OnePlus One: A cheaper, better, faster phone that you cannot readily purchase

Overview

It's no secret that Android based phones far outnumber any other mobile OS device today. Given those stats, you would think most would feel and function similarly, but in truth, it's far from that.

The Android OS is widely adopted by many manufacturers, with each of them implementing their own UI overlay to differentiate themselves from competitors. However, such an action has resulted in varying user experience across different brands, with each brand pre-loading their own set of apps and enhanced features that sometimes benefit end-users (and sometimes not at all). With the exception of Google Nexus line of devices, it is nearly impossible to find a flagship phone that is isn't tied down with the aforementioned "software bloat". 

Oppo once attempted to change all that with Oppo N1 Cyanogenmod Edition, which offers users an experience faithful to that of stock Android. The Oppo N1, however, did not catch on. This year, OnePlus, a company that was founded late in 2013, attempted a similar feat by unveiling the OnePlus One. "Never Settle" being its motto, it promises to deliver a stock Android experience on a high-end device (it's a 5.5-inch phablet powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor) , while empowering users to tweak and maximize the utility and power of the mobile phone - all for an incredibly low price of US$349.

At the time of writing this review, the only way to get your hands on this phone is to get an invite to purchase it, either from OnePlus or from a peer. Also, it does not ship directly to Singapore. Yet, interest for this phone has been very strong locally. Fortunately, the author has managed to get his hands on one for review. Does it really "Never Settle"? Is it really worth its hype and exclusivity? We find out.

Design & Build

When the OnePlus One was first unboxed, it was briefly mistaken for an Oppo Find 7A. Indeed, the OnePlus One bore an uncanny resemblance to the Oppo Find 7A, with similar edges, curves, screen size, and capacitive buttons. This is not surprising, given that OnePlus and Oppo share the same investors, hence if we might speculate, it could be a case where phone designs were shared between the two companies as well.

Turn the phone on its back, and that is where OnePlus differentiates itself from the Oppo Find 7A. The backplate of the phone is black, but with a fine-sandpaper-like texture to it. Holding the phone yields a different feel that is quite unlike anything else from the competition - in a good way. For one, it definitely feels more premium than the faux rubber back of the Oppo Find 7A. While it does not have the metal build of the iPhone 6 / 6 Plus or HTC One M8, neither does it have the faux 'leather premium' feel of recent top-tier Samsung devices. Yet, the OnePlus One still feels premium in a different way because of the rough rear texture, as though one is holding on to a graphite stone. In fact, the phone is aptly named "OnePlus One Sandstone Black 64GB".

Besides providing a nice grip and feel with its graphite-like backing, the OnePlus One also feels light for a phablet. At 162g, it's lighter than the iPhone 6 Plus (172g), or the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 (176g). Even though it feels light, it does not exhibit the 'flimsiness' that one may feel when handling the large iPhone 6 Plus because the latter is also rather thin (just 7.1mm). That's not to say the OnePlus One is thick, but at 8.9mm, it's slim enough to provide comfortable handling of the device without concerns of it snapping under daily wear and tear. To ensure Bendgate issues aren't a concern with the OnePlus One, this reviewer ensured the phone was carried in the front pocket of a tight pair of jeans, squeezed together with a thick wallet over the course of reviewing the phone. Even after a week of such usage, the phone did not bend.

Similar to iPhones and the Nexus 5, the OnePlus One has a non-removable battery of 3100mAh capacity. There's also no microSD card slot to expand upon its internal storage. Fortunately, the phone has 64GB of internal storage space to make up for that shortcoming (and that's double the 32GB capacity of what the Nexus 5 can offer).  For cellular connectivity, the phone uses a micro-SIM card, but take note that you'll need to use a clip, or the provided eject pin, to eject the micro-SIM card tray.

The OnePlus One sports a 5.5-inch LTPS LCD Display, with a Full HD (1920 x 1200 pixels) resolution. This yields a pixel density of 401 PPI (pixels per inch), definitely above " Retina-class", which is fast becoming the standard for most flagship phones these days. Color reproduction is above average, though it cannot match the standards set by the iPhone 6 Plus, and definitely loses out to the Super AMOLED display of the Note 4 (or any other Super AMOLED based screen for that matter).

For those also concerned about the auditory experience, the OnePlus One’s speakers are placed at the bottom edge of the phone. Sound output is audible, though not as loud as the other flagship phones; for example, the sound output was barely audible in a busy food court from our trials. Nevertheless, it has a better design consideration than the Oppo Find 7A, where the speakers are at the back of the phone, resulting in muffled output when placed on a surface.

Software - Cyanogenmod 11S

Introduction

Cyanogenmod is essentially, the team that augments the Android OS. Founded since the inception of Android OS, it has been supplying modded versions of the Android OS with the goal of empowering power users more options and control, while still staying close to stock Android user experience. For the past five years, they have been churning out Cyanogenmod OS images for various mainstream Android phones, giving tinkerers a chance to override their phone’s default OS with that of Cyanogenmod. Nevertheless, as such images are created without the official blessings from Google, one will need to go through a number of extra steps to integrate Google services after installing Cyanogenmod.

