At first we were a little turned off by its $529 starting price, but the cult smartphone maker's latest device won us over with its elegant software, a combination of Google apps and quiet, thoughtful additions.
A top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and excellent camera performance sweeten the deal.
The OnePlus 6 is definitely the best $500-ish unlocked phone on the market.
The problem is, few people in the US are really shopping for an unlocked phone in the $500 range.
Pricing
The phone comes in three models.
For $529, you get 64GB of storage and 6GB of RAM in midnight black (which has a more matte effect), mirror black (which has a glossy finish), or white.
For $579, it's 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM in all three colors.
For $629, it's 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, in midnight black only.
We reviewed the $579 model in mirror black.
That's definitely good value for the money.
But Americans who pay more than $400 for phones tend to use monthly payment plans, and OnePlus doesn't offer one.
T-Mobile's Samsung Galaxy S9 isn't really $720 for most people: It's $30 per month.
That means many people won't see OnePlus 6, in their day to day, as cheaper than the Galaxy S9 or the LG G7.
Shut Up About the Notch
We have one complaint about the OnePlus 6's otherwise excellent body: It's a little too wide.
In an era of 18:9 and 18.5:9 phones that make six-inch screens comfortable to use with just one hand, OnePlus has gone with a 6.28-inch, 19:9, 2,280-by-1,080 design, making its phone 2.96 inches wide.
That's noticeably wider than the Samsung Galaxy S9 (2.70 inches) and the LG G7 (2.83 inches), and you can feel it in the OnePlus 6 being harder to hold and use with one hand.
The OnePlus 6's most controversial feature is obvious when you turn it on: Its screen has a notch.
That has driven some OnePlus fans absolutely insane on social media—not really around the functionality of the screen, but cultural anger that their phones may be tainted with an idea associated with Apple.
They should get over it.
The notch at the top of the screen isn't a problem, because of OnePlus' smart software choices.
Within a few seconds, we had turned the notch into a dedicated status bar rather than having content flowing into it, and that approach looks great.
The phone has Gorilla Glass 5 on its front and back.
We tested the glossy black model, which definitely picks up more fingerprints than the matte black one.
OnePlus is also doing its usual excellent lineup of cases, including wood, fabric, and carbon fiber options.
Otherwise, the body is all rounded edges, no sharp corners.
It doesn't come to a point on the sides the way the latest Galaxy phones do, and OnePlus is still using a flat rather than a curved screen.
But the package shape, while somewhat generic, is elegant.
From left: OnePlus One, 2, 3, 5, 5T, and 6
The AMOLED screen is terrific.
Yes, it isn't as dense as a quad-HD screen, but that's hard to tell unless you're comparing it side-by-side with a sharper display.
The brightness and color saturation here really jump out at you.
The phone still has the OnePlus mute slider, which has always been great, as well as a regular headphone jack.
The single, bottom-ported speaker is fine, but easy to cover with your hand.
The body is weather-resistant, but not waterproof.
It has a 3,300mAh battery with OnePlus' Dash Charging feature for fast charging.
It lasted for 5 hours, 49 minutes of LTE video playback in our battery rundown test.
That's fine, but falls short of the LG G7 (6+ hours) and the Samsung Galaxy S9 (9+ hours).
There's no microSD card slot in the OnePlus 6, so you get your 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB of internal storage and that's it.
The 128GB model ships with 116GB available.
From left: Mirror black, white, midnight black
Networking and Call Quality
The OnePlus 6 has excellent call quality.
Both the earpiece and speakerphone are louder than we expected, and noise cancellation through the microphone is excellent.
The phone supports HD calling, as well as the new EVS codec for the best possible calls on T-Mobile.
Voice-over-IP and voice-over-WiFi are supported for T-Mobile, but not AT&T.
(AT&T uses its 3G network to make calls.) The bottom-ported speakerphone is highly directional, and maybe a little too easy to cover with your hand, but it's a pretty common placement.
The physical lock switch on the side flips between ring, vibrate, and silent, a nice touch.
Networking options are good but don't quite match up to the leaders.
The OnePlus 6 has dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
Tested against a Samsung Galaxy S9+ on a 150Mbps connection, we found the OnePlus 6 got consistently slightly lower speeds than the S9+ at various distances from the router, but slightly greater range.
The phone has Bluetooth 5.0 with aptX for lossless music playback.
See How We Test Phones
The state-of-the-art Qualcomm X20 modem here isn't being used to its maximum capacity, but it's still great.
