 This is the OnePlus 6. It's the latest in a line of Android phones that have steadily gotten better year over year. Now before we get into this, we see you guys have been commenting, we know you've been asking for it for a long time, so we're shooting this in 4k. So if you want the best video quality, maybe bump your resolution up to 4k. Cool? Okay, so if you're familiar with OnePlus, then most of what comes with the OnePlus 6 is probably a known quantity. But if you're not, here's what that quantity is. A OnePlus phone has high-end specs, a big screen, a clean Android software experience, and it comes with a price that's considerably less than other high-end Android phones with similar specs and features. Now nothing about that changes with the OnePlus 6, but it also means on the other side of the coin that nothing changes about the other things that are known quantities with a OnePlus either. It still isn't going to work with Verizon or Sprint, it still doesn't have the best camera you can get, and it's still not completely water resistant. Overall, the OnePlus 6 is a lot like the last few OnePlus phones. It offers a great experience for a price that's hundreds of dollars less than a similar size Samsung or Pixel. Here's the headline info you're looking for. For a starting price of $529, you get a 6.3 inch edge-to-edge screen, a Snapdragon 845 processor, a glass and metal design, extremely fast fast charging, 6 gigabytes of RAM, and 64 gigs of storage, Android 8.1 with some thoughtful, not annoying additions, and a dual camera system that's capable of all the latest portrait effects and slow motion video trends. You can also spend more to upgrade the RAM and storage, but you'll still be spending substantially less than you would on say a Pixel 2 XL. Now the most noticeable change from older OnePlus phones is a switch to a design with glass on the front and the back, which makes the OnePlus 6 look like basically every other phone to come out this year. Now I think it looks great until I touch it and then it becomes a fingerprint magnet, especially on the glossy version. There's a matte finish model that looks much nicer looking and helps hide those fingerprints, but at the same time it's much more slippery to hold than the already pretty slippery glossy phone, which might lead to a shattered glass phone sooner rather than later. Then the other big change is the screen is even larger than the 6 inch display on OnePlus's last phone. Now that's mostly because the screen now reaches the very top of the phone's frame, except for a cutout in the middle that houses the earpiece, front camera, proximity sensor, and notification light. So yeah, it has a notch, but frankly I don't really care and I don't have a problem with it. The notch means that I have more vertical space to read something on my phone, whether that's email or messages or tweets or use split screen multitasking or whatever else I want to do with the phone. And OnePlus is able to make this bigger screen fit in here without making the phone any bigger than it was last year, which means that I get more screen in the same size phone. That's a trade-off I'm willing to make any day of the week. Now there are a couple of things to be aware of with the OnePlus 6's notch. I've yet to encounter an app that didn't work as I expected because of it being there, but it does mean that the battery percentage is hidden until you swipe down to see your notifications. It also means that if you have a lot of icons for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, do not disturb, NFC, or whatever, it can get pretty crowded pretty quickly up there. But OnePlus does let you toggle a lot of these off if you don't want them to display. And if you really hate that full-bleed look, you can opt to black out the background of the notch so all of your apps just fill out just below it. Honestly, I think this mode looks worse and I've never really felt the need to obscure the notch's existence. Now other than its larger size, this year's panel isn't much different than before. It's 1080p pixels wide, it's OLED, it's got deep colors and vibrant blacks, it doesn't get as bright and it doesn't have as many pixels as a Samsung screen, but it's still easy to read outdoors and I haven't seen any major color shifting problems or issues. Now handling the OnePlus 6 is a lot like holding other similar sized, mostly glass phones. And most of the time it feels like it's too big, especially if I'm trying to do something with one hand. Now most other premium phones give you a choice of sizes, whether that's the S9 or the iPhone 8 or the Pixel 2. You can choose between a small or a large version, which lets you decide between having a big screen or having a phone that fits more comfortably in your hand. But with the OnePlus 6, it's only available in one size, and that size is big. Now performance-wise, the OnePlus 6 is really fast, which isn't a huge surprise considering it's got a top-of-the-line processor and lots of RAM. But OnePlus has done a number of things under the hood to make it