Even if you're not a fan of their hype machinery, you have to give OnePlus credit for turning out impressive flagship challengers at sub-flagship prices.
The success of the OnePlus 3 and the OnePlus 3T meant that the successor always had big shoes to fill. Does the OnePlus 5, the most expensive OnePlus smartphone yet, pull off the same trick in 2017?
Pros:
- Classy design, if somewhat derivative and generic
- Class-leading specs and performance
- Dash Charge and Oxygen OS (OnePlus’ secret sauce)
- Primary camera captures good detail
Cons:
- Average dual camera and low-light results
- Non-waterproof screen and bezels from 2016
- Electronic image stabilisation isn’t optical image stabilisation. Period
What’s Good?
The design is, for the lack of a better word, familiar, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a mature and well-thought out design, with its 7.25mm slim, brushed metal body and rounded corners that feel great in the hand and in the pocket.
The alert slider, a hugely understated design element in OnePlus phones, makes a comeback, as do the now-standard 5.5-inch display and a regular-sized helping of bezels, which means that the 5 certainly skips the 2017 trend of minimal bezels and expansive edge-to-edge displays.
Speaking of which, the AMOLED panel on the 5 pushes out punchy colors with great contrast and brightness levels, and there’s even the option to switch between sRGB and the newly added DCI-P3 color profiles if you’re not a fan of the vivid colors.
Turn it around, and that’s where you notice the big external changes. Gone is the center-aligned single camera, replaced by a horizontal dual camera setup on the top left corner.
Now, to call it an iPhone clone would be a bit of stretch – there are only so many ways you can place two cameras next to each other, and sure, the antenna strips are a wee bit familiar, but the device feels significantly different from Apple’s product in the hand.
It does look an awful lot like sister-company Oppo’s R11 though, and I wish OnePlus had added some unique elements to the 5. The fingerprint sensor and a 3.5mm headphone port makes the cut, but it’s a real shame that OnePlus couldn’t make it waterproof.
The big win for the OnePlus 5 is just how lightning quick it is, no matter what you throw at it. The spec sheet is insane – a top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with either 6 or 8GB of memory and fast UFS 2.1 storage, all of which contribute to snappy app load times, excellent gaming response and a stupendous amount of apps that stay in memory ready to be picked up where you left off.
Everything about using this device seems optimised for speed, and it’s noticeable even when you navigate around the almost spartan and near-vanilla Oxygen OS (based on Android 7.1.1). Pity OnePlus is now dealing with a BenchmarkGate of its own making – the device is screaming fast in everyday use and really didn't need to fudge (or as OnePlus puts it, more accurately represent) any numbers.
Is 8 gigs of RAM an overkill? Probably. But pulling off a more fluid and smooth Android experience than even the Google Pixel is no mean achievement.
Equally speedy is its proprietary Dash Charging tech, which is rather handy if you’ve had a particularly heavy day of use and want the phone to see you through till the morning.
On normal days, the 3,300mAh battery on the OnePlus 5 sees me through a full day of use, and if you remember to carry the slightly bulky Dash Charge adapter, topping it up even when you have a little bit of downtime is pretty snappy.
By now, the Oxygen OS is familiar to anyone who’s used the OnePlus 3 or 3T. Aside from the regular tweaks and gesture controls, there’s a new Do Not Disturb mode specifically for gaming, which blocks annoying notifications when you’re in the middle of a game, and a new Reading mode which makes the screen render in grayscale when you launch apps like the Kindle app, making the reading experience easier on the eyes.
Dual Camera
The big focus this time is the dual camera setup, so much so that the ‘Dual Camera. Clearer Photos’ tagline makes its way onto the box – twice!
You get a 16-megapixel IMX398 sensor with a wide-angle f/1.7 lens for the primary camera, with a secondary 20-megapixel IMX350 sensor with an f/2.6 telephoto lens, in a setup that would offer you lossless zoom much like the iPhone 7 Plus does.
The primary shooter is super quick to focus, and captures lots of detail with good dynamic range in good light conditions.
In dim light, image noise and softened edges become a bit of an issue, and you’d be well advised to use the Pro mode for manually tweaking the ISO, white balance, shutter speed and focus to eke more out of the camera.
The OnePlus 5’s lack of OIS is felt most when you’re using the telephoto lens to shoot a subject without blurring – you get EIS (electronic image stabilisation) only on the primary sensor. It works sometimes, just not consistently enough to be reliable.
It’s worth noting that the phone only switches to the second sensor when you’re in regular Photo mode and there’s enough ambient lighting, and any zoom you see in other modes is digital in nature.
The dual cameras also deliver a bokeh-licious Portrait mode. If you think the name is familiar (the 7 Plus also calls it a Portrait mode), the approach is similar to Apple’s as well. Using depth-sensing software, the rear camera blurs out the background to give you those oh-so-pleasing portraits (though it works on inanimate objects as well).
The effect is hit and miss, sometimes more so than the iPhone, especially when you’re dealing with charecteristics like stray hair or completely bald heads.
The iPhone’s bokeh effect also results in more natural looking portraits than the OnePlus 5, with the latter often blurring the background a little too harshly and somewhat too digitally, if you know what I mean. The selfie camera, a 16MP shooter with a screen flash, captures exceptionally detailed selfies in varying light conditions – maybe hanging around with the “Selfie Experts” has done the OnePlus 5 some good?
What’s Bad?
A casual observer looking at the OnePlus 5 (from the front) would be hard pressed to tell it apart from the 3/3T, which also means you’re looking at a pretty similar 1080p AMOLED panel instead of a jump to 1440p.
While it can be argued that a full-HD screen is good enough for most folks, many of whom may not even notice the extra pixels which, by the way, guzzle a whole lot more battery than a full HD display, it’s an odd stance to take for a company that asks you to “never settle” to not offer the option of a higher resolution display on the flagship that will see them through the rest of 2017 and early 2018.
It’s not something that terribly impacts the experience of using the device on a daily basis, but considering the bump up in price, the average consumer wouldn’t be wrong to demand more.
A few other details are missing – there’s no video stabilisation at 4K, while you get USB Type C for charging and data transfer, you’re still stuck with USB 2.0 speeds on the port.
Why Buy It?
Look, here’s the thing – the OnePlus is a pretty great phone, even though it isn’t the big leap forward from the 3T that the world at large expected it to be. Yet, the asking price has shot up north to Rs 32,999 for the 64GB/6GB RAM variant and Rs 37,999 for the 128GB/8GB variant, which in and of itself is still pretty good value, and it’s only real competition even now is the OnePlus 3T.
It’s got great performance, Dash Charge and the Oxygen OS mated to top notch hardware acts as its secret sauce. The features like the dual camera can get better with time and software updates – remember how bad the Portrait mode on the 7 Plus was when it first came out?
That said, OnePlus prices remain pretty consistent over the life-cycle of the product, while the 2017 class of flagships from Samsung and LG will lower prices in due course. It’s not unimaginable that four to six months down, OnePlus’ large advantage on pricing may well have eroded, and then consumers will start considering the stuff it’s missing a little more seriously.
(Tushar Kanwar is a technology columnist and commentator and has been contributing for the past 15 years to India’s leading newspapers and magazines. He can be reached at @2shar.)
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