It has all of the frequency bands that AT&T and T-Mobile use, except LAA, which boosts speeds in certain very crowded urban locations.
With 256QAM encoding and 4x4 MIMO, it is gigabit LTE capable.
Even though it supports many of their LTE and CDMA bands, the phone does not work on Verizon or Sprint.
We put some Verizon and Sprint SIM cards in the phone, and they wouldn't connect.
The OnePlus 6 is a relatively rare dual-SIM phone in the US.
Only about four percent of US phones can take two SIM cards, and the feature is useful for international travelers and for folks who want to keep business and personal lines on the same device.
We loaded two T-Mobile SIMs into the phone and found that we could make calls on, and send and receive texts from both SIMs easily.
A toggle in settings let us pick the SIM used for LTE data.
Processor and Software
The phone is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and runs Android 8.1 with OnePlus' Oxygen OS overlay, a very well-designed, spare skin that adds some useful features without much visual guff.
The Android P beta is already available for the OnePlus 6.
Pairing a 1080p screen with the 845 processor makes the phone feel very, very fast.
Its PCMark Work score of 8484 is the highest we've seen so far—only the Sony Xperia XZ2, which combines a similar screen resolution and processor, comes close (8306).
Graphics benchmarks tell the same story, with 33fps on the GFXBench Car Chase benchmark, matching the Sony and outpacing everyone else.
You may lose a little screen sharpness here over devices like the Galaxy S9, but you gain performance.
There's only one bloatware app—the OnePlus Community—and a widget screen to the left of the main home screen with a surprisingly useful loyalty-card-storing app on it.
Otherwise, you have a pretty pure Android app experience, with Google's photos, messaging, calendar and email clients as the default, and no manufacturer-offered duplicates.
Oxygen's tweaks are under the hood, like a gaming setting that turns on do-not-disturb mode, a reading mode that turns the screen more yellow, and the notch-as-status-bar mode we mentioned above.
Double tapping the power button opens the camera.
The software doesn't visually throw elbows in your face the way many other Android skins do.
It all feels, well, peaceful.
It's very similar to Motorola's approach, except that Motorola charges $700+ for its flagship phone, while this one costs $529.
The camera pairs a primary Sony 16MP, f/1.7 main shooter with OIS, and a second 20MP secondary lens.
Unfortunately, the second lens is mostly wasted.
It's for bokeh only.
It isn't 2x or wide-angle, and it doesn't appear to help with AR apps.
OnePlus either should have made the secondary camera more functional, or saved its (and your) money.
This complaint aside, the OnePlus 6 takes great, crisp shots in good lighting.
It focuses fast, there's little to no noise, and colors are rich.
That's standard fare for just about any high-end phone these days, so the real measure of its performance comes from its low-light abilities.
In a shootout with the Samsung Galaxy S9+ and the LG G7, the OnePlus 6 delivered solid results, often outshining the G7 and comparing favorably with the S9+ in certain circumstances.
In the first picture below, taken indoors, the OnePlus 6 does a good job of taking a crisp shot despite the inconsistent lighting, capturing details and textures.
It does feel a little oversharpened, though.
The G7 smooths things out a bit too much, and seems a little noisy.
The Galaxy S9+ arguably takes the best low-light indoor shots of the three.
That said, it's close.
Outdoors, low-light shooting could a bit inconsistent for all three phones.
In the first image below, the S9+ takes a clearer and better-lit shot than the others, with the autoexposure doing a better job of handling focus and lighting.
The G7 autoexposure struggles to balance lighting, while the OnePlus 6 falls in the middle.
In the second picture of the tree, however, the S9+ shots looks a little hazy, but does a better job of capturing the leaves that come out muddy on the OnePlus 6 and G7.
Overall, the OnePlus 6 is more than capable of holding its own in the camera department.
As for the secondary sensor, it provides a heavily oversaturated bokeh effect that contrasts with the more realistic appearance of photos taken with the S9+.
OnePlus' Pro mode gives you easy access to virtual aperture and shutter speed.
The phone is capable of recording 4K video at both 30fps and 60fps, though with the latter you can only take five minutes' worth of video at a time.
It's smooth and stable, perhaps a little too smooth.
Panning around when recording at 60fps gives a slight soap opera effect.
The 480fps slow-mo feature, like the 1080p screen, focuses on usability rather than hitting the maximum spec possible.
Yeah, sure, it isn't 960fps like on the Galaxy S9+.
But it can also record more than 0.2-second at a time, which is nice if you don't have a tightly contained burst of action you want to capture.
The 16MP f/2 front camera is good.
