OnePlus, a company launched a few years ago has now got the eyes of the world on it. The company has got a huge success, trust and positive vibes from people around the world. The approach of OnePlus is simple and clear. They make smartphones at cheaper prices and sell them with a somewhat less profitable price, unlike those big companies who want to make a huge cake of money at once. There has been ups and downs to the companies as well. We can forgive them for that, it’s still a new company, though.
Well, let’s talk about their device offerings. The OnePlus One, OnePlus 2, OnePlus 3, OnePlus 3T (No “4” because “4” is considered unlucky in China, however), and finally the recently launched OnePlus 5. Just 6 months after the launch of OnePlus 3T, the company took a quick leap toward the OnePlus 5. We have also got a new color added to the OnePlus 5’s color range as well and it is nothing but “Soft Gold”. So is it worth an upgrade from the OnePlus 3 or 3T? Is it the smartphone you need to consider for the price listing? Let’s check it out in our full detailed review today.
Design
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The most controversial topic for the OnePlus has been the Design itself. Many users including me at the first will say it resembles an iPhone 7 Plus from the back. But trust me, take the phone in your hands and you’ll definitely feel the difference it makes from the iPhone 7 Plus. It’s not a big problem for me at all. The OnePlus 5’s ergonomic hand feeling with a thickness of 7.25 mm thickness just feels like nothing in the hand. As I referred to the design resemblance earlier, the OnePlus 5 brings those antenna lines go around the parameter to make them less noticeable unlike the old OnePlus 3 and the 3T.
From the front, the device looks just same like the OnePlus 3 and 3T. The button placement, the screen to body ratio, the front camera, and the speaker are exactly in the same position. The proximity sensors are barely visible. On the bottom of the phone, we get our speakers, USB Type-C port, primary mic, and the legendary headphone jack itself. To the right, we get our SIM tray (Dual Nano SIM slots) and the power key whereas to the left side, we’ve our same old volume rockers and the amazing “Alert Slider”. Turning to the back side, we’ve got the “Dual Camera” setup here with LED flash and secondary noise-cancelling mic. Just below that we’ve our company’s logo engraved into the metallic body super great.
The device feels lightweight, slim, and comfortable in our hands but is somewhat slippery concurrently as well. Other than that, I’m happy with the design.
Display
The display on the OnePlus 5 has been unchanged from the OnePlus 3 or 3T. But still, the Optic AMOLED display looks good with 1080p resolution and 401-pixel density. The colors are a little bit saturated but the ability to change the color mode in the settings is pretty cool. You can change your screen calibration to sRGB, DCI-P3 or make your custom one as well. I would like to have the DCI-P3 but still, the default display calibration is much better to me at least.
The blacks on this display look completely black since the pixels are turned off at the time. Well, a pretty good advantage to AMOLED displays when it comes to saving battery. The colors are good to look at and they pop up well and even in the bright sunlight, the screen can be viewed without much of a problem. Well, the interesting thing comes in when you notice the “Reading Mode” feature. If you’re a book reader, then you would love to read books on this device. Just like Kindle, the “Reading Mode” disables all the colors except black and white to give you a comfortable reading view. Other than that, just like older phones from OnePlus, we get that smart old “Night Mode” feature which scales down the blues on the display.
The screen is a 2.5D curved screen with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection but still, it does have that screen protector pre-installed out of the box somehow to resist scratches to the main display. If you would ask me about the display in terms, I would say it is pretty good and not to worry about.
Performance
In case if you don’t know, the OnePLus 5 comes in two different variants – one being the Soft Gold and Slate Gray variant with 64GB of internal storage and 6GB of RAM whereas the Midnight Black variant comes with 128GB of internal storage and 8GB of RAM. The Midnight Black variant is crazy fast and comes with a price tag as well. So in this review, we used the 6 GB RAM variant available. Apart from all these, we get the crazy fast Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset with Adreno 540 GPU on both the variants.
As you would expect, the performance on the OnePlus 5 is really amazing and just performs much better than those of the high-end flagships available out right now. Apps and games open up quickly and just works buttery smooth. Compared to OnePlus 3 and 3T, the touch to feels very much improved on the OnePlus 5 as well. With that 6GB or 8GB of RAM, the phone never gets tired at all. Even I keep opening my apps one by one and keeping the apps in the background, the phone still works like it is snappy after all. This is also because of the factor that the OnePlus 5 has a UFS 2.1 dual lane based storage system which speeds up the things.
