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.

Needless to say, the OnePlus One is a close cousin of the Find 7a, and its specs are top notch. There's a great foundation, so we'll move on with some initial hardware impressions.

Of course, the first part to look at is industrial and material design, along with any other immediate observations about the phone. From the front, the phone is almost a pure expanse of black glass. There are outlines for the capacitive keys, but these are quite faint most of the time. The contrast of the silver plastic ring only emphasizes this, and the lack of logos helps to make the design stand out by virtue of its minimalism. Picking it up, the feel of the sandstone black finish is incredibly unique and unlike anything I've ever felt. The finish has been described as soft sandpaper, and that's a description I'd agree with. It makes the phone feel much grippier than one might expect. The back cover is also strong, with no real give and no flex. Other than a few logos, the only significant design elements on the back are the camera, dual LED flash, and a hole for the microphone. The front of the phone has surprisingly great attention to detail as well. The silver plastic piece on the front of the phone makes the finger smoothly roll off of the display when swiping around, and the imperceptible feel of the earpiece helps to contribute to the sense that this is a single, well-built phone.

On the sides, the minimalistic theme continues. There's only a power button on the right side, a headphone jack and microphone port on the top, and a volume rocker on the left side. The SIM tray is also on the left side, and on the bottom of the phone we see two speakers, a USB port, and a microphone hole. In general, the feel of the power and volume buttons are great, with no slack and a clean, if subdued click upon activation.

Needless to say, OnePlus has done a fantastic job. However, there are a few issues to talk about. First, the size is definitely too much to handle. If the LG G3 was at the very edge between a phone and phablet, the OnePlus One firmly steps into phablet territory. At some point a line in the sand has to be drawn, and it only makes sense to do so here. The angular corners of the OnePlus One combined with its larger footprint makes for a phone that is almost impossible to comfortably use with one hand. I can't help but feel that this would've been a far more impressive phone if shrunk to a 5" display size, as in my experience it takes two hands to comfortably use this phone. The other issue is much more subtle though. For some reason or another, the glass lens covering the display of the phone feels as if it has noticeably higher friction than other phones I've used. It almost feels as if the oleophobic treatment of the glass is either missing or thinner than most. Of course, overall the phone is great from a basic design perspective. The size seems to be a matter of OnePlus' start-up position and the need to share parts with the Find 7a, although the feel of the glass is unlikely to be an issue for most.

Display

Within the past few years, smartphone displays have improved immensely. Color rendition, peak brightness, contrast, resolution, viewing angles, and power draw have all improved since the first modern smartphones that appeared in 2007. Of course, while it was once possible to judge relative quality in displays by subjective comparison, most smartphones no longer have TN displays or poor maximum brightness. In order to better test displays, we turn to SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 with a custom workflow.

In the basics, we see that the OnePlus One has a reasonably bright display and acceptable display contrast, although there's room to improve in both. OnePlus has also done a good job of making sure that their display gets dim enough for night time reading, as minimum brightness is around 4.2 nits. Viewing angles are also great. While contrast with viewing angle changes isn't as good as AMOLED panels, I don't see any color shifting with viewing angle changes. This seems to remain an advantage of IPS panels for now.

In grayscale, we see that the white balance is just a bit blue, but there really isn’t a big issue there. The OnePlus One sets a record for grayscale accuracy. I would like to see a bit better color balance at the higher scales, but it's really just nitpicking. Specifically, red needs to be bumped up to be in line with green and blue. It's understandable why this is done though, as the display's backlight will be the weakest in red in general.

In the saturation sweep, OnePlus has done a great job to make sure that colors are as accurate as possible. The only issue here is that the red, magenta, and blue is a bit weaker than it should be. Some extra saturation would definitely tighten up the accuracy here in addition to making the display more appealing than it is now. However, the display is still incredibly well-calibrated, and will be more than accurate enough for general use.

The strong showing in the saturation sweep helps carry the OnePlus One through to do well in the ColorChecker. For the most part, we see that much of the error comes from the issues previously discussed with grayscale. The display overall is great, and while it isn’t perfect, it’s really just nitpicking at this point. The OnePlus One manages to display colors more accurate than almost everything on the market. The only real issue I've noticed with this display is that there's a bit more IPS glow than I'd like when shifting viewing angles.

