OnePlus One Review, Specs, and Hidden Features

The OnePlus One has been one of the most hyped smartphones of 2014. There's really not much else to be said, as OnePlus' marketing has been quite noticeable amongst Android enthusiasts. The OnePlus One seems to come from nowhere, although there is a noticeable resemblance to the Oppo Find 7A which is produced in the same factory. The OnePlus One is said to be a flagship killer, as its high-end specs come with a mid-range price. The 16GB version starts at 299 USD and the 64GB version starts at 349 USD. With a 5.5" 1080p display, Snapdragon 801 SoC, and plenty of other bits and pieces to go around, the specs are certainly enough to make it into a flagship phone.

Of course, the real question is whether it really is. After all, while specs provide the foundation, what makes a phone bad, good, or great has to do with the entire phone, not just the spec sheet. At any rate, I've attached this spec sheet below to give an idea of what to expect from the phone.

Looks and Designs

From the second you lay eyes/fingers on the OnePlus One, you can tell it's a high-quality device, almost impossibly so for the $300 price tag. It's got a solid sort of heft to it, and the screen is raised just slightly over the silver edges, which gives you a fun surface to run your fingers around when you're nervous. It also looks great.

On the back, instead of opting for metal, your standard soft-touch plastic, or something glossy and cheap feeling, the OnePlus One we tested ("Sandstone Black") has a fabric-y sort of texture. It doesn't have any pull to it, and I'm inclined to think it's just a strangely rough sort of plastic, but it feels like the inside of a tablet cover, the part that sits against the screen when it's closed up. It's a unique and strange but not entirely unwelcome material. It feels like it'll get dirty quick—like you can't set it down for fear that it'll get greasy and stained—but after over a week of use it still looks great. It held up damn admirably to some time on my heinously unclean kitchen counter.

The style of the OnePlus One extends beyond just the phone though. This is the first gadget I've had in a long time where I've actually been impressed by the charging apparatus. That's right; its micro USB cable is badass. It honestly gives cloth-coated cables a run for their money, and it's completely untangleable.

The screen, a 1080 x 1920 pixel IPS LCD display, looks great in pretty much all scenarios. It doesn't have quite the contrast, deep blacks, or looks-good-outdoor-ness of an AMOLED display, but it is pretty. Definitely up to par with just about everything else out there.

Camera

Okay, the OnePlus One's camera is not great, but it's not a total slouch either. The 13MP shooter performs pretty well in daylight, but less so in the dark of the night. I used it to capture unflattering pictures at my sister's high school graduation and the results hold up pretty well, but a lot of my shots came out blurry because the image stabilization is pretty meh, and the autofocus speed is relatively slow. It'll get the job done if you've got good lighting and you're not in a rush, but it's nothing to write home about.

I also gave the OnePlus One to my colleague Mario, who's a bit more qualified to suss out the finer points of smartphone camera-ry, and his takeaways were that the image stabilization was definitely pretty bad—even controlling for his own extra-shaky hands—and that the low-light performance was "a catastrophe" which I think this sample shot bears out pretty well.

Performance

Of course it helps that the hardware underneath that custom OS just screams. The OnePlus One rocks a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801—the fastest lil phone chip out there right now—and backs it up with 3GB of RAM. The result is a phone that almost never stutters, whether you're just zooming around the homescreen or playing some Hitman Go. I never ran into any performance issues except for a little freakout where Snapchat was freezing up, but I'm pretty sure that was Snapchat's fault.

With a serious engine under the hood, and that big beautiful display to run, battery life is a concern. Luckily the One's beefy 3100 mAh battery packs enough juice to get you through the day. I spent a big chunk of my time with the OnePlus One at my parent's place, and though I was getting up at 11 am every day I was putting the One through seriously heavy use. We're talking hours of reading Twitter on the couch, podcast listening, and general messing around while waiting for something to happen in a one-horse town. Multiple sustained sessions of 45 minutes-plus. And every day, the One still had a good 25 percent battery life when 2 or 3 AM rolled around. I could never have gotten away with that on my Nexus 5.

Operating system

At the core of the OnePlus One-spericence is Cyanogenmod. For the uninitiated, this is essentially a forked, modified version of Android, kind of like Amazon's Fire OS except not nearly as drastic a departure. It's developed by the Cyanogenmod company rather than Google itself, and as such it lags behind Android updates just a little bit since Cyanogenmod's engineers have to do their own mods before it gets to your phone.

Don't let the name or the fact that it's not straight out of Mountain View fool you, though; Cyanogenmod is pretty damn faithful to the spirit of stock Android. The UI design is basically identical, but for a few immediately visible changes which a little added flair that basically amounts to "hexagons everywhere."

Also unlike Fire OS, Cyanogenmod and the OnePlus One come with all the your favorite Google Apps installed by default. Future versions of the phone might not if Cyanogenmod ever loses Google's blessing, but the current version is close enough to stock Android that Google has agreed to let its essential default apps be included.

OnePlus One Specs

·       Network: Unlocked, GSM (T-Mobile and ATT in the U.S.)

·         OS: CyanogenMod 11S

·         CPU: 2.5 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801

·         Screen: 5.5-inch 1920x1080 IPS-LCD display (401 PPI)

·         RAM: 3GB

·         Storage: 16GB or 64GB

·         Camera: 13MP rear / 5MP front

·         Battery: 3100 mAh Li-Po

·         Dimensions: 6.02 x 2.99 x 0.35 in

·         Weight: 5.71 ounces

·         Price: $300 (16GB) or $350 (64GB)