"Never settle." That's the motto of the OnePlus One phone. Never settle, whether it's your life goals or an inferior smartphone. Sounds inspiring, right?
The team behind OnePlus One are knocking it out of the park on creating buzz. The phone was initially launched on an invite-only basis; you needed an invite to spend your hard-earned cash on the handset. That’s been relaxed slightly, and now Tuesdays are a free-for-all. For 24 hours, you can grab one of the handsets without an invite, if you are willing to run the gauntlet with the other Android phone fans trying to get their hands on one. The question is, is it worth the effort?
The good
Under the hood, it’s a decent spec. A 2.5GHz
Qualcomm
Snapdragon 801 processor with 3GB of RAM. The battery is a 3100mAh unit, which gives about a day of use comfortably. The 5.5in touchscreen is full HD, while the camera clocks in at 13 megapixels for the rear-facing camera and 5 megapixels for the front-facing one. If you want 4K video recording, the One Plus One does it; likewise with slow motion. It comes in 16GB or 64GB versions.
If the cold, hard spec isn’t enough to tempt you, perhaps battery life might. In short, it’s great, Not only does the OnePlus One have a sizable power bank to pull from but it also adds extra technology, such as a display that adjusts the backlight level and also differentiates between dynamic and static content on the screen. What it means is that you won’t have to charge it every night, unless you’re a particularly heavy user, and by that we mean your finger is permanently welded to the screen. And if that’s the case, the battery life on your phone is the least of your worries.
The phone goes a step further than some of its rivals when it comes to voice recognition and quality. Rather than adopt dual microphones to deliver better voice quality, it uses stereo recording and tri-microphone noise cancelling. OnePlus claims that this third mic increases voice clarity by 80 per cent; while we couldn’t put an exact percentage on it, it certainly seemed to respond better than other handsets.
It’s the little details that make the OnePlus One a great investment. Whether it’s the USB cable that comes with its own cable tidy and the ability to make tangling it extremely difficult or the included SIM tool that can be attached to your keyring, the phone simply works. Gestures on the screen can open up specific apps - a circle will open the camera, a double tap will bring the screen to life.
The not so good
It’s not all great. While the OnePlus One looks great, there’s bit of a thick bezel on it, which makes the phone a little bigger than we’d like. That’s partly because you can disable the on-screen navigation buttons and have the hardware buttons located on that bezel pop up instead, but it just seems a little thicker than it should be.
The camera, while producing some amazing shots in good lighting conditions and with subjects that stayed perfectly still, fell down a little when things strayed from the ideal. A fast moving subject, for example, showed more blur than we’d expected.
It’s eclipsed by the more expensive camera phones, but in saying that, at its price point, it still punches above its weight.
The rest
The rear of the phone is textured, which makes it easy to grip. It’s a refreshing change from the now ubiquitous Gorilla Glass that, while it looks good, turns your phone into something with all the inertia of a block of ice. You won’t be rushing to catch the One Plus One from a sudden kamikaze dive towards the floor just because you left it on a table under the mistaken assumption that it was perfectly level.
The battery is built in, and there’s no expandable storage: you get what you pay for and no more. That’s either 16GB or 64GB, and nothing in between. It’s an odd choice, but the 64GB option is welcome.
The verdict
HHHH As far as mid-range smartphones go, OnePlus One is easily one of the best we’ve tested. Worth taking a chance.
