(upbeat music)
- Hey, what's up? MKBHD here.
This is the new OnePlus 10T.
And it's the most generic OnePlus phone of all time.
So, while I'm not reviewing this phone,
this is my first impressions,
I have had it for about a week and a half.
But I also was busy winning
Club Ultimate Frisbee World Championship
for the past eight days in the middle of Ohio
with the New York club team, PoNY.
Anyway, typically, the T phone for OnePlus
is just taking whatever their latest and greatest was
and giving it a spec bump across the board
to just make it a little bit faster in every way.
Sort of like what the S used to be for the iPhone.
But this isn't a direct sequel.
We had the OnePlus 10 Pro in January.
Looks pretty similar.
But that was 899 when it launched, now it's 799.
So just keep this in the back of your head
as you're watching this.
This isn't a 10T Pro, it's just the 10T.
And so it launches at 649.
So, on one hand, now, we know, okay, it is a lower price.
We know to expect some things to be cut,
some shortcuts to be taken to get to this price here.
But on the other hand, some of the shortcuts that they took
are downright head-scratchers to me.
So the OnePlus 10 Pro from January
had the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip and up to 12 gigs of RAM.
So this 10T has the new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1
and up to 16 gigs of RAM.
Great. So there's a spec bump.
A reason to get this phone. Cool.
And they're nearly the same size,
but last year's phone had a 120Hz display
curved pretty dramatically over the edges.
This 10T is flat.
It also has a 1,000Hz touch sample rate
and gets a little bit brighter.
It is also adaptive instead of LTPO.
And it's 1080 instead of 1440.
This all makes complete sense.
I mean, LTPO, and especially 1440P,
are sort of reserved for the highest end of phones.
So at this price, 1080P, OLED,
120Hz adaptive refresh rate, it's good.
It's got the fingerprint reader under the display.
It's got the hole punch in the top middle.
No surprises here.
Design-wise, though, the 10 Pro was a satin soft-touch black
that I really liked with dark satin metal rails.
That was kind of sick, actually.
The 10T, here, has a new black textured back
called Moonstone Black.
It's got these little dashes or lines through it.
And then instead of dark rails, it has sort of normal,
generic chrome ones for their new 360 antenna system.
And instead of a camera shelf,
it's more of a smoothed-out camera slope up to the shelf.
Which, actually, kind of do like,
but I liked it first on an OPPO phone
that came out a while ago.
So now it feels even more like another OPPO phone.
Again, adding to the list of reasons
why it feels a bit more generic.
Then you might also remember
OnePlus signed this big three-year deal,
$100-plus million deal
with Hasselblad for their cameras,
which would let them borrow maybe some color science
or some image processing.
And the OnePlus 10 Pro was a part of that in January.
It had the Hasselblad branding on the back
and even a Hasselblad-themed camera app.
Well, less than two years later,
this OnePlus 10T doesn't have any Hasselblad stuff anywhere.
There's no Hasselblad camera app.
There's no Hasselblad branding on the back of the phone.
And as far as I can tell, it doesn't appear to use
any of that new color science or image processing either.
Now, is that because the cheaper phone
isn't worthy of the new Hasselblad sauce?
Like it's not expensive enough to get that?
Or is it just because you stop caring about it?
I don't really know.
I guess I feel like if you've already paid for it,
you should just put it in all your phones.
But it's not here.
And then you might have also noticed
that this is the first OnePlus phone ever made
that doesn't have the alert slider.
Literally, one of my favorite features
of any OnePlus phone that they've had for years,
the three-way volume slider that lets you quickly switch
between sound on and vibration and silent,
it is now gone from the OnePlus 10T.
And they gave their reason for it.
You know, "It takes up more space than you would think
"inside the phone.
"The board has to come across,
"and we save that extra space
"and give you a little more battery, blah, blah, blah.
"You can still do that stuff with software."
I actually believe you,
but just think about identity for a second.
Can you actually imagine the iPhone dropping the mute switch
because Apple wants to save some space
and prioritize something else inside the phone?
I literally can't picture an iPhone
not having a mute switch.
Sure, you can always do it with software, yes.
