For a 5-month old company, OnePlus has managed to create quite a hype and noise around their first smartphone — the One. While OnePlus is a Chinese company with its roots originating from another Chinese OEM, Oppo, it has its eyes set on expanding rapidly into the European and US markets, rather than just limiting themselves to their home market.

For this specific reason, the company ships the international version of the One with CyanogenMod 11S — a special version of CyanogenMod 11. So, how good is the OnePlus One? Is it worth the hype? Read our review to find out. 

Build Quality

For a company making its first smartphone, the One sports an impressive build quality by all means. The back of the 64GB Sandstone Black One comes with a very unique texture that feels very pleasant to hold. As a bonus, it is quite resistant to fingerprint, dust, dirt and is not slippery as well.

For such a large device, OnePlus has nailed the placements of the Volume keys and the Power button on the left and right sides of the device. They are placed exactly where your fingers will be resting when you naturally hold the phone.

While OnePlus has managed to keep the bezels on the One at a very minimum, the bottom bezel is still a bit too large for my liking. Make no mistake though; the OnePlus One has a better bezel-to-screen ratio than the Galaxy S5, Sony Xperia Z2 and the HTC One M8.

The capacitive keys are hidden in the bottom bezel and do exactly what they are intended to do, though illumination levels are a bit on the low side. Another gripe with them is that they are in different order than what Google recommends and includes a menu key — which is abhorred by seasoned Android users. Thankfully, OnePlus allows users to switch between on-screen navigation keys and the capacitive keys.

The dual-speakers on the One are located at the bottom, and while OnePlus had originally mentioned them as stereo, they are in fact dual mono speakers working in tandem for a louder output. While no BoomSound competitor, the speakers can get plenty loud and are better than what you get to hear from in most non-HTC devices.

Display

The front of the OnePlus is adorned with a gigantic 5.5-inch 1080p LTPS panel from JDI that is protected by Gorilla Glass 3, which easily pushes it into the ‘phablet’ category. The 1080p panel has a pixel density of 401ppi, which might not be as dense as the One M8 or the G3 but is more than good enough for the average joe. While the One comes with a smaller display than the Note 3, it is slightly taller (and narrower) than the latter.

The display is slightly raised compared to the edges and body of the device, which does make it prone to breaking and getting scratched easily, if the device ever falls face down on the ground. On the positive side, it also gives the impression of the display ‘floating’ on the device body. The display does not particularly excel at anything, but it does not disappoint either. The viewing angles are as good as the One M8, the contrast ratio is decent and it can get pretty bright as well. The only chink in its armor are the somewhat poor black levels and the below average sunlight legibility.

The OnePlus One display also suffers from two major issues: Yellow banding and random ghost touches. While the first is a quality control issue in certain batches, the second is a low-level driver issue. Thankfully, the Cyanogen team is already working with Synaptics on fixing this issue. The recent 33R update greatly improved the touchscreen response but the issue is still present.

Software

Apart from its top-notch build quality and price, the highlight of the OnePlus One is the software that it runs on — CyanogenMod 11S. The ‘S’ here stands for a special version of CyanogenMod 11, which includes a few extra goodies like a new camera app, off-screen gestures, Hexo theme and more.

The Theme Manager in CyanogenMod 11S allows the user to customize the look of the OS completely

Underneath though, CM11S includes all the features that you might have ever used on a normal CM11 build including Privacy Guard, Blacklist, Lockscreen Shortcuts and more. The customization options offered by the OS are simply too much to much to list here, and way more than what other OEM skins offer.

Unlike Samsung’s TouchWiz though, the customization options offered here are actually useful, though they may be a bit overwhelming for a first time user.

CyanogenMod 11S lockscreen

However, CyanogenMod 11S is also the biggest weakness of the OnePlus One. The firmware has way too many bugs, which really should not be there in any consumer phone.

Credit to the Cyanogen team where it is due though — they have been rolling out frequent updates to fix these bugs. Sadly though, while these updates fix a lot existing bugs, they end up introducing new ones as well.

While useful, Gesture shortcuts are extremely unreliable.