For OnePlus One, Cyanogenmod has collaborated with OnePlus to create Cyanogenmod 11S, a Google-tested version of the Cyanogenmod 11, such that the phone comes with relevant Google services out of the box. Unlike the Oppo N1, Cyanogenmod does not compromise on OS maintenance for the OnePlus One; updates for the OS are very frequent, sometimes even twice a week (as experienced by the author), compared to other mainstream flagship devices.

Clean User Experience

Once you start using the OnePlus One for the first time, there's one aspect that's very prominent from the get-go: the whole interface looks and feels very clean and it is completely free of bloatware! Without any manufacturer UI overlay interfering the stock Android user experience, the whole interface also runs buttery smooth. There is no noticeable lag, and transitions between apps or pages are very smooth. It is the equivalent of using a Nexus 5 device.

Highly tweak-able system settings

The Nexus 5 features a soft on-screen navigation bar (the back, home, and tasks key), while the OnePlus One uses the capacitive keys situated at the bottom of the screen. Moreover, the keys are: menu, home, and back - a button series that is mostly obsolete in most recent Android phones. However, Cyanogenmod allows you to enable soft action buttons, should you need them. Switching to soft keys disables the capacitive buttons, thus allowing you to use the phone like a Nexus 5. Further to that, if you miss the menu button on the soft navigation bar or any others, you could simply add the relevant action key to the navigation bar.

Without rooting your device, you could also tweak how the processor performs, right down to setting its maximum and minimum frequency. An "uber user" can even set the governor, as well as the algorithm used to handle multiple tasks. To enable that, one must enable developer options by tapping the Build item in the System Info - five times. That will then allow you to tweak the CPU via Performance settings.

In addition to that, power users can also set highly advanced options for various actions. One such option would be to boot the phone to recovery upon powering on the phone. Another would be to enable QuickBoot, similar to that of HTC's Fast Boot. How about the power to kill any rogue apps by enabling "Kill App Back Button" option which you could then kill an app by just long-pressing the back button.

Knock-to-wake

Similar to that of LG G3, the OnePlus One can be configured to wake its screen when you knock/tap the screen twice. It can also be configured to power down the screen upon knocking on the status bar twice. However, unlike the LG G3, it does not support knock code, though there are unofficial reports stating that this is mostly a software limitation.

Off-screen gestures

Another interesting feature is its screen-off gestures. When the phone is on standby, you can draw a predefined gesture on the screen to enable certain features. Currently, only three features are available: turning on and off torchlight, activating camera, and music control. These is similar to that offered on the Oppo Find 7 series of phones, however the gestures options are limited on the OnePlus One.

Screencasting

Ever since Android 4.4, users can record what takes place on-screen. However it's complicated, requiring the phone to connect to a desktop and running some commands. The OnePlus One device comes with a screen recording function out of the box, such that users can record actions/activities without having to connect to a desktop. You could record just about anything, even a gameplay, as we show off in the following page where we discuss about the phone's performance.

Privacy Guard

Once in a while, you're likely to face apps, such as Facebook Messenger, that request way too much access to your personal information. Cyanogenmod 11S comes with Privacy Guard, whereby users can select which apps they want to protect their data against. Of course, this can only be set after the app gets installed to your device.

Themes

Cyanogenmod comes with a built-in Theme Manager for those interested to customize the appearance of the phone's user interface. In addition to browsing from the Theme Store, one can also fully customize on their own, by choosing their own theme packs and sound notifications.

Connectivity

The OnePlus One supports Cat4 LTE. Despite the device coming from the USA, OnePlus One supports Singapore's LTE bands.

Performance

To reiterate, the OnePlus One is powered by a quad-core 2.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, with 3GB of built-in memory. This places the phone squarely within the high-end category, despite its affordable price tag. Naturally, the question would be if it can match up to its pricey competitors, so we run our tests to help answer this.

Note: the benchmarks were executed with the processor left at its default performance setting, i.e. Balanced.

Sunspider

SunSpider JavaScript measures the browsing performance of a device. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience.

For the OnePlus One, the Sunspisder performance is notoriously bad compared against its competitors. One possible reason is that for the OnePlus One, the Sunspider benchmark was executed via Chrome, which usually yields poorer Sunspider scores compared to a native Android browser. 

3DMark 2013

3D Mark (2013) is a synthetic benchmark consisting of two graphics tests packed with high quality textures and post-processing effects designed to stress the GPU performance of the device and a physics test to stress its CPU performance. With all of our devices easily maxing out the Normal and Extreme versions of this test, we'll just be looking at Ice Storm Unlimited, which is used to make chip-to-chip comparisons of different chipsets, CPUs and GPUs, without vertical sync, display resolution scaling and other operating system factors affecting the result.

Despite its low price, the 3DMark score of the OnePlus One is easily one of the higher ranking results. Given that the phone specifications of the OnePlus One is close to Samsung's Galaxy S5, it's able to outperform it. The scores are in fact fairly close to that of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, which is powered by the newer Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor.

Quadrant Standard

Quadrant evaluates a device's CPU, memory, I/O and 3D graphics performances.

