Mobile phones have become a commodity in the current scenario. Every other
day you would hear a phone launch. Always looking into the regular titans
doesn’t seem pretty grand. Few among the global standard marks a buzz. Xiamoi
which brought a level of standard and economically price offered on their brand
vowed the Indian audience and made most of its sales within seconds.
Another Chinese product which gained a lot of attention is OnePlus One. The
phone makers might take pot shots at their rivals, come up with some hilarious
advertisement. But it got one step ahead of adopting a Tagline Never Settle. That’s an ambitious tagline if ever
there was one.
One of the main reason behind the buzz of OnePlus is being the unique idea
of selling the phone based on invitations only. The invite only method has been
discontinued in favour of the more familiar pre order route. In an era where
marketing a phone is the main key, this invite only method was certainly unconventional, but led to a lot of word of
mouth publicity and even the hype given in social medias.
Obviously, selling the phone is not the buzz but the phone comes with
spectacular features and affordable price and it runs on cyanogen mod ROM which
is another geeks android fantasy. So lets check out more about this ‘Flagship
Killer’ or its just another phablet.
Build and
Design -
OnePlus One has a 5.5-inch display which is surrounded on all sides by a
metallic corner. There’s a slight dip on the top and the bottom of the display
which shows the end of the glass front and beginning of the metallic edges. On
the front, you only have the earpiece speaker section on the top and the
front facing camera beside it. The display has a Corning Gorilla Glass 3
protection.
The rear cover – Sandstone black in our case – covers the majority of the
rear side as well as the sides of the phone. In fact, the front glass is
separated from the rear cover only with the silver metallic lining. Although
the rear cover is swappable, you will need a special instrument to get it to
open as it offers a snug fit around the rear and sides of the phone. The
Sandstone cover has a lovely texture which feels somewhat like a softer version
of a regular sandpaper. It gives a great grip on the phone.
Coming to the rear side you have the 13MP rear camera with a dual LED flash
unit. You have a microphone places just beside the camera section. Below the
camera is the OnePlus branding followed by the Cyanogen branding on the bottom
of the rear side. We like the minimalist design of the phone. The curved rear
also helps with grip. It weighs just 162 grams and is 8.9mm thick on the sides.
OnePlus One does not have the Ingress Protection certification, it is
not water and dust resistant.
Specifications
-
One of the main reasons behind the buzz around the OnePlus One are the
stellar internals. It houses a Snapdragon 801 system-on-chip with a 2.5GHz
quad-core Krait 400 processor and Adreno 330 graphics processor. This is paired
with 3GB of RAM. On the storage front, the Sandstone version offers 64GB of
space of which 54.87GB is available to the user. There is no microSD card slot
for this model. But with over 50GB of storage space, does one really need it?
It sports a 5.5-inch full HD display IPS LCD
display puts the pixel density at 401 pixels per inch. That is quite a dense
display and thanks to the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 covering, the phone is
protected from accidental scratches. On the camera front you have the 13MP rear
camera and a 5MP front camera. There is a 3100 mAh battery. You can remove the
rear cover, but you can’t take out the battery.
Software -
Cyanogen Mod is the unique selling point of
this phone which makes this phone pre-rooted and unique from most of the other
phones out there which either come with a skinned user interface atop the
Android OS or stock Android OS. One of the major advantages of pre-installed
Cyanogen Mod firmware is that you have the root access and you can do a lot of
customisations. We had the Android 4.4.4 KitKat OS with the Cyanogen Mod CM 11S
custom ROM atop it.
The other interesting app is Screen-cast app which lets you record your on
screen navigations with the recording registering where you've touched the screen
as well. With regular phones, you would need root access to do this.
Performance-
Considering the OnePlus One houses a
Snapdragon 801 SoC and comes with 3GB of RAM, we did not experience any lagging
or stuttering while using the device. Animations are smooth and we did not
experience any slowing down of the device despite opening multiple apps, over
20 Chrome tabs and so on.
Call Quality is
quite good indoors and there wasn’t any distortion on the
earpiece speaker. However while outdoors in traffic situations, the high
volume levels would still not manage to drown out the ambient noise. There were
a lot of occasions, when on accepting calls the phone switched to speaker phone
and we had to manually disable it. On the OnePlus forums, this is an issue that
is being discussed. Hopefully the issue will be addressed in the next system
update, although we aren’t sure if it is indeed a software issue.
The speakers
located at the base of the phone are sufficiently loud. Despite your hands
covering them while watching a movie in the landscape mode, we faced no issues
while watching a movie indoors. Some of the AudioFX effects are not
available in the speaker mode and you will need to invest in a pair of headset
to get the effects such as Bass Boost and Surround Sound. We said you need to
invest in a pair is because the bundle does not include any headsets.
It supports
quad-band 2G and 3G along with 4G LTE bands. On the connectivity front, you
have Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA. It
supports GPS with GLONASS along with sensors such as a proximity sensor,
gyroscope and accelerometer.
Product
Review-