Battery Life

At this point, battery life is one of the number one priorities for a phone. While in 2013 our primary tests consisted of the web browsing test and video playback tests, we've expanded our suite to include Basemark OS II and GFXBench to simulate intensive general usage and gaming, respectively. For all of our tests in which the display is on, we calibrate the brightness of full white to be 200 nits in order to standardize and attempt to control for extraneous variables as much as possible. While this may seem arbitrary, it's important to do so to draw real conclusions about which phone has better battery life. 200 nits on a phone can be as low as 50% and as high as 90%, so setting a standardized brightness percentage would not be an effective method of controlling for display brightness. With that in mind, let's get to the battery life tests.

Here, we see that the OnePlus One takes the number three spot for battery life amongst phones and phablets. This is definitely a great result to start with, and is a solid 20% higher than the One (M8). However, the Huawei Ascend Mate 2 continues to hold its position with a long lead over just about anything else available in the market today.

We can see a similar story in LTE web browsing battery life. However, the OnePlus One manages to close up the lead that the Ascend Mate 2 holds in WiFi browsing. It's likely that the 28nm LP process and lack of envelope tracker is responsible for closing the gap in this regard. It's interesting to see how the iPhone 6 Plus trails behind the OnePlus One here, but it's likely that this difference is due to the fact that the iPhone 6 Plus has an off-die modem compared to the OnePlus One's on-die modem.

White battery life tends to fall towards the bottom here, we can see that the reality is that the OnePlus One performs quite well, which indicates that there's relatively little throttling to speak of and that the OnePlus One is simply doing well by sustaining high levels of performance.

We see the same story in the GFXBench rundown. The OnePlus One manages to set a new record for final run FPS among phones and phablets, although battery life is near the bottom of the pack. It seems that if there's any one reason for the escalating display size wars, it is to increase battery life. While by no means a clear order, we can see that the larger battery more than compensates for the larger display of the OnePlus One. This makes sense, as a phone should have a fixed size circuit board. Therefore, by increasing display size the circuit boards become smaller relative to the rest of the phone, and all of the area opened up by increasing the size of the phone can be taken up by the battery. Overall, the OnePlus One is almost as good as it gets for battery life in a phone, with excellent sustained performance under load.

Charge Time

To really have a holistic understanding of battery life, we must also take a look at charge time. While battery life can be the only determinant of mobility, in cases where usage is heavy enough that the battery or multiple batteries have to be charged, charge time can become incredibly important. To this end, OnePlus includes a 5V, 2.1A charger in the box to quickly charge the rather large 11.78 WHr battery.

Somewhat surprisingly, the OnePlus One does a great job in this test, coming quite close to other devices with QC 2.0 fast chargers like the Galaxy Note 4 which is definitely good to see. Overall, this makes the OnePlus One one of the best phablets on the market for battery life.

Camera UX

For the most part, the OnePlus One has a generally standard camera system for 2014 smartphones. With a 6P lens system, F/2.0 aperture, and Sony IMX214 camera sensor, the OnePlus One has a relatively standard camera system for today's smartphones. The focal length is similar to most smartphones on the market at a relatively wide 3.8mm length, which makes it equivalent to a 28mm focal length when accounting for the crop factor of the sensor. The front facing camera has an OmniVision OV5648 sensor, which is a 5MP, 1.4 micron, 1/4 inch sensor, with an F/2.0 aperture at 2.67mm focal length. This means that the field of view is similar to the rear-facing camera at about 29mm accounting for the crop factor.

While the camera hardware is relatively standard, the camera interface is definitely a unique take, and is the first time that I've been able to use Cyanogen's camera UI. In general, this UI feels like a mix of the old Google Camera, along with an immense amount of complication and not much explanation. For example, in the settings there's an ISO selection menu. While this is nothing to talk about normally, there's a setting called "Auto (HJR)". The only way for me to learn about this setting is by searching for it on Google, which explains that it favors higher ISOs to reduce the effects of shaky hands. As of the latest 44S update, this crashes the camera any time I try to take a photo in low light. To further explain the point, there are plenty of options in the video size setting, but a huge number of them are completely unexplained. While one might easily guess what 4K UHD or HD 1080p is, I find it difficult to believe that 4k DCI, CIF, or QCIF are self-explanatory. Interestingly enough, turning RAW capture on or off also has an effect on the maximum shutter speed, something that isn't actually detailed anywhere.