With a score of 23273, the OnePlus One outperforms LG G3 and the Oppo Find 7A, and matches the Galaxy S5.

Real-life world usage

Benchmarks aside, as noted on the earlier page, the actual use of the phone is smooth and is better than most other competing devices where responsiveness is concerned. In fact, the device has enough processing power to handle screen recording (also known as screencasting) while playing a graphics-intensive game at the same time, without significantly affecting the game performance. Here's an actual gameplay video we recorded using Asphalt 8 and screen recording at the same time to prove it has the required processing power. Take note that we post-processed the captured video to compress it for web considerations and added a sound track to an otherwise silent screen recording (and no, it doesn't record real-time audio generated by the game):- 

Play

Camera Performance
 

Still Imaging

The OnePlus One comes with a 13-megapixel Sony-Exmor f/2.0 back-facing camera. For daytime photos, quality is excellent. Even when the photo is digitally zoomed, the photo does not suffer from massive quality degradation, as can be seen in the photos below.

Even in low light conditions, the camera is still able to take good quality photos, with an appropriate shutter speed.

There are many shooting modes available for users to tinker with, ranging from Slow Shutter, to Steady Shot. One can switch mode by just swiping the screen up and down.

A recent update to the OnePlus One enabled the capability to save images in DNG RAW format. For the uninitiated, a RAW image is like a digital negative, which allows for advanced post-processing flexibility. As such, a professional user is able to perform advanced adjustments on the images, either through image editing application on a PC, or by using RAW editor apps, such as Photoshop Touch. Below is an example of this before and after post-processing a RAW image:-

The 4.8-megapixel front camera has average performance since it's unable to cope with low-light conditions. As such, the OnePlus One is not suitable for taking selfies in low light conditions, but that's a tall order since many phones don't have good front-facing cameras to begin with or lack a suitable flash unit.

Video Recording

The OnePlus One is able to record videos at both 4K UHD (3840x2160) and DCI (4096x2160) resolutions. Video recording at 4K UHD is relatively smooth, but it is not the case for 4K DCI mode that demands more of the device. Performance of the video recording is good overall under daylight.

Other notable features include recording slow motion videos of 720p HD resolution at 120fps and time lapse videos out of the box (with recording intervals of up to 12 hours).

Battery Performance

Our standard battery test for mobile phones includes the following parameters:

• Looping a 800 x 480-pixel video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

With these test parameters, the OnePlus One’s battery life lasted over 8 hours, and is comparable to that of most flagship phones. It even trumps LG G3 easily, though one should note that the OnePlus One has far fewer pixels to light than the G3's QHD resolution screen. Indeed, when compared to the phones of similar specs, the battery life is within the expected range of 480 to 520 minutes. Its resulting Portability ratio isn't class leading, but it's decent for its class.

Conclusion

The OnePlus One is one of the rare phones that can be best described as “Cheaper, Better, Faster”; it offers a fast processing subsystem, a better stock Android experience, all for a relatively cheap price of US$349 without contract. The OnePlus One has also proven to be a tinkerer’s dream phone. Other flagship phones, despite having newer or faster processors, certainly do not provide a clean, stock Android experience that many minimalists and enthusiasts prefer. In some ways, you could say that the OnePlus One has one-upped the Nexus 5  by providing full customization options to power users, in addition to providing a stock Android experience. These reasons alone have made many local enthusiasts very interested in this device, with many requesting for invites to purchase the phone.

Nevertheless, there are certain things which one expects from a flagship phone, but are not present on the OnePlus One. A lack of MHL or Slimport to HDMI output is one of them. A standard fare amongst other flagship phones, it is a letdown that OnePlus One supports neither. Though you could work around this somewhat with a Chromecast device, as of now, it is still not possible to cast the entire phone to Chromecast.

Availability is another limitation. In addition of the phone not officially sold in Singapore, one cannot readily purchase the phone online. To get a OnePlus One, you will need to obtain an invite to purchase the phone. After which, you will need to ship the phone to a forwarder address in the USA, before you ship the phone to Singapore. Total costs, including freight and shipping, as well as the GST levied on items costing more than S$400, comes up to about S$550. That's still an affordable sum compared to most flagship-class phones, but don't forget that you can get an Oppo Find 7A for S$599, which is just a little more and offers its own set of features, including warranty. Further to that, don't forget that you can also get the OnePlus One from online retailers like Lazada and it costs just about as much if you were to buy it directly from OnePlus.

So is it still worth the effort and exclusivity? it's debatable and probably only if you don't mind the lack of warranty and that you really want a true power-user device without too much rooting hassles. But if you are a hardcore user, you would probably have rooted your phone and slapped on one of Cyanogenmod images for your device. OnePlus One probably makes a great case where the phone's own pricing (without the costs associated to shipping) gives it a really strong value for what you get out of the device. Probably the phone would make a good option if you lived in USA, but back home in Singapore, the value proposition isn't too strong unless you want a device that's a little niche, unique and different.

If you're still sold by the OnePlue One proposition, here's more information from our forum's discussion thread on how to obtain invites to purchase the phone.

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