Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OnePlus 2 Review!”.
Hey, what is up guys? Um could be HD here, and this is the oneplus 2 company named oneplus phone name, the 2 1. 2. 1 2. So i’ve been using this device for the better part of a month about three weeks or so as my daily driver. So all the time – and I know a lot of people – get worked up over the flagship killer slogan that they use. What I’m just going to do is ignore all the hype and just look at the device itself, so the easiest place to start is the hardware and a lot of interesting decisions went into the hardware department for the oneplus 2, but they all came together to equal. A really nice phone that feels good in the hand and that’s what’s important, so it has a nice little weight to it.
It’S a little on the bigger side of the scale as far as smartphones go, but it’s nothing too extreme, since it’s definitely not the biggest smartphone. With a 5.5 inch display, the metal band around the phone is really premium. It’S a huge improvement over the oneplus one, and it’s this metal band alone that makes the phone feel like it’s more expensive and I like, if they didn’t, try to go super thin, like some manufacturers trying to one-up themselves, I guess but nothing wrong with being a Little thick dear, every smartphone manufacturer, ever if you’re, using a large camera module, which you probably are feel free to fill out the rest of the phone’s body with battery like this, it will not make the phone too heavy or too thick, and everyone will appreciate the Extra battery, thank you anyway. The shape with the oneplus 2 is just fine. It’S rectangular and sort of boxy in a way, but it fits in the hand nicely, and this phone is really easy to hold the sandstone black back, helps that too now every one plus two comes by default with this sandstone black back and the texture is pretty Unique it’s a little bit rougher than last year’s phone, I’m guessing for durability, but it still feels great and then the back is removable. So you can buy another back with a different material and drop that on for a different look and feel also with the removable back. You get access to the dual SIM card slot trays. No, I access to the battery or any expandable storage, but you do just get the SIM card slots now. This one also features a pretty unique switch on the left hand side, it’s the alert slider, so you can switch between sound profiles on the phone without having to turn the screen on. So all the way down is all notifications. Half way up is priority. Notifications and all the way up is do not disturb mode pretty nifty switch, although I feel like this is upside down. If I wanted to flip all the way to silent, I feel like I would switch all the way down. I don’t know I wish I could reverse the order in the settings now.
Of course, this slider on the left means you have both your power and volume buttons on the right hand, side of the phone. This was a little bit annoying at first, neither one of them has ridges or anything. So you kind of just have to remember where the power button is, and you get used to it eventually. They’Re, pretty clicky tactile buttons, but it took about a week of using the phone to get it to feel natural and stop making mistakes. I pretty much hit the power button on the first try every time now, although there’s also totally the option of the double tap on the screen to wake from sleep. If you want to use that now at the top of the phone is the headphone jack I kind of wish it was at the bottom, but oh well and then at the bottom of the phone you have the speakers and the USB type-c port. Now the speakers aren’t anything special, it’s not even a stereo speaker. All the audio comes from the right Grill, which is not very loud, and it’s kind of easy to cover with your finger.
It has these built-in audio profiles, which are nice. If you really want to tweak the EQs, but honestly, the quality of the driver has to be decent first I’ll end up cupping your hand around that to hear it anyway. This is one of those spots where they’re cutting corners and then there’s a USB type-c port. Alright, so this is a new port for smartphones and it was given in this phone with the reasoning.
This is the future and it totally is. But that means that here in the present it’s actually a little bit inconvenient unless you have a 2015 MacBook or Chromebook pixel, you don’t really have a bunch of USB type-c charges lying around and the one that comes on the box. The cable is a little bit short and you have to buy another one for your car and – and I don’t know, is it really worth it? Here’S USB type-c in this phone broken down here are your pros, and here are your cons is a worth. It depends on how into the future.
You are, I kind of miss fast charging, but the battery life here is good enough that I’m not charging in the middle of the day, so I’m down with it. The oneplus 2 also has a biometric fingerprint sensor in that home button and, as I mentioned in the original impressions, video that I did when the phone first came out, this home button does all the same stuff. A regular home button does except actually press down and move, it’s not tactile.
So it’s basically like a trackpad, a glass surface that you can tap double tap or hold down to read your fingerprint and the fingerprint reading is pretty good. Now this phone has gotten. I think for software updates, since I first started using it and from the very beginning the fingerprint sensor was quick and it’s only gotten quicker.
