OnePlus 10T review: this phone fully charges in 19 minutes

Accommodation Singapore introduces

The OnePlus 10T costs £629 ($649), undercutting fast-charging rivals from Xiaomi and other Chinese smartphone manufacturers that typically cost £1,000 or so.

On the outside the 10T follows a familiar formula. The shiny metallic sides meet glass front and back. The back plate now fully envelops the camera lump in one smooth piece of glass, similar to the Find X5 Pro from parent company Oppo.

The 6.5in screen is very good-looking and has a high refresh rate of 120Hz, which keeps things smooth. It is a little less bright than the older 10 Pro and some top rivals, but is otherwise excellent.

It is certainly snappy and responsive, but the biggest improvement is that the chip is 30% more energy efficient, which helps conserve battery life and keeps the phone noticeably cooler in operation.

The 10T runs the same OxygenOS 12.1 software based on Android 12 as the 10 Pro from April, not the recently announced Android 13-based OxygenOS 13. OnePlus will provide bi-monthly security patches for four years from release and three major Android version upgrades, including OxygenOS 13 later this year.

For now, it has the same slick look and similar niggles as before, so for more, see the 10 Pro review.

The main 50MP camera is pretty good, capturing shots with a good level of detail, reasonable good colour balance and dynamic range. With a bit of effort you can get some really beautiful images. It becomes a little more grainy than better cameras in low light, but portrait mode, night mode and other fancy features work well. Video captured up to 4K at 60 frames a second is decent, too.

The ultrawide camera is weaker, however, struggling with detail and dynamic range, often making scenes look significantly darker than the main camera. The digital zoom is also not great, producing obviously blown-up images beyond 2x. The 16MP selfie cam produces detailed images but lacks dynamic range, becoming a bit bleached-out in bright light.

The OnePlus 10T costs £629 ($649) with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £729 with 16 and 256GB shipping on 25 August.

For comparison, the OnePlus 10 Pro costs £799, the Google Pixel 6 costs £599, the Pixel 6a costs £399, the Samsung Galaxy S21+ costs £949, and the Xiaomi 12 Pro costs £999.

It genuinely charges so fast, it changed the way I thought about using it. I no longer needed to charge it overnight because it was full again in the time it took me to brush my teeth.

It also has a better chip, slick performance and a large and fast screen.

Buy it for the performance and charging, not the camera, and the OnePlus 10T is a good top-spec phone at a highly competitive price. But with extremely good mid-range phones such as the Pixel 6a costing £400-ish, is that enough?