While an unfamiliar UI is not really a massive issue, there are some fundamental flaws with how the UI works. One of the most obvious flaws is the aspect ratio of the preview, which is 16:9, when output images can have a 4:3 aspect ratio. This makes it impossible to accurately frame an image. In order to do the ISO chart test, it was necessary to use Google Camera to frame the chart before switching back to the Cyanogen camera.

In addition to all of this, the scene selection UI doesn't have much thought put into it. All filters and all scene modes are integrated into a single menu, which is navigated by swiping up and down on the preview. This wouldn't really be an issue but when there are 31 options to swipe through this really gets to be a bit much to handle. There is a list option that can be found by going through the menus though, which is a bit better at organizing information. Unfortunately, most of the scene options are a bit nonsensical. The "night" modes don't actually change anything (ISO and shutter speed seem to be identical), and pretty much everything else is unclear on what it does. The one interesting mode is the slow shutter mode, which sets ISO to 100 and allows the exposure time to go as high as 8 seconds for high-quality photos on a tripod. This is also broken as of the 44S update, which causes the camera to crash until the phone is rebooted. I suspect that OnePlus is better off exposing full manual controls instead of trying to cover every possible edge case with a large number of scene modes that may or may not change anything. There's also no way to get a grid to try and frame images properly.

Speaking of ISO and shutter speed values, while the camera UI was mostly responsive in previous versions, around the 38R OTA I saw a dramatic shift in the auto exposure algorithm as it went from a maximum of 4500 ISO and around 1/11 second shutter speed to 4100 ISO and 1/6 second shutter speed. This has effectively made it impossible to use the camera at night, as there is no OIS present to reduce the effects of even slight hand shake. Overall, all of these issues make the OnePlus One quite frustrating to use as a camera.

Aside from these niggles with the camera application that can generally be resolved by using Google Camera, another area of evaluation is shot to shot latency, along with focus latency. To this end, the device was tested by pointing the camera at the ISO chart with strong lighting to be able to reach base ISO and timing how long the camera took to focus on an object along with how quickly the device could take a photo.

The OnePlus One does do surprisingly well in our focus test, setting a rather respectable focus latency around the same speed as the competition. On the other hand, the default capture speed is really quite long, although this is really mostly due to the RAW capture as turning off RAW capture dramatically speeds up response time in the camera to a much more respectable ~750 ms.

Still Image Performance

Quibbles with the camera application aside, it's important to look at the results that the OnePlus One's camera is capable of putting out. While it was effectively impossible to properly frame the ISO chart for resolution testing, we can look at a broad range of other situations that can help to distinguish the OnePlus One's camera one way or another.

In this example, the OnePlus One really does a good job with handling fine detail and dynamic range. There's relatively little artifacting given the sheer amount of detail that has to be captured in this landscape shot, and there's very little blurring of detail. Unfortunately, we can already start to see some luminance and color noise, as seen on the building on the left side of the photo.

In the interest of documenting camera behavior with the various OTAs, I managed to take a few lightbox photos with the OnePlus One as well. In this scene, we can see that the pre-38R the camera has similar behavior, but with much more detail preserved when viewed at 100%. Unfortunately, this also comes with rather significant luminance noise despite strong lighting to keep the camera at a relatively low ISO.

Unfortunately, the camera software is also lacking when it comes to HDR mode. A good HDR mode is almost required at this point as these smartphone cameras have so little dynamic range, and this is where the OnePlus One also falls short. Significant halos can be seen all around high-contrast areas. On the bright side, the output does have very high dynamic range, but it is glaringly obvious when used. This is especially odd as the IMX214 supports SME-HDR, which makes it possible to do HDR within a single photo instead of requiring multiple exposures that can cause these halos and ghosting effects.

On the other end of the spectrum, the OnePlus One is really a bit disappointing in low light. As one can see, before the 38R update there was effectively zero attempt at noise reduction in low light, and even when shrunk to 678 pixels wide it's pretty obvious that there is an immense amount of color noise. At 100%, there are even hot pixels present that make for an incredibly poor image. The slow shutter mode does make for some incredible quality, but this requires a tripod as exposure time can easily reach a second or more.

Thankfully, with recent updates OnePlus has added some level of noise reduction to the camera processing. Unfortunately, this doesn't fix much as pretty much any low contrast detail is smeared away and areas that don't have detail loss from noise reduction have significant amounts of noise. However, OnePlus is far from the only OEM that has these issues as the Galaxy S5 LTE-A actually has a bit less detail in this test scene despite the larger sensor size. The new updates have also made it extremely difficult to get a photo without significant blur from hand shake with RAW capture on, so this is an issue to consider as well.

