Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OnePlus One Review!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the oneplus one – it’s a new phone from a new manufacturer and it’s gotten a lot of attention. It’S actually one of the most polarizing phones i have ever seen so over in the tech community. This phone is almost impossible to get. People are swarming over this phone there’s way more demand than supply. There’S an invite system. It’S just really really hard to get your hands on, but then i go over to class and someone says hey what phone is that? And i say it’s the oneplus one and they go the what i don’t. I don’t really know what that is so clearly there’s a big divide over who cares about this phone? Why? The short answer to that question is the price: this phone, when it’s available, will cost outright three hundred dollars for the phone off contract for perspective. The iphone 5s will retail seven hundred dollars off contract, the galaxy s5 700 off contract, the htc one, seven hundred dollars off contract. So when you put up a phone with very similar specs to that and it costs only 250 off contract.
It’S turn a lot of heads in the tech community and that’s because we care about specs. So let’s try to find out if this is worth caring about the specs for this low of a price. So just to get it out the way it is rocking a 2.5 gigahertz quad-core snapdragon 801 chip, the adreno 330 gpu, three gigabytes of ram, a 13 megapixel camera, a 3 100 milliamp hour battery all very similar specs to something like the samsung galaxy s5 and on Top of all that, for a premium slab style phone, the oneplus one is built really well. I actually think its design is one of its best assets, so this white version here is extremely soft to the touch and they advertise that a lot. It’S super soft, and yet it’s also very durable. It feels really solid in the hand, thanks to all the metal involved around the frame, so all the way around the phone, no matter how you hold it, you’re touching metal somewhere, and it really does actually have the perfect button placement for a big phone.
Yes, it’s big, it’s that 5.5 inch 1080p display, but the power button is low enough. On that right, hand, side and the volume buttons are low enough, that it shows that they actually took some notes. They actually thought about where to put these buttons and it keeps the phone pretty usable to even someone with smaller hands, uh more comparable to the smaller five inch or 5.1 inch display flagships. It’S also pretty thin.
So really the design is one of the best points about the oneplus one. So with the beastly specs and pretty top-notch build quality, it seems like you’re, getting a lot for your money for this phone and it certainly feels like it when you’re holding it again. It feels like a beast of a phone uh. You also have lte 802.11 ac, wi-fi a big battery too, like i said, 3 100 milliamp hours, but it’s not removable, although you can take off the back and soon you’ll be able to replace the back with other covers of different materials, and i also noticed that This phone has three microphones one on top one on the back and one on the bottom leading me to believe the audio quality would be great and it was and calls, but for some reason the call volume of the person i was talking to was super low. Like i cranked the volume – and i could barely hear who i was talking to – which was weird – but i guess that can be fixed with a software update but for other apps, the speaker sounded just fine, maybe even a bit above average, since it’s real stereo. Instead of fake stereo like the iphone or the nexus 5., so if you’ve been looking really hard for a flaw that makes this phone’s hardware worth really less than the other 700 flagships, it’s trying to kill, you probably haven’t found it yet, and neither have i i Mean i’ve been using the phone for weeks.
As far as i can tell, this phone is pretty much flawless, a miracle piece of hardware for the price and i’ve been damn impressed with using it, but really guys. This phone is super similar on the inside to a lot of those other 700 phones thanks to the specs inside. So what really differentiates it? What really makes this a different phone is actually the software uh it’s cyanogenmod and, like i said in that top five video i did not too long ago.
For all intents and purposes, this is a cyanogenmod phone. This is going to depend on the features and the awesome stuff that comes with cyanogenmod 11s. So it’s a custom built os for this phone based on the latest version of android 4.4 kitkat, and it’s definitely filled with extra features specifically for this hardware, which is nice to see, i’ve talked about some of their stuff before so it lets.
You choose a lot of things to really customize your vanilla, android like experience, so you can really make it your own. You can make. It seem very much like a nexus almost stock like me, or you can hop in the theme manager and really go crazy. All out customizing, not just your wallpaper and your icons, but your boot animation and your lock screen and everything all sorts of stuff – and there are custom features like being able to choose between on-screen software buttons or off-screen capacitive buttons.
Depending on what you like. You can’t do that on any other phone. You can also customize what the software buttons show up by adding or subtracting or reordering them. However, you like so there’s tons of stuff here that you’d probably be used to finding in a custom rom, because really that’s what this is. It’S cyanogenmod, even though this device is not rooted out the box, another cyan engine mod feature is, you can say, hey snapdragon, snapdragon, hey snapdragon, hey snapdragon, and sometimes it decides to wait and work and other times it doesn’t uh. When you do, it opens up.
Google. Now and you have to train your voice for a while, i haven’t found this to be really all that responsive but, like you just saw it does work sometimes they’ve. Also, custom built a lock screen, so it blurs your wallpaper or since it’s android 4.4 will also blur whatever album art of whatever music you’re listening to, while it’s playing, which is really cool and i’m actually a pretty big fan of this lock screen. Just because it’s a big screen and not everyone can reach the center with one finger. So just swiping down from anywhere in the middle, is pretty convenient. If you’re trying to use the device with one hand and of course you can always swipe to get into the camera directly from the lock screen as well and they’ve custom built a few other apps like the audio effects, control which works really well for listening to Music, the themes browser again like we mentioned the gallery and the camera app. So this is a custom built one by cyanogen, again, it’s kind of a cross between the old google camera and the new one. But i do like how easy it is to switch between shooting modes.