In the last one month, Cyanogen rolled out a couple of updates for the OnePlus One. The first one (30O) fixed a lot of bugs and introduced a new Clear Image mode as well. However, it also ended up introducing a severe battery drain when the phone was at idle, which nearly led to the battery life of the phone being halved for many.

The second (33R) update has since then only managed to partially fix the high power drain issue and the touchscreen going berserk problem, even though it includes a new touch panel firmware from Synaptics.

Camera

The OnePlus One comes with a Sony Exmor R IMX214 camera sensor with a 6-lens setup and an F/2.0 aperture. The same setup is also found on the Oppo Find 7 and quite a few other devices — all of which are excellent at imaging. The OnePlus One, however, is a mixed bag when it comes to camera performance.

In daylight, the camera can take some impressive shots with plenty of details and accurate contrast and saturation levels, even though focus is a bit on the slow side. Since Cyanogen and OnePlus don’t believe in saturating the colors, the images lack the pop effect, but this does not make them inferior by any means.

The OnePlus One does start to struggle in low-lighting situations. While the captured images have plenty of details, there is also a lot of noise in them. In addition, chances are you will need to click multiple indoor shots to make sure that you get at least one image that does not have even a slight blur to it.

A special note about the front-facing 5MP camera on the One. The sensor has a wide 80-degree lens, which makes it perfect for selfies. The images captured by it have plenty of details and very low amount of noise as well.

The HDR effect is a bit too strong on the OnePlus One

The biggest problem with the OnePlus One camera is not the hardware, but its software. Even though the included Camera app from Cyanogen offers a plethora of customizations and features, the shot to shot time is reminiscent of some 2010 flagships.

On the positive side, Cyanogen has promised to improve the camera performance in a future update and even add RAW support to it. The OnePlus One can record videos in 1080p resolution at 30FPS as well as 60FPS. It can also record 4K videos at 30FPS and at 24FPS in DCI format — which is generally used by professionals.

While the handset can also record slow-motion videos at 720p resolution (120FPS), it does not capture any audio to go with it. With the recent Android 4.4.4 update, Cyanogen also introduced a Clear Image mode under which the phone takes multiple shots for a final high resolution photo with more details and less noise.

In practice, while shooting a picture in the Clear Image mode takes an agonizingly long time, the end result is almost always worth it, especially in low-light situations as the noise in images are significantly reduced.

Performance & Battery Life

The OnePlus One comes with a Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.5GHz, an Adreno 330 GPU and 3GB of RAM, which is in certain categories better than what the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8 pack. With no bloated skins on top of stock Android to bog the performance down, the One is an absolute delight to use.

I have been using the device for more than a couple of weeks now and never did I notice any lag or skipped frames throughout the OS. The OnePlus One is as smooth as the Nexus 5 and HTC One M8 and a fair deal faster than the Galaxy S5. The extra gig of RAM really helps in multi-tasking as well.

Battery life on the OnePlus One has been a mixed bag. While I was initially able to extract more than a day of battery life with nearly 5 hours+ of screen on time, the Android 4.4.4 update wreaked havoc to it. The idle standby drain has increased drastically and frequently over the last one week, I have woken up in the morning to find the One completely dead, even though it had 25% charge left.

The second 33R update did improve the battery life by a bit, but it is still not as good as what it was initially.

Conclusion

Without its compelling price, the OnePlus One becomes a tough handset to recommend. While the handset can definitely stand its own against the likes of the Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M8, the minor issues plaguing it even after nearly three months of its (limited) launch are a big bummer.

I initially got the handset as my daily driver but the constant data drops and touchscreen issues have been driving me nuts.

Once you factor in the $349 price tag for the 64GB version of the OnePlus One, the handset becomes an instabuy — thanks to its excellent value for money ratio. It even beats Google’s Nexus devices in the VFM department — which is no small feat to achieve.

However, buying the handset at this compelling price requires users to sell their online soul, take part in various contests on the OnePlus forums, beg in other online communities and more.

Question is — Are you ready to do all these just to buy a phone?