But I would bet anyone $1 million right now
that the next five years of iPhones
will all have a mute switch
because it's just such a part of the iPhone's design.
So, a new OnePlus phone coming out
and not having an alert slider, it might be kind of minor
to some people who have never bought a OnePlus phone before
or never even followed or cared about the OnePlus stuff.
But to people who have,
this is kind of sad that it's not here.
Just more generic points for this phone.
The 10 Pro had a standard camera,
an ultra-wide, and a telephoto.
Plus, an LED flash with some text in the middle.
We talked about how that was kind of dumb text,
but it was there.
To no one's surprise, that text is all gone.
And in true generic fashion,
they've moved to a Sony IMX766 sensor for the primary.
Which is the same one that was in the Nothing Phone
and the Zenfone 9 and the ROG Phone 6,
and a bunch of others.
It also has a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera
and a two-megapixel macro camera.
More generic points.
Now, probably the biggest feature headlining this phone,
the one that gets emphasized the most from OnePlus
when they tell me about this phone, is the battery.
So it's a 4,800 mAh dual-cell battery,
which is slightly smaller than the 10 Pro's 5,000 mAh.
But it now charges with OPPO's SuperVOOC technology
at a crazy fast, a crazy fast, 125 watts.
It actually comes with this brick in the box
which says 160 watts on it,
but the phone peaks at 125 watts here in the US.
And that's good for one to 100% in literally 20 minutes.
It's insane.
It really is truly incredibly convenient.
I did a whole video all about fast charging pretty recently.
But with this one, I got it down to 20%, doing some demos,
plugged it in for 30 seconds and it got up to 22%.
And then I let it go for another three minutes
and it got to 32%.
Just easy.
So I guess that does feel like OnePlus,
even though it's OPPO's SuperVOOC charging,
they've always emphasized fast charging here.
But they also didn't put wireless charging in this phone.
So, you get the peace of mind of having fast charging,
but you lose the convenience of wireless charging.
Even more generic points.
The funny thing is, despite my disappointment,
I bet this is a perfectly fine phone for a lot of people.
Decent screen, high-end chip, lots of RAM,
pretty smooth performance from my first impressions,
decent cameras,
and an OxygenOS that's more like ColorOS than ever before.
That's actually what a lot of people
are looking for at 650 bucks.
And hey, it's even getting four years of software updates.
And I guess that's the point,
which is this phone is more generic than ever before.
Which, to me,
or someone who's familiar with the OnePlus story
and the history of the brand and all that
is pretty disappointing.
But that also means, by definition,
that this phone appeals to more people than ever before.
So this goes right in line with what I talked about
in my "What Happened to OnePlus?" video.
If you haven't already watched it,
I'll make it the first link below the like button
because you should definitely watch that video.
But, yeah, I remember I tweeted a couple days ago
when we first got some of the specs of this phone
that it seems like a new OnePlus phone
without an alert slider, feels like them
just completely giving up on their identity.
And it was funny, so many of the replies were like,
"Actually, it feels like a couple years ago
"when Carl Pei left,
"that's when they gave up on their identity."
And other people were like, "Actually, no.
"The OnePlus 7 Pro was the last good phone they ever made,
"then it went downhill."
Some people were like, "The OnePlus 3
"was the last time they ever made a good phone,
"and then every phone since then was just trash."
But at the end of the day, this is just my first impression.
And the moral of this story, for me,
is don't be a fan of the company be a fan of the product.
The individual product.
And if you look at this on the market today,
this phone is fine.
I'm sure it's fine.
Everything about this phone, it's all right,
nothing too crazy about it.
And that's what they're intending to do
with the sort of remnants of what OnePlus is.
There's a lot of other good phones out there for the price,
and I highly encourage checking them out.
Again, this sort of sweet spot of $600,
which is a lot to spend on a phone,
but also sort of right in the middle now
considering you have $1,000 flagships.
There's a lot of competition there.
I just reviewed the Zenfone 9,
incredible phone for the price.
I really like it.
And so a lot of comparables.
But, hey, when you're familiar with OnePlus,
this phone is just feeling more generic than ever before.
Either way, that's been it.
Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace.
(upbeat music)