OnePlus One – Never Settles – Review

Oneplus has redefined the mobile industry with its flagship killer device, the Oneplus One. Oneplus is a spinoff from the mobile manufacturer Oppo, but they have nothing to do with Oppo. It has its headquarters in Hongkong and it has launched the mobile in 16 countries: Sweden, Denmark, United States, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Finland, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Portugal. If you are searching for India in the list above, then you would have to wait for a few more weeks until they are officially launched and available in India.

The Oneplus One a.k.a OPO, is called the flagship killer, because it has all the specifications of a 2014 flagship mobile, yet priced low. It also performs much better than most of the flagship devices with similar specifications. You would not see a single advertisement in the media for the Oneplus One. Also this mobile is not available with your traditional retailers or service providers. You would have to have an Invite to be eligible to buy the phone and once you have an Invite, you can order it along with a host of accessories. Recently, Oneplus opened up the pre-order system for 1 hour for people without Invites to buy the mobile. To get an invite, Oneplus wanted you to be active in their forums and participate in contests to spread the news about the mobile in your social network. Once you buy the Oneplus One, you will receive invites to share with your friends. That is how they marketed themselves. I see it as a low cost and effective marketing solution and at the same time it would help them control the demand supply equation.

So this December, fans and aspiring buyers from India, would get India specific Invites and the device will be shipped to India. If a mobile is shipped to India, two obvious questions will come up. The cost, no official news yet, but it would be available at less than 25k for the 64 GB version.  The service, no news on this, but Oneplus definitely has some plans up its sleeves.

I have been having the OnePlus One with me for over a month now and let me share my thoughts with you.

Pros:

• Low price for high end specs
• Premium build quality
• Customizable OS
• Performance
• Excellent battery life
• Good camera

Cons:

• Touch display sensitiveness is unpredictable at times
• Camera lacks optical image stabilization
• Non expandable memory
• Non user replaceable battery
• No wireless charger support
• Not water resistant

In the Box

• Oneplus one mobile
• Data / Charging cable
• SIM tray ejector tool
• 2A Wall Charger (Separate box)

Unboxing

Design

The OnePlus one does not look like a cheap phone. It weighs 160 grams and it is 8.9 mm thin. It has got a soft finish on both the white and black variants, at the back. The white(16GB) has silky finish while the black (64GB) has sandstone finish. It has a slightly curved back and completely made from polycarbonate plastic. At the front there is a metal finish rim. The display is 5.5 inch diagonally. It is fairly a large phone, but still comfortable to handle. The 5.5 inch LTPS LCD display is full HD 1080p screen giving it a pixel density of 401 ppi. While the number are not impressive here, the crispness of the graphics is fairly decent. It has good viewing angles but out of the box, the display looks warmer and yellowish. But that can be changed by the controls in the display settings. The Gorilla glass protected display is raised above the frame, making is susceptible to accidental damage. The front also has a 5 mega pixel camera next to the sensors and earpiece. Below the display, you would find the off-screen capacitive buttons which can be deactivated. However I am not a huge fan of on-screen buttons and hence I have it enabled.

On the left, there is a SIM tray which is completely camouflaged with the texture of the phone. Above it, is the volume rocker while the power button is at the right. The 3.5 mm audio jack is at the tip and the bottom has the dual speaker grills with the USB/charging port between them. There are 3 mics in the mobile. One each at the top, bottom and at the back. The Top mic is the noise cancelling mic for the audio recording mic at the back. The back has the 13 MP camera assisted by a dual LED flash. The back cover is interchangeable, but a bit tricky to remove.

Under the hood

The OnePlus One is powered by a Quad-core 2.3 GHz Krait 400 processor sitting on a Qualcomm MSM8974AB Snapdragon 801 chipset and supported by 578 MHz Adreno 330 graphics processor. It has 3 GB of RAM and the internal storage is 16 GB on the white variant and 64 GB on the Black variant. If you refer to the table below, you would see that the specifications match flagship devices like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8. Not only the OPO is priced very less, it also outperforms these flagship devices in terms of performance. The reason is the performance optimization of the CyanogenMod’s firmware. The animations in graphic intensive games and apps are handled very smoothly. Do check out the performance benchmark score below. There is absolutely no lag and the best part is, it does not heat up beyond 40 degree Celsius.

