OnePlus One Review
OnePlus is trying to turn the smartphone industry upside down, but so far it’s just made a solid phone with an exceptional price
A phone with top-notch specs and user experience doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg. Google has proven this with its last few Nexus devices, Motorola has reinvented itself on the principle, and countless lesser-known Chinese manufacturers have been doing it for years. The latest to launch its company (and an insane marketing hype machine) on this principle is OnePlus with the release of its first phone, the OnePlus One.
Following what felt like an eternity (a few months, in reality) of marketing hype over social media and some hand-picked journalists, OnePlus finally dropped all of the details on the OnePlus One. The company's mantra of "Never Settle" set high expectations for a phone that was also set to have an amazing price, and in the end it surprisingly met many of those lofty goals.
The OnePlus One has industry-leading specs across the board, with a huge high-resolution screen, top-of-the-line processor, 3GB of RAM, 16GB or 64GB of storage, solid build quality, customization-friendly CyanogenMod OS and a genuinely shocking $299 unlocked starting price. That all seems too good to be true, so what's the catch? Well, despite the company's philosophy, no phone is perfect — but the One still has a lot going for it.
About this review
We’ve been using the OnePlus One for a little less than a month now. We were supplied with a pre-production OnePlus One that has minor hardware differences from the final models that will eventually ship to consumers.
The software, too, is not final and was updated multiple times throughout the review — including a final update to bring it to nearly production software near the end of our evaluation and have been using that build for a couple weeks. If any software features change dramatically after publishing, we will update this review. We used the One on both AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. though our time with it, though primarily on AT&T.
Unlocked phone sticker shock is a real thing, and it has made many of us willing to compromise for lower internal specs in order to buy a phone we can actually afford. We all want the high-end phones that would normally be palatable at $200 on-contract, but when they're $649 without any agreement, it can just be too much. That's just not the case with the OnePlus One, where you're getting all of the top components on the cheap.
We all want newest high-end phones, but without a contract they can just be too expensive. But that's not the case with the OnePlus One.
A Snapdragon 801 processor at 2.5GHz, 3GB of RAM, 16/64GB of storage, a 13MP Sony camera sensor, 5.5-inch IPS display at 1080 x 1920, 3100 mAh battery, stereo speakers, 802.11ac Wifi, Bluetooth 4.0, seven-band LTE radio and more, all crammed into a single phone for $299 or $349, depending on your storage capacity choice.
That's just out-of-this-world value for a phone at this point in 2014, and regardless of how OnePlus is capable of releasing a phone with these specs at this price point, it's the end user that benefits the most.
OnePlus One
2.99 in
75.9 mm
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0.35 in
8.9 mm
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6.0 in
152.9 mm
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5.71 oz (162 g)
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5.5" HD
1920x1080
401ppi
LTPS IPS
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3100 mAh
Lithium polymer
Talk: 14 hrs
Standby: 288 hrs
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