[OnePlus 6T  Guides, News, & Discussion] partcyborg:
Well that's a relief, I thought I'd be the odd one out possessing both a s9+ and a op6t. Nice to know there are so many of you right there with me ?

Going on pure hardware alone: I call it an even time. Each phone has a few things I like/love, and a thing or two I miss. Gun to my head id probably say the s9+, as the one of the two misses with the op6t is more of an annoyance. The two things I am referring to are: the display being only HD, and the lack of an SD card. The display almost doesn't qualify as a miss at all, as I didn't even notice the difference and only discovered the discrepancy upon seeing detailed specs somewhere. That being said, I do kind of miss loading up 4k hdr videos and wowing friends and family. But again, almost not even a thing, as the display is gorgeous (and is made by Samsung, surprise surprise) and even does 1080p hardware hdr flawlessly if you trick YouTube into trying to play it

The bigger issue for me is the lack of sdcard, although for a slightly different reason than has been mentioned previously. My issue boils down to what I consider an incredibly stupid decision made by Android on how to partition the device, and drives me nuts to this day that I can't really do much about it. My issue with the 128gb of local storage is that they shoved all of it into a single partition with no (stock, ignoring twrp for the moment) way to wipe your os without erasing all 100-something GB. It is absolutely unacceptable in this day and age to force someone to backup and restore upwards of 80-90gb of data off a device just to erase the damned is to get a clean install. Making /sdcard an actually separate partition that you did not have to wipe to format would virtually eliminate this issue, but time and time again they continue to configure devices in this same dimwitted manner.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself "but what about twrp? It lets you wipe /data without wiping internal storage!". And you would be the right, this is supported by twrp, and that is excellent news, but it's a far cry from true native support, and it falls down in some key places. The biggest rough edges around the option are:

1) the "failsafe" stock software still doesn't support it, so there are several situations you can find yourself in where you have no choice but to do a full reset and wipe the entire device.

2) backing up /data is problematic, and limited (and completely broken on twrp for the op6t right now). There is simply no way to back it all up without root/custom recovery. Even with twrp, you only can thanks to the great tipatcg mod but even if it worked correctly in the op6t by installing it you lose the ability to backup and restore your app data and "/sdcard" data separately, something very important if you ever decide to look at alternative roms. If that were the end of it, it might be ok, by it gets worse: due to incompatibilities between twrp and the brand new fine filehandler currently the act of restoring any datw into your op6t using twrp/nandroid will destroy the encryption keys on your device causing you permanent loss of access to everything in /data forever. Why this happens is to long to be up into get into here, but currently the only workaround is to

only backup to external storage. (Yes, I know this from first-hand experience)

Backing up to sdcard skirts all if these issues, and not being able to do so has already once led to losing every single byte of storage used at the time