On the bright side, with the flash on the OnePlus One does a respectable job. I don't see any real issues here, although the LEDs are a bit on the weak side compared to other devices that I've used this year. Overall, the camera of the OnePlus One is really just average at best. In daytime the camera is definitely quite good but there's already a lot of noise creeping into the photos before we consider low light photos. While the results are better than what we see with devices like the Galaxy S5, this comes at the cost of high amounts of shutter lag and motion blur.

Video Performance

On the video side of things, we see a relatively standard array of formats and bit-rates. For 1080p video, one can choose between 30 and 60 FPS for 20 and 38 Mbps baseline H.264, respectively. There's also 4K DCI and 4K UHD video recording, which are at 24 and 30 FPS respectively. In the case of 4K DCI (4096x2160) it seems that the bit rate is at 62 Mbps while 4K UHD (3840x2160) is at 60 Mbps. Like both 1080p formats, this seems to be also encoded in H.264 baseline instead of high profile, which is a bit strange. The 720p120 format ends up being encoded as a 30fps file for 1/4th time slow motion, and uses 14 Mbps H.264 baseline.

In the case of 1080p30, quality is relatively good although there continues to be a great deal of noise present throughout the video. There isn't any obvious macroblocking though. The EIS performance is definitely a bit disappointing, as there really isn't much in the way of compensation for hand-shake or other unintended motion.

Similar to the 1080p30 sample, it's clear that the quality of the encoded video is quite good with relatively few obvious artifacts. Unfortunately, the sensor is being pushed a bit far here as the amount of noise present is significant. In addition, EIS seems to be completely absent here as it's pretty much impossible to see what's happening unless I'm standing still. Overall, quality should be great but  the Galaxy Note 4 and other phones with OIS will be much better for video.

Software

While software tends to be a bit of a side note in reviews, it really is a crucial part of the experience. Without a good UI, the entire experience can be ruined as a result of these issues. This leads us to CM11S, the first official UI released by Cyanogen. For the most part, this UI really is just a lightly re-touched version of what we see in Nexus devices, but with a large number of extra features. For example, we see a revamp of the quick settings menu, with horizontal quick settings in the notification drawer along with a large number of available quick settings tiles in the quick settings menu.

Of course, CM11S goes much deeper. There really is an immense amount of customization available to the end user, from a custom boot animation to new icons, fonts, wallpapers, sounds, and overall system UI themes. While Holo is the official AOSP UI, CM11S ships with Hexo which is largely similar to Holo, but with a strong emphasis on hexagons throughout the UI. Many of the modifications that one might be used to from a custom ROM are present here, such as the ability to dynamically change the battery icon in the status bar, the way that the clock is displayed, reception representation, gestures to turn on the flashlight or the display, re-mapping the rather dim capacitive buttons, enabling or disabling on screen buttons, permissions management, changing the size of a pattern unlock, changing the lock screen altogether, and similar customizations.

While one can spend their time defending choice for the sake of choice, I definitely question the value of all of these additions. While some will value the ability to deeply customize their OS, for anyone that is even remotely unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of CyanogenMod and Cyanogen they will find their experience to be deeply frustrating. While I've already detailed some of the usability issues present in the camera application, many of these features fundamentally don't make sense. The notification drawer's "quick access ribbon" out of the box is simply a row of icons that can have very little meaning at times. While one can guess that an airplane is for airplane mode and a flashlight is for the torch, a circular arrow is utterly ambiguous in nature. Given the quick access nature of this menu, one might guess that this is a rotation lock toggle but for one reason or another it's actually the auto-sync toggle.

These issues extend to the point of being outright frustrating for average users. While one might guess that setting up lockscreen protection through the security menu as with almost every other UI, CM11S places it in the lockscreen menu which definitely can make for some level of difficulty in adapting from other devices. Something as simple as the pattern lock becomes complicated as one is given an almost ridiculous amount of choice from a 3x3 to 6x6 pattern. While a 4x4 or 3x3 pattern makes sense, 5x5 or 6x6 is almost guaranteed to be wholly unnecessary for an OS that's supposed to target a large number of users that may or may not be accustomed to the Cyanogen UI experience.

