[OnePlus 7T Real Life Review] cj chitwood:
OnePlus motto: Never Settle. Yet buying this phone, I feel that's exactly what I did.

I've had the phone about a week, maybe a week and a half, so I'm still getting into it...

But first, it's really not a *bad* phone. It's got some decent hardware in it. Aesthetically, well, it's just like every other phone. Screen in front, camera in back, notch for FFC, blah blah blah same old same old. It performs well, and the battery lasts me a couple of days with almost no usage (I didn't buy it to be a game console or a bitcoin miner). However, I'm not as impressed as I expected to be.

I decided on OnePlus because they're reputed to be modder-friendly; yet it seems this phone doesn't lend itself to quick development. Reading through a dozen forums, I still am having difficulty with the first steps. "Download the boot.img, boot it, etc. etc. " okay, great, but it won't let me boot it with a locked bootloader. Was it a simple "fasboot oem unlock" or was there more to it? None of the forums seem to hit this (I saw it somewhere, can't find it now).

I'm not one who is goo-gah over the latest features. Just because something's new and different doesn't make me gasm over it. Things like an ever increasing aspect or a notch / hole in my screen to fit the FFC. Seriously? Are we that hor.... erm... "excited" for a 100% screen-to-body ratio that we're sacrificing the screen to fit a FFC in, and then extending the screen length so we can still watch Netflix without a notch interfering, all just so we can have a phone without a "bezel"? OMG, a bezel is so 2016! Seriously! I need a bezel to keep my fat-a**ed finger pads from interacting with the screen. It's the one saving grace about this phone's display: THE SCREEN IS FLAT, EDGE TO EDGE, so a thin bezel isn't so bad, but this path manufacturers are on is just a mistake.

I prefer what works. Features are fine if they're useful but if all they are is a fad, or something just to be different (of course notches aren't different now so now we have pop-out FFCs, which I think I'd prefer, or no FFC at all) or a front to hide the fact they're sharing all my usage data in the background then they have no place on my phone -- I really don't need a fingerprint sensor or face unlock. I don't need 5G. I don't need gaming mode. I need a phone, that has SMS/MMS, and maybe a camera with flash. Everything else, let me get via a ROM or an APK.

I'm not a fan of "gesture" interactions. I shouldn't have to learn sign language to use my phone. Present me an interface. One of the first "mods" I did was install Nova Launcher Prime... right after disabling a bunch of default "share everything about me with the service provider, Google, and OnePlus" permissions.

I'm not a fan of certain default settings being to breach the privacy of the user's .... well, usage. Yeah, yeah, I get it, I'm a boomer, I need to get with the times, everybody's doing it, it's no big deal, whatever. It's just not anybody's business, especially Google's, T-Mobile's, nor OnePlus', what apps I use, how often, or where I am at any time of day. They claim it's to make the phone easier to use, or more useful to me, but in reality it's just another vector of attack, to borrow terminology from the network security world, by which they can track me or my habits for the sole purpose of making money and later on influencing my spending decisions (it's a slow boil). I spent over an hour going through all the settings disabling various things. There are many parts of the OS that seem integrated into various apps' abilities to access things like usage data or location; disallow access, app continually notifies that it's broken (though it appears to work just fine -- I finally muted the notifications, which I feel I shouldn't have to do). Bottom line, the phone from the factory is set to share everything when in my opinion sharing anything should require informed, consensual (and not simply at the end of a pages-long legalese EULA) opt-in by the user.

The camera is the same Sony IMX586-or-whatever-it-is that's in the Asus ROG Phone II and that phone's photos are FN AWESOME (GSMArena.com photo comare tool) but I feel the photos taken by this device could be better. Still, they're better than my old phone. Mostly. Zoomed to max, taking a photo of my wife on the beach from about a hundred yards away, the old phone with its 16 MP main sensor -- while perhaps not as detailed -- looked better. Perhaps a result of noise reduction? HedgeCam is a download I recently made and it takes decent, noise-reduced, shots, though I've not fully tested it yet.

Lots of little things that just eat away at the overall device. Lack of certain things -- like an audio jack, video out, barometer and IR emitter -- don't really affect me though I liked having them on the old phones I've used (I had my MyTouch 4G Slide hooked up to the entertainment center of the van for the kids to watch ripped DVDs on since they stored more easily on a MicroSD than they did on the original media; and we're always losing remotes -- if you have kids, you understand -- and the IR emitter with IRPlus app installed came in handy on my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and the LG G5). It would be nice to have all the same touches the other phones had but I had to... well, settle.

Long story short, it's a decent phone with near-flagship hardware. It would be nice to have it more useful and less spy-like, without the fad features.

If you read the whole thing, thank you for your interest. I'd type more and edit more but it's 1:30 a.m. and I need to be up in four hours for work.