Connectivity

Apart from the regular Bluetooth 4.0, USB OTG, WiFi 802.11b/g/n/ac, GPS/GLONASS and NFC connectivity features, OnePlus has a host of connectivity options. It supports upto 7 bands of LTE as well as penta-band HSPA+ and quad band GSM. In simple words, it supports Airtel 4G in India.

Camera

Being a photography enthusiast, my opening statement would be that, this mobile supports RAW format. It has a 13 Megapixel sony sensor with six lens elements and a f/2.0 aperture. The front camera is a 5 MP sensor. The camera app is custom made by CyanogenMod and it is very minimalist in design. The image quality is good but at times the colors appear washed out. But I don’t mind, because of the support for RAW image. If I desperately need to edit the image, I can import the images to my Lightroom and play with it. The camera app also comes with a build in editing application, which does the basic image processing job. The OnePlus One can record video at 4K resolution, but if you bring down the resolution to 720p, you can record slow motion videos at 120 fps. I had some banding issues with the recorded videos, and I reported the issue in the forum and also raised a bug report. Ultimately the issue was resolved in the latest firmware update. This device is even cheaper than the Nexus 5 which is my primary phone and I find that the camera in the OPO (both front and back) is leaps and bounds ahead of my Nexus 5.

Camera Samples – Flickr Stream

Battery

The OPO is powered by a 3100 mAh Li-Po battery and it cannot be replaced by the user. While it is not a huge battery, it definitely last longer, thanks to the optimization by CyanogenMod. On a normal usage with few hours on 3G and rest of the day on WiFi and a few camera clicks along with some minutes of telephony, the battery lasts for more than a day. But when there is intensive use of screen on-time the battery drains fast and lasts for 10 hours of continuous usage. Now that is great news when you compare it with other smartphones. Even the most expensive Samsung mobiles don’t last this long. I also had some issues with the battery calibration. At times, it would never charge beyond 98% and when the charge comes down to 25%, the battery dies. I had to recaliberate the battery to get back on track.

Software

The international variant of OnePlus One ships with CyanogenMOD 11s based on Android Kitkat. The Chinese variant ships with ColorOS. CyanogenMod is the most popular custom ROM based on Android Open source project. CyanogenMod is know for it performance tweaks and optimizations. There is a whole universe of community that supports CyanogenMOD. The interface in OPO feels like vanila android, but the looks can be modified with a whole bunch of themes / skins that can be downloaded from the play store (most are paid). Apart from the looks, there a lot of performance and user interaction tweaks. It also has some gesture based interactions. O motion on the lock screen can open up the camera instantly. V motion can switch on or off the torch and the arrow motion can navigate to the next or previous sound track, all without unlocking your device. Also you can double tap on the screen to wake. Basically, I love the CyanogenMod on the OPO for not being too heavy on resources and enhancing the UX in a subtle manner.

Other choices
Whatever said and done, the OnePlus is definitely an Unicorn very tough to get your hands on. It remains to be the phone of dreams for many, especially for we Indians. Though India specific invites have been annonced, the dates and support are not clear. If you cannot wait and looking for a similar mobile, I assure you that you wont find any. Ofcourse there are many mobiles in the price range. The Nexus 5 comes close in terms of pricing and performance, but still OPO beats it in all departments. The Moto X first gen is still in the race and then there are the expensive flagship with similar hardware but they are overly priced. When the OPO launches in India, the only phone that will be its true competitor is the MI4. Until then, OnePlus is a never settling beast of a phone with practically no rivals.

Verdict

OnePlus One is practically an underdog that has managed to dent the stage for eternity, in a positive way. It has proved at large that you don’t need to spend insanely to own a piece of premium hardware. Now that the bar has been raised and the standards have been set, we will wait for other manufactures to respond to the OPO challenge. The OnePlus One is a great performer. Its fast processor with its huge RAM and effective software optimization makes it an unparalleled performer. Ofcourse it has its own drawbacks. There are loads of software bugs that needs to be taken care of. But considering the track record so far, the update with fixes are coming at a faster rate. It remains to be the ruler in terms of price to specifications ratio. This is one phone which has been given design consideration right from the box to the user interface of the phone. If you are able to get you hands on the OPO, well and good, but if you want to wait till it is made available in India, I would that it is worth the wait.

Video Review