I love the OnePlus 5T. This is my first Android phone since the Xperia S god knows how many years ago, and I've been primarily all-in on Apple for all my tech. So this is quite a change for me.
The specs are amazing for the price. £600 for 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2 year accidental damage cover, cases and the tempered glass screen protector is an amazing value really. I love that OnePlus doesn't bloat up their phones with a ton of crapware you can't remove. It's all very clean and the performance of OxygenOS truly is buttery smooth. I find the display is gorgeous even though it's specs are well below the latest from Samsung and Apple - it certainly compares very favourably to the iPhone 8 my wife uses.
I'm aware the camera falls quite a bit below the latest iPhones, Pixel 2 and Samsung phones in challenging conditions. But that isn't an issue for me because I don't take a lot of photos with my smartphones anyway. I accept I'm a bit of an oddity in this area though, and many other people put the camera at the top of their list of priorities.
The facial recognition stuff is insanely fast. I know it's nowhere close to as secure as what Apple is doing with the iPhone X, but it's so good on the OnePlus I've left it enabled despite the security concerns. (I figured I'd be happy with the fingerprint reader on the back, and I can now say I am not). It does suggest that Apple is on the right track dropping Touch ID in its latest flagships and pushing Face ID as the future, but I'm not paying iPhone X prices for it.
The thing that blows me away the most is how dated iOS looks side-by-side with a quality Android device today. I thought i was totally uninterested in widgets and the other Android niceties that the "fanboys" rave about. I'm not sure I could go back to iOS now unless Apple has a radical rethink about stacks of homescreen app icons and nothing else. iOS 11 really looks totally basic and boring to me now when I look at my iPhone 7 Plus beside the OnePlus 5T.
It was the price of iPhone X that finally pushed me over the edge. Tim Cook has been pushing Apple's prices higher across the line of laptops, iPads and now iPhones too. The iPhone X I wanted with AppleCare Plus would have cost £1350.00 - plus at least another £50 for an official case. And I finally said enough is enough, it's time to sample the competition. So thank you Timmy!