I’M really happy with it. It unlocks my phone with pretty great accuracy. You can store up to 5 fingers if you want and it’s an easy way to secure my phone.
I find it to be just as accurate as touch ID all right, so fun fact. When oneplus first sent me this phone early before the launch day for that impressions, video you guys saw, they didn’t tell me anything about the phone, they didn’t tell me any of the specs. They didn’t tell me any numbers, so I actually wanted to play a little game with myself.
I just looked at the display and I wanted to see if I could figure out if it’s a 1080p display or a quad HD display, just by looking at it, and I looked at it, I set my wallpaper. I got my icons and everything – and I guessed based on you know, looks pretty good. I’M gon na say that’s a top notch yeah, that’s that’s a quad HD display. Of course I took a screenshot and I looked at it later and it’s 1080p. So I got the idea and I you know I held it up to a Galaxy s6 and then, of course you can tell oh that looks way better with the AMOLED display and quad HD on the galaxy s6. But the point is this: is a great 1080p display one of the best in the business and that’s pretty good for 2015, so there you have it just on the outside.
This phone is kind of stacked in the hardware department. It’S at 5.5 inch 1080p display its excellent has great viewing angles: excellent brightness contrast and colors thin bezels to keep the footprint pretty manageable metal rails. The swappable sandstone back dual SIM card slots, a 13 megapixel camera with autofocus laser autofocus, which I’ll talk about in a second at 3300 milliamp hour battery a fingerprint reader and alert slider, a USB type-c port. That’S a lot of great stuff, but, like I mentioned in that perfect smartphone video, the last video we tend to now measure smartphones by what’s wrong with them, instead of what’s right, so the worst parts about this hardware would be the weak speaker and the lack of Wireless charging and NFC now on the weak speaker, not a whole lot. You can do you can just set the EQ still. It sounds good enough to your ear and it just won’t be very loud and the wireless charging also not a huge deal for me.
If you can pick up a few USB type-c cables, you’ll pretty much be good to charge wherever you want. No NFC, though, there’s really no workaround for that and there’s two types of people on that issue: number one: people who use NFC all the time: people who use mobile payments, Google Wallet for that type of person. This is a deal breaker.
This is not the phone for you if you’re the other type of person like me, where you don’t use NFC all that often I mean I used it actually, once in a while to pair with my rx100 to wirelessly transfer photos not a huge deal. It takes a little longer to do Wi-Fi pairing now, but for that it’s not really a big deal. Oneplus is argument is that there are more of that second type of person, so they decided not to include it, but I mean how cheap would it have really been.
I mean not including a super cheap feature like NFC and a new smartphone, because people don’t use it is kind of like building a car and not including reverse lights, because people usually drive forward technically true but evade come on now. The camera. On the back of the oneplus 2, I did an entire separate video about that was when I first got the phone a few weeks ago and I’ll link that video right below that like button, I can pair it at length to a couple of other high-end smartphones And give some photo and video quality samples. Basically, it’s a pretty good quality. Smartphone camera, that’s capable of taking some great shots, but it’s a little slow and it needs to continue to be improved with software updates. It’S a 13 megapixel omni vision, pure cell s, image sensor, the largest pixel size of any 13 megapixel camera, and it has optical image stabilization and laser autofocus. The laser autofocus is very fast as you’d expect, and the optical image stabilization for photos is very good. It takes some crispy low-light shots with a low, slow, shutter, speed handheld. So that’s awesome, but it’s kind of slow to actually take the shot. Getting the camera app open is pretty quick.
I’Ve been mapped to a double press of the home button, just like a Samsung phone, so I don’t need any camera shortcut on my home screen, but the time it actually takes to click the photo and actually taking it is too long and it’s that slow every Time kind of discouraging for when you’re trying to capture faster motion, but I think we’ll see this continued software update. It’S that make this phone and this camera better. It’S already gotten an update and soon apparently it’s going to get manual controls as well. So this camera can get better and speaking of software, the oneplus 2 is running its own custom, rom of near stock, android, oxygen, OS 2.0 or actually 2.1.