Finally, it's hard to argue for extensive customization of most visual aspects, as it's really far too easy for themes to rapidly diverge from meshing with Google design lines quite rapidly. While I'm sure that there are people out there that will like whatever themes are available using the CM11 theme engine, it's really hard to argue that this is a good thing for cohesive experience. The sheer number of issues with the camera alone is enough to question whether this level of customization is worth dealing with the likelihood of buggy releases.

While there are a lot of issues with Cyanogen's approach of throwing every possible option to the user, to their credit a great deal of the experience does come out quite enjoyable once one has spent enough time actually figuring out what each option does. For example, while on most phones it's pretty easy to fill the status bar with an NFC indicator, WiFi, cellular reception icons, battery icons, battery percentage text, and the time, this can be avoided on the OnePlus One. Various elements can be removed if desired, and things like the privacy guard application allow for a great deal of fine-tuning to ensure that applications don't have more permissions than necessary, although this could cause unintended behavior in an application. In addition, the overall experience has been consistently smooth and performant, with no real lag. The real issue here is that CM11S has taken the kitchen-sink approach to UI design, to the detriment of the user.

CPU Performance

As SoC performance is still crucial for a good experience, there continues to be a need for good benchmarks of overall system performance, along with targeted benchmarks to better understand each aspect of the SoC. For the most part the Snapdragon 801 is a known quantity at this point, but it's worth going over again just to make sure that performance is as expected. In order to test this, we use a suite of browser benchmarks and Basemark OS II to get overall performance.

As one can see, the OnePlus One scores quite similarly to everything else on the market. This isn't really a surprise, as pretty much everyone is using the same SoC at this point.

Cheating

While for the most part we've seen an end to cheating in benchmarks, there are still a few remaining OEMs that seem to insist on continuing this behavior. Unfortunately, it seems that OnePlus is one of these OEMs. However it seems that this is limited to Antutu, which sees the rather simplistic behavior of hotplugging all cores at maximum frequency when the application is launched.

GPU Performance

As always, it's important to test the performance of the GPU in order to better understand how a device will perform in workloads such as 3D gaming and similar situations. In the case of the OnePlus One and its Snapdragon 801 SoC, we're looking at an Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 578 MHz. While this is a known quantity by this point, it's still worth going over simply to verify that performance is in line with what we expect from this setup.

As one might be able to guess, the OnePlus One's graphics performance is where we expect it to be. At this point in the device lifecycle, the OnePlus One ends up behind the latest and greatest, but performance is more than acceptable as most of the GPU performance gains are spent on driving higher resolutions instead of better performance.

NAND Performance

In truth, storage performance tends to fall to the background on the long list of things that affect user experience. However, while it takes large improvements for a user to notice faster storage, poor storage performance is extremely obvious and painful to live with. To test this, we use Androbench with some custom settings to reduce variability in results. While Androbench seems to be an invalid test on Android 5.0, on Android 4.4 the test continues to work well for its purpose so we can disclose these results.

In this test, it's clear that OnePlus has kitted out the One with some extremely high-quality NAND (which appears to be a Toshiba solution) , but random I/O isn't quite as impressive. This may be due to the controller used. At any rate, one shouldn't have any problems with lag resulting from poor storage performance as the eMMC used in this device is incredibly high-end for a device of this price.

WiFi

On the OnePlus One, it's quite surprising to see the retention of 802.11ac WiFi as such features are often the first to be cut to reduce the price of a product. In the case of the OnePlus One, we see Qualcomm Atheros' WCN3680 solution, which is a single spatial stream for a maximum physical link rate of 433 Mbps. While the physical link rate is one thing, practical bandwidth and performance is another. In order to test this, we use iperf on Android with Asus' RT-AC68U for maximum perfomance in this area.

In this test, I saw that the OnePlus One noticeably out-performed the rest of the single stream competition, but I suspect that there are some irregularities here as iperf would report bandwidth above 433 Mbps in certain cases. Subjectively, there are no real issues with WiFi performance and one should have little issue with this on the OnePlus One.

GNSS

As one might have guessed, the OnePlus One leverages the on-die modem for GNSS. This means that one can expect IZat (GPSOne) gen 8B. In general, I haven't found any issues with GPS on this device. With a cold lock (airplane mode on, no assistance data) I found that it took around 50 seconds to first acquire position, then around another 30 seconds to get high accuracy.

