,
it's going to turn on the depth effect,
although, interestingly, it's actually using it
on the wide-angle camera.
Okay, let's give this a try.
Oh, perfect, there we go.
A wonderful shot of lots of hearts behind Ken.
That's, man, that's a special one right there.
If we look at the standard portrait mode, though,
what we're getting here is something that looks okay,
but you know it's not really that great.
First of all, I like it when a portrait mode
will use the telephoto camera.
It's a little bit more of a compressed focal length
I guess would be the correct phrase,
but this, man, the edges are all just blurry.
Nah, this is not great.
Get some good light and you can actually get
a ton of detail out of these photos.
If you look up close to the little fibers on the leaf,
they're super clear, and super crispy.
Something else I'm really appreciating
with shooting with this camera
is that there's very little latency
when it comes to taking a shot,
or especially when it comes to viewing your images,
everything is pretty much instant.
So, if you wanna take a couple shots,
quickly make sure you got the thing,
and then move on right back into the camera,
there's really no lag.
We're also going to be getting some pretty decent
slow motion options.
So, the OnePlus 6 will shoot up to 4k
at 60 frames per second, and when you slow that down
it looks pretty nice.
But, if you really want some proper slow motion,
you're going to be getting either 720p at 480,
or my personal favorite is 1080p at 240 frames per second.
You're still getting decent quality,
but it's going to slow down and still give you
that cool look.
I mean, this is cool, right?
Switching up cameras for a second,
this is what 4k video looks like on the OnePlus 6.
Now, importantly, we do have
that optical image stabilization,
which especially when you're shooting 4k is super helpful,
but it's pretty much useful
for any kind of smartphone video.
You guys can see as we move around a little bit,
it should be reasonably smooth.
So, is the OnePlus 6 worth it?
At a little bit over $500.00,
you're getting the entire flagship experience.
Now, yes, there are going to be a couple things missing,
such as the lack of wireless charging,
but when you consider that this is going to cost
a lot less than a lot of other flagships
that perform very, very similarly,
it's kinda hard to argue
that this is not the definition of being worth it.