And i really like it, it’s quick. It’S clean, it’s pretty close to stock Android, as you can see, and it’s customisable in a bunch of ways that are genuinely pretty useful. You can rearrange the icons of the toggles on your quick settings to look exactly how you want them and remove the ones that you don’t use. You can go into the dual SIM card, tray settings and use one SIM card for calls, and the other one for data or really whatever you want.
You can take total control of how the SIM cards are used or you can just use one you can use on screen or off screen buttons. I choose off screen and then, of course you can choose what the hardware buttons do on a long press or a double tap of any of the buttons. So that’s how I made the DoubleTap of the middle home button open the camera, and I also have a long press of that home button open Google nap, but you can map a whole bunch more stuff for shortcuts.
If you want – and you can enable a system-wide dark mode and change the accent color throughout the entire OS, which can be pretty nifty, there’s tons of stuff like this, you can customize LED notification. Colors, you can customize app permissions, tweak, animation, speeds, etc. I mean you can really dig in and get your hands dirty and make this phone work exactly the way you want it to the biggest new feature.
They’Ve added on the home screens that that looks like the furthest from stock Android is called shelf, which I guess everyone has to have a screen to the left of the home screens. Now so you can go into the settings and enable if you want – and it’s basically just a page with a list of your recent apps frequent contacts and then some widgets of your choice. It’S kind of neat: you can change the header image to whatever you want and any widget in there you can add of any size.
I’M not sure how many people will find this useful, but this is another one of those things that one plus can add features to with a software update. So I guess we can be optimistic about its potential and performance throughout all of oxygen. Os was top-notch snappy, as some might say. This is, of course, thanks to you the choice of your Snapdragon 810 chip, super high-end, your four gigabytes of RAM and, of course, a 1080p display not having to push as many pixels as a 1440p display. So I’m a fan, this usually tends to be the case with near stock Android phones, it handles a ram. Well, it remembers a ton of recent apps and multitasking and moving around between apps and web browsing, and your typical use is perfectly fine, as you’d expect, with higher end stuff. Like gaming, there was of course earlier concern about the Snapdragon 810, not being bad, but overheating, and this phone this phone never got hot on me once I gamed plenty, I put a lot of hours into it, even if it is throttling to keep temperatures down.
I’M not noticing any difference in performance or functionality, and that’s what really matters here. Battery life was also pretty good. This is combining, of course, the 3300 milliamp hour battery, which filled out the space nicely and the near stock Android experience and the great RAM management and the 1080p display instead of 2k. All the stuff combines to give my use an average of about three and a half to four hours or a little over four hours of screen on time per day, which the way I use a phone since I know it’s different for everyone that number for me. I would give B, which is a huge improvement from like the d galaxy s6.
I was using earlier, but also not quite at the level of the champs like the oneplus one and the Droid turbo. It’S enough to get me through an entire day comfortably, but not much past, that also there’s no power saving mode. So once you get down to like 5 3 2 % of battery, you probably just want to turn it off.
So, at the end of the day, when judging oneplus 2 as a complete package, it satisfies my like 5 pillars of a great smartphone package, pretty well great performance, great camera, great display, great battery life and great build quality and it kind of nails. All of those. Now I’m used to using like six seven $ 800 smartphones as my daily driver.
So when you turn around and tell me, this is a $ 389 smartphone for this version, that’s pretty damn impressive and I’m actually really curious to see how the Moto X style will come in and compare to this one at a pretty similar price point. All I can say is I’ve had my sim card in this phone for the past couple weeks like I’ve said, and I haven’t wanted to take it out now sure as a full time user. You notice a lot of things.
I don’t even really see. In other reviews, like the vibration motor in this phone is really soft. It’S like really weak for some reasons. So if you leave your phone in vibrate only mode, I missed a couple calls that way and some notifications, which is weird and stuff like some apps like relay for reddit and Phoenix, didn’t really work that well on this on until the latest version of oxygen OS 2.0.1, which fix a lot of that stuff and even stuff like the home button, not responding a hundred percent of the time, probably two percent of the time. It takes me an extra pressed for it to register. But again, a lot of this is nitpicking and can be fixed with continual software updates.
So the worst thing about this phone is how hard it is to buy one again, but I would really recommend it to people who are willing to jump through a hoop or two or twelve to buy one thanks for watching guys and talk to you guys in The next one peace .