feel even faster than other phones, whether that's optimizing background processes or just kind of speeding up animation so everything happens a millisecond or two faster. The result is that the phone feels like it's really fast and it just powers through everything without really feeling like it's ever running out of steam. For stamina, the big 3300 milliamp hour battery in the OnePlus 6 means it's able to keep going for a full day of use for me without much of an issue. Now it doesn't have wireless charging, even though it has that glass back now, but OnePlus's dash charger is basically the fastest wired charging option you can get, so topping up the battery is never really a chore or a hassle. So let's talk about this camera, because traditionally that's where OnePlus phones can't quite match up to the bigger players. Now on paper, the OnePlus 6 has an upgraded camera. It's got bigger pixels and it has optical image stabilization. There's a 16 megapixel main sensor that handles most of the heavy lifting and then there's a 20 megapixel secondary sensor that adds more detail and enables portrait style effects. Now if you compare the OnePlus 6 versus the OnePlus 5 or 5T from last year, it's definitely an improvement. There's more detail and less noise and images are brighter, especially in low light. The portrait mode is just as gimmicky as before and even though it's nice to have slow motion in the video recording now, I don't really see myself ever using it. But if you stack the OnePlus 6 camera against a newer phone like the Samsung S9 or the Pixel 2 XL or even the Huawei P20 Pro, unfortunately it doesn't hold up. None of this is to say that the camera is bad, it's actually pretty good, especially for the price you pay. But it's definitely the thing where you see the biggest difference between the OnePlus 6 and more expensive phones. Now for software, the OnePlus 6 is running Oxygen OS, which is OnePlus's take on Android and it's running 8.1 Oreo in this case. Mostly it looks really similar to what you find on a Google Pixel phone. It's clean and it's easy to use without a bunch of gimmicky things getting in the way. But there's a couple of neat things that I want to point out. First is a gesture control system that you can use in place of the standard Android on-screen buttons. I really like this idea because it lets my content make full use of the display and stretch all the way to the bottom. But unfortunately the gestures are not as smooth or as fluid as on an iPhone X and they could use a good amount of work. I really hope OnePlus keeps working on this. The second is a reading mode which shifts the display to a monochrome appearance and it mimics an e-reader or Kindle. It makes reading long articles or ebooks much nicer and you can even have it turn on and off automatically depending on what app you're using. There are some other hardware features worth mentioning too. The OnePlus 6 has something that you won't find on any other Android phone. It has a physical switch to move between ring, vibrate, and fully silent modes. It's something I wish more phone makers would adopt. And there's two easy ways to unlock the OnePlus 6. You can use your finger or your face. The face unlock is not as secure but it's super convenient and fast. And for some reason OnePlus removed the swipe gestures on the fingerprint scanner that reveal the notification shade which seems like a minor thing but honestly it's annoyed me the entire time I've used the phone. OnePlus 6 also still has a headphone jack which is great if you don't want to deal with wireless headphones or Bluetooth in your car. And for speakers it has a loud and clear single speaker at the bottom but it doesn't have the even better dual speaker setups that many other phones offer at this point. And while OnePlus claims that the 6 is splash resistant it doesn't have any proper water resistant ratings so it can't be fully submerged or truly get wet. It's okay if you're out in the rain but don't go dropping it in a pool. So that's the OnePlus 6. It's everything we've come to expect from a OnePlus phone and it doesn't really change the conversation. Now it's still a great value and it still has most all the features you'd want on a high-end 2018 Android phone. And it doesn't have any annoying things like AI everywhere or dedicated buttons for a virtual assistant you don't want to use or weird squeezing interfaces that just are kind of gimmicky and get in the way. But at the same time if you're on Verizon or Sprint or you want maybe you want the best camera you can get or maybe you want a phone that you don't have to worry about if you drop it in the sink or maybe you just want something that isn't enormous then the OnePlus 6 probably isn't for you. But for everyone else the OnePlus 6 is pretty great. Hey thanks for watching and special shout out to Ernesto Alonso who made this really cool wallpaper you saw in this video. You can download it at the link below and be sure to check out our new Verge Art Instagram page. It's got all of our cool custom wallpapers there.