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ARTICLEAfter weeks of rumors, OnePlus's latest flagship phone, the OnePlus 5T, is now official.
The young and growing Chinese phone maker's 5T is a direct jab at Samsung and Google's flagship Android phones. Why pay $650 for a Pixel 2 or even $1,000 for a Note 8 when you can get a premium phone with similar features for $500?
SEE ALSO: OnePlus 5 review: Spectacular on every levelOnePlus's specializes in undercutting the competition and the OnePlus 5T is no different.
Though the OnePlus 5 was only released at the end of June, the company's offices are in Shenzhen, China, which affords the company the flexibility to work on new products quickly and fast-track new features at a speed other phone maker's cant.
The OnePlus 5T starts at $499 for 64GB of storage with 6GB of RAM and $559 for 128GB of storage with 8GB of RAM and launches on Nov. 21. And there's only one color this time: Midnight Black.
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The phone closely resembles the OnePlus 5 in both design and performance. And that's not a bad thing. I liked the aluminum unibody design on the 5 and it looks and feels good on the 5T.
The AMOLED screen's bigger at 6.01-inches and now stretches across the front with an impressive 80.5 percent screen-to-body ratio. The resolution's 2160 x 1080 -- not nearly as crisp as the now common 2880 x 1440 resolution found on other phones with 18:9 aspect ratio screens, but still good! I can't really tell the difference.
Powering this baby is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip and the aforementioned options of storage and RAM. There's no memory card slot, but you do get dual SIM card slots.
The battery is the same as the OnePlus 5: 3,300 mAh with OnePlus's super fast Dash Charge technology.
The fingerprint scanner's been relocated to the rear of the phone like on the Pixel 2. And thankfully, there's still a headphone jack. The speaker is still mono, though.
Like all OnePlus phones, the 5T runs OxygenOS, the company's optimized version of stock Android 7.1.1 Nougat.
OnePlus says photos and videos should look better than on the 5. Selfies look a little better from the 16-megapixel front-facing camera and regular photos as well as Portrait mode shots will look crisper and more vibrant from the dual cameras on the back. The company also says low-light performance has been improved.
Like the 3T that launched several months after the 3, the OnePlus 5T isn't a complete overhaul. The only major difference is the screen's bigger and the bezels are slimmer. This upgrade costs a few more bucks what the 5 did at launch (it's no longer in production), but it looks like it's well worth the price and keeps the company's phones competitive with Samsung and Google's.