They made it really easy here, just a vertical swipe up or down to move between modes. So i actually found myself using this a lot just to quickly switch to hdr real quick. I used to use it all the time just because of how easy it was, and the camera itself on the phone was surprisingly nice to me, like i’ve heard some other people didn’t really like it that much, but i think it’s pretty good, certainly better than the Google play edition 1m8 i’m coming from, so it takes 13 megapixel photos and it’s capable of 4k or slow motion video and i’m actually a fan of how low profile the physical camera itself is.
People don’t really talk about it that much, but it reminds me a lot of the oppo find 7 here, which is probably the phone that this is physically most similar to and it sticks out just a tiny little bit, but i say good job to them. On keeping the camera pretty small and low profile and the actual pictures, it takes look pretty nice, so there’s no optical image stabilization, but it does have dual led flash and multiple lenses and everything else. You’D expect from a nice camera and the photos were detailed and saturated and well colored and sharp. I actually like the action mode because it forces a faster shutter speed which freezes stuff at the expense of a bit of a higher iso, but it does reduce blur really well. So it almost kind of makes up for that lack of stabilization, low light pictures again were okay compared to other decent phones.
I mean this is a solid camera. I mentioned in my find 7a review that i’m a fan of the slightly over aggressive hdr, and we see it again here almost the exact same way. I mean this one plus one camera is where i was probably fully expecting to be. Let down by the price tag, but nope gets a thumbs up for me here.
So the only real con here in this phone is cyanogenmods bugs, which is good and bad bad, because it’s the whole os and it’s a custom os built for the phone. So you’d expect it to be perfect. I guess, but it’s also good, because even though it’s not perfect, it can be fixed with software updates. So during my use of this phone i kept coming across little force closes and little errors that i just don’t normally see on other phones and a lot of them were easily reproducible.
For example, if you open up the camera app directly from the lock screen, then hit the kind of invisible home button. Your wallpaper will glitch a bit and black out the bottom part and will not fix itself until you sleep the phone and then wake it again. Where the bottom part of the wallpaper reappears kind of weird, but happens every time, little stuff, like that regular performance, you know, zipping around the phone and multitasking is just fine opening and closing apps animations frame rates are all high. Even gaming is pretty great.
I’Ve played a couple of games on this phone – i’m not a big gamer on my phone, but it’s it seems solid, but this is where it really gets. Weird really, almost all of the other animations throughout the os are fast, except for the home button. Now, of course, i have on-screen buttons, but i tried this with the off-screen buttons too, and i got the same issue. The home button response time is super slow.
A lot of you guys mentioned this in the top five video like what is that lag coming from uh, it’s not really a lag. It’S just a palpable delay, a delay between hitting the home button and then actually starting the animation to go home. It’S so big of a delay that a lot of us notice it every time and it got annoying for me, so i actually put it up next to the google play edition 1m8, like just to make sure i wasn’t going crazy and sure enough yeah, it’s got Some serious delay – and i don’t know why the other buttons don’t have a delay. The back button is actually faster and the multitasking button works just fine, so i thought it was waiting for a home double tap to see if i was sleeping the screen, but i turned that option off. So i really have no explanation for this massive intrusive delay for the home button, and i can only hope, cyanogen already knows about this issue and is working to fix it with a quick over-the-air software update. So that’s kind of the story of using this phone.
I love the hardware and using it and everything it just doesn’t feel quite as polished as a nexus or another high-end flagship when i’m using it and that’s evident by the little software problems here and there. The occasional delays and force closes when working around and trying to use all the awesome features of this custom operating system. So, at the end of the day, yeah this phone comes down to signage and modern. Whether or not cyanogen can keep improving and keep sending updates to this phone.
I’Ve already gotten one in the time i’ve spent with it and whether or not they can live up to these specs, because i would really expect a phone with such awesome. Specs like this, to perform kind of like a 700 phone, i’m not expecting it to match every part of that phone, but i expected a custom os for a brand new company’s phone to to at least perform optimally on it. So really, this phone is going to live or die on cyanogenmod and whether or not the updates come and keep it stable like it would on a nexus, because you can already expect that to happen on a nexus so yeah. This is a really impressive phone.
I am, i am really big fan of the hardware i like how soft the back is. I like how sturdy it’s built. I like the specs. I like the way it looks. It is a big phone, but i have big hands. I don’t mind that, and i can understand why people are clamoring over this phone, especially in the tech community.
I don’t think you should smash a 700 phone to get it, but hey marketing is marketing, and this is a pretty well priced phone for what you’re getting for the money. So i say, if you’re willing to take that risk in cyanogen mod and you think they’re going to actually maintain it and update it like a nexus, is pretty much guaranteed to be from google and you want that experience for a hundred bucks off. It might just be a damn good deal for the risk you’re taking. So if you trust them do it, it’s gon na be worth it.
I don’t have any invites. I can’t get you an invite if you’re trying to get this phone i’ll, keep you guys updated on twitter, of course, in the link right below that like button for availability and things like that, if you’re trying to get your hands on it but uh. For now there might be a giveaway coming up, maybe soon, but really the idea here is uh. If you’re trusting cyanogenmod, it’s a pretty good pick.
So there you go guys thanks for watching this review. Video hope you enjoyed it again. There’S a thumbs up button below to click. If you liked it – and i will talk to you guys in the next article peace, you .