Like the rear sensor, it favors brighter, saturated colors.
It captures plenty of detail in daylight, though it shoots a little soft in low light.
Conclusions
The OnePlus 6 stands almost alone in our market as a $529 dual-SIM phone.
Its major competition in that role is the Huawei Honor View 10, which has a microSD card slot, an IR blaster and a 2x zoom camera, but choppier gaming performance and a much heavier, more divisive Android skin.
OnePlus' software, ultimately, will lead to happier users.
The OnePlus 6 gets all the basics right, including excellent call quality, a solid camera, a loud speaker, a bright screen, and the best chipset on the market.
In a not-terribly-exciting year for smartphones, that fits the bill, and OnePlus' software seals the deal.
But a $529/$579 phone is too expensive for the American up-front buyer.
I've felt that way since the OnePlus 5, which breached the $400 barrier.
Above that level, most people pay with credit, and folks with credit on hand will likely lean towards the Google Pixel 2, the LG G7, or the Samsung Galaxy S9, all of which have similar performance and somewhat more hand-friendly bodies.
Compared with the S9 and the G7, the OnePlus 6 has more RAM, but the lack of a microSD slot, the slightly bloated width, and the superfluous dual camera feel a bit off.
The S9 and the G7 are also compatible with all four major US carriers; OnePlus is still AT&T/T-Mobile only.
The equation will be different in countries where most phones are sold up-front, where the small steps down from the S9 to the OnePlus 6 don't justify the $200 price difference; apples to apples, the OnePlus 6 is a better value.
Here in the US, a carrier partnership and monthly payment plan for the OnePlus 6 could help even the score.
You can't deny that this phone is elegant, and OnePlus' Android skin might be the best one out there: It adds features quietly, without slowing down the phone or making things look less Googly.
The OnePlus community is powerful and positive, making it another good reason to stick with the brand.
We just wish that this device fit better into the way Americans shop for phones.
Pros
Solid build.
Fast performance.
Excellent main camera.
Elegant software.
View More
Cons
No monthly payment plans.
Second camera doesn't add much.
Not compatible with all carriers.
The Bottom Line
The OnePlus 6 is a fast and elegant phone that should be the top choice for US dual-SIM users, but its pricing is a little awkward for everyone else.
The OnePlus 6 grows on you.
At first we were a little turned off by its $529 starting price, but the cult smartphone maker's latest device won us over with its elegant software, a combination of Google apps and quiet, thoughtful additions.
A top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and excellent camera performance sweeten the deal.
The OnePlus 6 is definitely the best $500-ish unlocked phone on the market.
The problem is, few people in the US are really shopping for an unlocked phone in the $500 range.
Pricing
The phone comes in three models.
For $529, you get 64GB of storage and 6GB of RAM in midnight black (which has a more matte effect), mirror black (which has a glossy finish), or white.
For $579, it's 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM in all three colors.
For $629, it's 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, in midnight black only.
We reviewed the $579 model in mirror black.
That's definitely good value for the money.
But Americans who pay more than $400 for phones tend to use monthly payment plans, and OnePlus doesn't offer one.
T-Mobile's Samsung Galaxy S9 isn't really $720 for most people: It's $30 per month.
That means many people won't see OnePlus 6, in their day to day, as cheaper than the Galaxy S9 or the LG G7.
Shut Up About the Notch
We have one complaint about the OnePlus 6's otherwise excellent body: It's a little too wide.
In an era of 18:9 and 18.5:9 phones that make six-inch screens comfortable to use with just one hand, OnePlus has gone with a 6.28-inch, 19:9, 2,280-by-1,080 design, making its phone 2.96 inches wide.
That's noticeably wider than the Samsung Galaxy S9 (2.70 inches) and the LG G7 (2.83 inches), and you can feel it in the OnePlus 6 being harder to hold and use with one hand.
The OnePlus 6's most controversial feature is obvious when you turn it on: Its screen has a notch.
That has driven some OnePlus fans absolutely insane on social media—not really around the functionality of the screen, but cultural anger that their phones may be tainted with an idea associated with Apple.
They should get over it.
The notch at the top of the screen isn't a problem, because of OnePlus' smart software choices.
Within a few seconds, we had turned the notch into a dedicated status bar rather than having content flowing into it, and that approach looks great.
The phone has Gorilla Glass 5 on its front and back.
We tested the glossy black model, which definitely picks up more fingerprints than the matte black one.
OnePlus is also doing its usual excellent lineup of cases, including wood, fabric, and carbon fiber options.
