The OnePlus 10T is the brand’s latest offering in the value flagship market, with a starting price of ₹49,999. This phone packs in the new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, and a pretty capable camera, but does it still offer the best value for money in this segment?
Design
The OnePlus 10T takes obvious design cues from its elder sibling, the flagship OnePlus 10 Pro. This is most evident with the camera bump, of course, which has a similar stove-top layout that helps give it that premium look. It does lack that puzzling and somewhat unnecessary text from the 10 Pro though, which I only take as a positive.
We’ve got the Jade Green colour in this glass back, which has got a glossy finish that is quite fingerprint prone, but does look very nice. The frame is plastic,and while a metal frame would have been nice at this price point, it still feels pretty premium to look at.
At 203g this is not a very light phone, and at 8.8mm it’s also not the most slim, but the curved edges on the back make the phone very easy to use with one hand, and the in-hand feel is pretty great as well.
The volume buttons are on the left edge, while the power button is on the right. Above the power button is… nothing, because the 10T does not have the iconic OnePlus alert slider. You’ll have to rely on the drop-down quick settings to change sound modes on this one.
For ingress protection, the version of this phone in North America gets an IP54 rating. This version doesn’t get that, but it should offer a similar amount of protection.
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Display & Audio
On the front of the device, you get a flat display with pretty thin bezels all around. The panel itself is a 6.7-inch FHD+ AMOLED unit, with support for HDR10+ and 10-bit colours. There’s also support for an adaptive refresh rate up to 120Hz. It's not using LTPO technology but the screen will smartly switch between 60, 90, and 120Hz based on what you're doing.
The front panel gets plenty bright to use in direct sunlight. The in-display fingerprint sensor also works pretty fast and without any issues.
The OnePlus 10T also gets stereo speakers, which are pretty loud and have nice clarity as well. These speakers, along with the great colours and contrast on the display, make the 10T a fantastic device for watching content.
Performance
The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset is the latest offering from Qualcomm, now made at a TSMC fab rather than a Samsung fab, which is supposed to solve all the heating problems faced with the 8 Gen 1. And all these claims are very true.
In benchmarks, the OnePlus 10T is actually faster than its more expensive elder sibling, the OnePlus 10 Pro. Both CPU and GPU benchmarks turn out to be a little bit faster. And the longevity claims hold up as well. In the Wild Life Extreme stress test, it had a whopping 94.3% stability, which is, frankly, amazing.
All this data means this should be a fantastic phone for gaming, and yes it is! On Call of Duty Mobile, it does the highest possible graphics settings, at the highest possible regular framerate. You can also use the 90fps setting, but that lowers the graphics quality. The phone does not throttle, and holds its performance even after long sessions of gaming. It does heat up quite a bit though.
The OnePlus 10T comes with up to 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, and up to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. I don’t know what you would do with more than the 12GB RAM this version has, but if you need it, it’s here. All of this of course means that the OnePlus 10T absolutely flies through any sort of regular usage.
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Camera
The OnePlus 10T has a 50MP primary camera, an 8MP ultra-wide camera, and a 2MP macro camera.
The main camera uses the Sony IMX766 sensor, which by now is a very tried and tested offering from Oppo brands. It continues to take very nice and detailed pictures in broad daylight, with good colour representation. Portrait mode is also pretty nice, with good subject separation. Night mode is turned on by default when you take a picture in low light settings, and shots are brightly lit and can get it in a lot of detail even at night time conditions.
OnePlus’ familiarity with the sensor means that they know how to get good results from it by now, but it also means the pictures look fairly similar to other recent OnePlus phones, like the Nord 2T or the 10R, or the 9RT.
The 8MP ultra-wide here also takes pretty decent shots of wider areas in well-lit settings.
The OnePlus 10T can also record video at up to 4K 60FPS. Even at this resolution, you do get electronic stabilisation, which makes shooting 4K a very viable option with this phone. Details and colours are all pretty great as well. The phone doesn’t do 8K video, but I don't think that's a big miss.
The front camera is a 16MP unit which takes pretty decent selfies in both indoor and outdoor settings, and will also suffice for video calls and the like.
The OnePlus 10T’s camera offering is very capable, and will please most users. The main sensor, as we know, is fantastic. However, some of the competition in this price range is giving higher quality 13MP ultra-wide lenses, and 12MP telephoto lenses, so I do wish OnePlus had offered better auxiliary sensors here.
Software and Battery
The OnePlus 10T comes with OxygenOS 12.1 out of the box, which remains very fast and customisable. You get the new OnePlus Shelf drop-down menu, the Work-Life Balance modes, and all of that jazz.
Android 13 hasn't rolled out to OnePlus 10T phones at the time of shooting this review but the company has promised 3 years of OS updates and 4 years of security updates for the 10T, which means that it should get OxygenOS 13 pretty soon, and then OxygenOS 14 and 15 when they come along.
This phone gets a 4,800mAh battery, which easily lasts a full day even with heavy use, and could also last more if you turn on the battery saver mode and what not. Keeping you topped up is 150W superfast charging, courtesy this 160W fast charger, that can take you from 0-100 in a mere 20 minutes. There is, however, no wireless charging on offer here, which kinda sucks.
Verdict
The OnePlus 10T is a great value flagship, which is faster than the 10 Pro, has a great camera, and charges up extremely quickly. It does, however, feel like it’s missing some of that special OnePlus sauce, and that absent alert slider stings a lot more than I thought it would.
It will be interesting to see what direction the brand takes from here, but still for a price of ₹49,999, you can’t go wrong with the OnePlus 10T.