Misc

The haptic feedback on the OnePlus One is noticeably different from every other device I've used, with much more noise than vibration. The same TI BQ27541 fuel gauge is shared with the Oppo Find 7A, as is the TI BQ24196 charger chip. Reception, at least for T-Mobile US' band 4/AWS LTE is noticeably worse than most devices that I've tried. The dual speakers are loud and the quality is relatively good, but no better than what one might find on the iPhone 6.

Final Words

The OnePlus One is quite possibly the most interesting phone I’ve seen in a while, and reviewing this device was extremely difficult due to how frustrating some aspects of the device were. OnePlus itself is a company that seems to come from nowhere, although it’s evident to some extent that OnePlus and Oppo are currently quite close in the production of these devices as a great deal is shared with the Oppo Find 7A. Aside from this, the One is a critical device as it seems to be the phone that could be the first to kill the concept of a 650 USD flagship smartphone. In order to figure out whether OnePlus has succeeded, it’s important to revisit all aspects under review before passing any final judgments.

To start, OnePlus really has nailed the industrial and material design of the One. While it certainly isn’t an aluminum unibody, it’s a far cry from the glossy plastic designs that are often quite popular with OEMs. The entire design clearly has had a great deal of thought put into it, from the earpiece to the sandstone finish. It’s often said that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a plastic phone. In this case, OnePlus has definitely done it right. The minimal design is definitely appreciated, as is the in-hand feel from the shape and materials of the device. Unfortunately, this phone is just far too big for one-handed use. If the LG G3 was on the edge of one-handed usability, this goes just a step further. The larger bezels and more angular shape of the OnePlus One make it extremely difficult to use with one hand, and is therefore best compared against phablets.

One of the main justifications for pushing the limits of size so much with “phones” is because this makes it possible to push larger batteries and therefore more battery life. In this regard, the OnePlus One definitely justifies its larger size. The battery life of the OnePlus One is class-leading, and it’s really unlike anything else on the market today. The OnePlus One also manages to post impressive sustained performance scores, which speaks to the larger surface area and efficient thermal design of the One. Surprisingly, despite the large battery the One charges almost as quickly as phones with QC 2.0 fast charging.

The other high point worth talking about is the display. Despite the low price, the display on the OnePlus One is decidedly high end. The color calibration is almost as good as it gets for a smartphone, with high brightness and relatively high contrast. There are some issues with viewing angles, but these are generally quite minor in nature.

OnePlus has also managed to deliver a high-end SoC for a decidedly mid-range price. While it’s disappointing to see benchmark cheating, it seems that this behavior is isolated for the most part. The Snapdragon 801 in the One performs identically to everything else with the same SoC, which is definitely good to see. In the same vein, it’s great to see OnePlus shipping incredibly fast NAND in this device with reasonably-priced storage tiering.

However, the OnePlus One is far from perfect. While the hardware is great for the most part, the camera and the camera experience are deeply disappointing. While the Nexus 5 didn’t have the best camera in the world, it managed to ship with some sort of noise reduction and hot pixel removal to improve final image quality. The OnePlus One shipped with approximately none of these things and a rather painful camera application. While one can get by with using this application, it’s much easier to use Google Camera instead of the Cyanogen camera. Despite this and updates to add image processing, I’m still not all that impressed by the camera. This update has also made it effectively impossible to take photos off-hand in low light, as the 1/6 second shutter speed is far too long for a camera without OIS.

Unfortunately, these issues with the camera UI can be seen in the software experience as a whole. There is a strong and consistent focus on presenting as many options and features as possible to the detriment of user friendliness. While I appreciate the extent of customization available throughout the OS, it feels as if it’s still very much the same XDA ROM with a serious lack of polish. I suspect that this has little to do with OnePlus though, as Cyanogen is the one that seems to be driving UI decisions more than anything. Regardless of where the fault lies, it’s critical for these issues to be resolved for the OnePlus Two.

Overall though, the OnePlus One isn’t a bad phone by any means. It remains one of the cheapest devices with Snapdragon 801 on the market, and the hardware on offer is really something great. However, there is a disappointing level of polish in this product. This doesn’t make the OnePlus One a bad phone, but it this does mean that it won’t kill the flagship model any time soon. There are too many issues to directly compare this phone to other high-end smartphones without bringing the price of the phone into the equation. However, taking into account the extremely low price the OnePlus One is well worth comparing to other high-end devices. The OnePlus One has compromises like every other device. Whether these compromises are acceptable is up to the buyer to decide.