Otherwise, the body is all rounded edges, no sharp corners.
It doesn't come to a point on the sides the way the latest Galaxy phones do, and OnePlus is still using a flat rather than a curved screen.
But the package shape, while somewhat generic, is elegant.
From left: OnePlus One, 2, 3, 5, 5T, and 6
The AMOLED screen is terrific.
Yes, it isn't as dense as a quad-HD screen, but that's hard to tell unless you're comparing it side-by-side with a sharper display.
The brightness and color saturation here really jump out at you.
The phone still has the OnePlus mute slider, which has always been great, as well as a regular headphone jack.
The single, bottom-ported speaker is fine, but easy to cover with your hand.
The body is weather-resistant, but not waterproof.
It has a 3,300mAh battery with OnePlus' Dash Charging feature for fast charging.
It lasted for 5 hours, 49 minutes of LTE video playback in our battery rundown test.
That's fine, but falls short of the LG G7 (6+ hours) and the Samsung Galaxy S9 (9+ hours).
There's no microSD card slot in the OnePlus 6, so you get your 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB of internal storage and that's it.
The 128GB model ships with 116GB available.
From left: Mirror black, white, midnight black
Networking and Call Quality
The OnePlus 6 has excellent call quality.
Both the earpiece and speakerphone are louder than we expected, and noise cancellation through the microphone is excellent.
The phone supports HD calling, as well as the new EVS codec for the best possible calls on T-Mobile.
Voice-over-IP and voice-over-WiFi are supported for T-Mobile, but not AT&T.
(AT&T uses its 3G network to make calls.) The bottom-ported speakerphone is highly directional, and maybe a little too easy to cover with your hand, but it's a pretty common placement.
The physical lock switch on the side flips between ring, vibrate, and silent, a nice touch.
Networking options are good but don't quite match up to the leaders.
The OnePlus 6 has dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
Tested against a Samsung Galaxy S9+ on a 150Mbps connection, we found the OnePlus 6 got consistently slightly lower speeds than the S9+ at various distances from the router, but slightly greater range.
The phone has Bluetooth 5.0 with aptX for lossless music playback.
See How We Test Phones
The state-of-the-art Qualcomm X20 modem here isn't being used to its maximum capacity, but it's still great.
It has all of the frequency bands that AT&T and T-Mobile use, except LAA, which boosts speeds in certain very crowded urban locations.
With 256QAM encoding and 4x4 MIMO, it is gigabit LTE capable.
Even though it supports many of their LTE and CDMA bands, the phone does not work on Verizon or Sprint.
We put some Verizon and Sprint SIM cards in the phone, and they wouldn't connect.
The OnePlus 6 is a relatively rare dual-SIM phone in the US.
Only about four percent of US phones can take two SIM cards, and the feature is useful for international travelers and for folks who want to keep business and personal lines on the same device.
We loaded two T-Mobile SIMs into the phone and found that we could make calls on, and send and receive texts from both SIMs easily.
A toggle in settings let us pick the SIM used for LTE data.
Processor and Software
The phone is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and runs Android 8.1 with OnePlus' Oxygen OS overlay, a very well-designed, spare skin that adds some useful features without much visual guff.
The Android P beta is already available for the OnePlus 6.
Pairing a 1080p screen with the 845 processor makes the phone feel very, very fast.
Its PCMark Work score of 8484 is the highest we've seen so far—only the Sony Xperia XZ2, which combines a similar screen resolution and processor, comes close (8306).
Graphics benchmarks tell the same story, with 33fps on the GFXBench Car Chase benchmark, matching the Sony and outpacing everyone else.
You may lose a little screen sharpness here over devices like the Galaxy S9, but you gain performance.
There's only one bloatware app—the OnePlus Community—and a widget screen to the left of the main home screen with a surprisingly useful loyalty-card-storing app on it.
Otherwise, you have a pretty pure Android app experience, with Google's photos, messaging, calendar and email clients as the default, and no manufacturer-offered duplicates.
Oxygen's tweaks are under the hood, like a gaming setting that turns on do-not-disturb mode, a reading mode that turns the screen more yellow, and the notch-as-status-bar mode we mentioned above.
Double tapping the power button opens the camera.
The software doesn't visually throw elbows in your face the way many other Android skins do.
It all feels, well, peaceful.
It's very similar to Motorola's approach, except that Motorola charges $700+ for its flagship phone, while this one costs $529.
The camera pairs a primary Sony 16MP, f/1.7 main shooter with OIS, and a second 20MP secondary lens.
