37
Condor
5y

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

Comments
  • 6
    ++ just because u wrote so much lol
  • 3
    😮
  • 3
    I recently got a new phone and my final decision was a oneplus 6 vs. Samsung note 9. I chose the note because I didn't think I'd be getting a new laptop anytime soon and it did pretty much everything (casual stuff, not programming, web dev etc.) I would do on my laptop. A month later my school gets me an insane deal on laptop and I wish I went with the oneplus for many reasons, mainly though it was $400 US less than the note.
  • 3
    Every update unroots.... I fucking want to murder OP... Bricked my OP6 3 times.

    By the way, what was your last phone? I honestly don't think it's that much more impressive than my OPO other than the camera upgrade... That's really the only reason I bought... And then the 6T came out pretty much right after....
  • 3
    While I like OnePlus for being easily customizable // rootable // flashable etc., it's just a phone. I bought the OP3T, because I knew I will get a high quality product, but since those phones getting more and more expensive, I will probably drop to a cheap alternative for my next phone, or just buy a used phone idk.

    The thing is, hardware doesn't really matter for me phonewise, like there are a lot of decent phones, which will be able to fulfill my needs, for 200€ or less.

    So yeah, no OP for me next time, quite unfortunate they don't offer cheap phones anymore. Hope this phone won't break anytime soon.
  • 3
    I have the op 6, am quite happy with it. I also rooted it and had the same issue as you. After some debugging I found out this has to do with the fact I removed chrome (with debloatder) which apparently is being used as a web view. When I readded chrome (and then disabled it) everything worked again.

    Maybe that was your issue as well?
  • 2
    @billgates my previous phone was the Nexus 6P, so given all its issues, perhaps even a 100 buck cheapie could've been better 🙃 interesting to hear that updates might brick the device, I'll be careful about that. Thanks for the insight!

    @kolaente that may very well be the case actually. I removed it and installed Brave, but I don't think that I've explicitly set it as the default WebView after that. Thanks for mentioning this! I'll give it another go later on.
  • 0
    The whole purpose of magisk is that it doesn't touch system files
  • 0
    @electrineer meh, it does give basicIntegrity and ctsProfile checks despite the system being modified, so.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Don't get me wrong, it's just that I care more about system cleanliness than I do about going entirely systemless. And given that SuperSU isn't open source anymore since it got bought out by that Chinese company, Magisk is pretty much the only option left that I know of (I kinda miss advanced command logging though). And I guess that even if SafetyNet would be tripped by my modified system.. do I really care? It's not like I'm using Netflix, Pokemon Go, Snapchat or any of the others that rely on SafetyNet anyway.
  • 1
    @Condor you have to do things in a certain order and make sure you backup. But as root they make you flash the fill image each time. And after you gotta make sure it doesn't go into a bootloop.
  • 1
    @electrineer yes it does? It's flashed onto the boot image.

    Finally I figured out that Magisk was the cause and sometimes need to run the uninstaller to remove it completely before reinstall. That and there's a certain order to patching the boot image. Magisk needs to be after flashing TWRP/recovery.
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