Unfortunately, the second lens is mostly wasted.
It's for bokeh only.
It isn't 2x or wide-angle, and it doesn't appear to help with AR apps.
OnePlus either should have made the secondary camera more functional, or saved its (and your) money.
This complaint aside, the OnePlus 6 takes great, crisp shots in good lighting.
It focuses fast, there's little to no noise, and colors are rich.
That's standard fare for just about any high-end phone these days, so the real measure of its performance comes from its low-light abilities.
In a shootout with the Samsung Galaxy S9+ and the LG G7, the OnePlus 6 delivered solid results, often outshining the G7 and comparing favorably with the S9+ in certain circumstances.
In the first picture below, taken indoors, the OnePlus 6 does a good job of taking a crisp shot despite the inconsistent lighting, capturing details and textures.
It does feel a little oversharpened, though.
The G7 smooths things out a bit too much, and seems a little noisy.
The Galaxy S9+ arguably takes the best low-light indoor shots of the three.
That said, it's close.
Outdoors, low-light shooting could a bit inconsistent for all three phones.
In the first image below, the S9+ takes a clearer and better-lit shot than the others, with the autoexposure doing a better job of handling focus and lighting.
The G7 autoexposure struggles to balance lighting, while the OnePlus 6 falls in the middle.
In the second picture of the tree, however, the S9+ shots looks a little hazy, but does a better job of capturing the leaves that come out muddy on the OnePlus 6 and G7.
Overall, the OnePlus 6 is more than capable of holding its own in the camera department.
As for the secondary sensor, it provides a heavily oversaturated bokeh effect that contrasts with the more realistic appearance of photos taken with the S9+.
OnePlus' Pro mode gives you easy access to virtual aperture and shutter speed.
The phone is capable of recording 4K video at both 30fps and 60fps, though with the latter you can only take five minutes' worth of video at a time.
It's smooth and stable, perhaps a little too smooth.
Panning around when recording at 60fps gives a slight soap opera effect.
The 480fps slow-mo feature, like the 1080p screen, focuses on usability rather than hitting the maximum spec possible.
Yeah, sure, it isn't 960fps like on the Galaxy S9+.
But it can also record more than 0.2-second at a time, which is nice if you don't have a tightly contained burst of action you want to capture.
The 16MP f/2 front camera is good.
Like the rear sensor, it favors brighter, saturated colors.
It captures plenty of detail in daylight, though it shoots a little soft in low light.
Conclusions
The OnePlus 6 stands almost alone in our market as a $529 dual-SIM phone.
Its major competition in that role is the Huawei Honor View 10, which has a microSD card slot, an IR blaster and a 2x zoom camera, but choppier gaming performance and a much heavier, more divisive Android skin.
OnePlus' software, ultimately, will lead to happier users.
The OnePlus 6 gets all the basics right, including excellent call quality, a solid camera, a loud speaker, a bright screen, and the best chipset on the market.
In a not-terribly-exciting year for smartphones, that fits the bill, and OnePlus' software seals the deal.
But a $529/$579 phone is too expensive for the American up-front buyer.
I've felt that way since the OnePlus 5, which breached the $400 barrier.
Above that level, most people pay with credit, and folks with credit on hand will likely lean towards the Google Pixel 2, the LG G7, or the Samsung Galaxy S9, all of which have similar performance and somewhat more hand-friendly bodies.
Compared with the S9 and the G7, the OnePlus 6 has more RAM, but the lack of a microSD slot, the slightly bloated width, and the superfluous dual camera feel a bit off.
The S9 and the G7 are also compatible with all four major US carriers; OnePlus is still AT&T/T-Mobile only.
The equation will be different in countries where most phones are sold up-front, where the small steps down from the S9 to the OnePlus 6 don't justify the $200 price difference; apples to apples, the OnePlus 6 is a better value.
Here in the US, a carrier partnership and monthly payment plan for the OnePlus 6 could help even the score.
You can't deny that this phone is elegant, and OnePlus' Android skin might be the best one out there: It adds features quietly, without slowing down the phone or making things look less Googly.
The OnePlus community is powerful and positive, making it another good reason to stick with the brand.
We just wish that this device fit better into the way Americans shop for phones.
Pros
Solid build.
Fast performance.
Excellent main camera.
Elegant software.
View More
Cons
No monthly payment plans.
Second camera doesn't add much.
Not compatible with all carriers.
The Bottom Line
The OnePlus 6 is a fast and elegant phone that should be the top choice for US dual-SIM users, but its pricing is a little awkward for everyone else.