Coming to gaming, the OnePlus 5 just seems to be capable of handling any game I throw at it. I would say it just outperforms many devices available in that pricing. I ran through Assassin’s Creed, Temple Run, Asphalt 8, Mortal Kombat, Pokemon Go, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and much more. Still, it ran all of them and even most of the times, they were still in the RAM very well.
I would say that I was very much improved with the performance on the OnePlus 5 very much. It is just amazing and I love the performance.
Software
The best part of every OnePlus device is the software. Just like its predecessors, the OnePlus 5 also runs on Oxygen OS on top of Android 7.1.1 Nougat. And what I like about it is that Oxygen OS adds more features to the stock Android without taking in the feel of stock Android. It’s the only custom ROM I’ve seen to be working pretty great without any lags.
We get some extra few tweaks like the Shelf, switching between on and off screen navigation buttons, Theme changing, Reading mode, Gaming do not disturb mode and much more. If I continue to speak about the Software, there are a lot of things to say but I think this is enough to give you an idea of the software. But, the software experience is really amazing on the OnePlus 5.
Camera
Here’s the thing where OnePlus wants to stand out, the camera. When it comes to the camera, the OnePlus 5 comes with dual rear cameras. One of them being a 16MP lens with f/1.7 aperture whereas the other lens is a 20 MP one with an aperture of f/2.6, though. Talking about the camera, the dual camera lenses here used on a OnePlus are handy when it comes to Depth Mode (Portrait Mode) and even 2x lossless zoom (1.6x optical zoom and 0.4x digital zoom).
When we take a look at the images coming from the OnePlus 5, the photos are well detailed and crispy at the same time. When it comes to photos with great lighting, they look too good and the details are well preserved too. The telephoto lens on the other side is a great way to take those macro shots very well and you can also call the feature as “Depth Mode” because that is what OnePlus says. But when it comes to color reproduction from the telephoto lens, the colors go more to the natural side.
And thus the day transforms to night, the time when the shots were taken using the telephoto lens, it struggled to take in more light. They get noisy with flares all over. So using the main lens in the night time can help you out most of the times.
When it comes to the selfie game, the OnePlus 5 packs in a 16 MP front-facing camera which in turn takes very good selfies just like the ones on the Pixel. When the phone finds itself in low-light conditions, then it maximizes the screen brightness with a white color and that helps in getting the selfies very good at night time.
Talking about the video, the OnePlus 5 is capable of recording 4K at 30fps and 1080p at 60fps. There is no OIS this time so the OnePlus 5 depends upon the EIS (software stabilization) and it turns out to be pretty smooth. While recording it’s good to be on the main lens because the telephoto lens lacks the EIS. Even when we take a look at the front camera, we get EIS there too which is pretty great for some vloggers.
The camera keeps improving with the software upgrade which is quite regular. In overall, the camera on the OnePlus 5 is pretty great and amazing but it is not that great as they hyped it for sure. But I would say that this is one of those great cameras available in smartphones in the current market.
Battery
It is known that the battery on the OnePlus 5 is shrunk down by 100mAh from the OnePlus 3T’s 3,400 mAh battery. But actually, the 3,300 mAh battery on the OnePlus 5 is much better over the one on OnePlus 3T. And with heavy use like I do every time, the OnePlus 5 seems to last me about a day. Before going to sleep, I do still have some juice left on my battery and with the recent software update, the standby time has been improved a lot. If you’re a light user then you might get the battery level up to 50% left by the end of the day. I got a screen-on-time of roughly more than 6 hours which was pretty great indeed.
Even if you’re out of charge, the world’s fastest charging solution has got you covered. The “Dash Charge” on the quick side, charges your phone to about 60% in less than 30 mins. And from an empty state to full happens in about 1 hour 20 mins. Just use “Dash Charge” once, and you’ll never look back to other charging solutions ever. I was really impressed with the battery on my OnePlus 5 very much.
Pricing and Verdict
The OnePlus 5 is priced at Rs. 32,999 for the 6GB RAM variant with 64GB of internal memory which comes in Soft Gold and Slate Gray colors. The Soft Gold is a limited edition and is available for less time. And this is the variant that is worth for the price what you’re paying for. And if you consider getting the 8GB RAM variant, that wouldn’t be a great choice, unless and until you want 128GB of storage. It is sure that the OnePlus has risen up its prices little higher but it is still way lesser than what the other flagships out there.
If you’re thinking to get a stock Android phone with all the flagship specifications, better camera, and performance, then the OnePlus 5 is the right choice for you. And it still does has its own downsides like the other flagships do as well. The OnePlus 5 lacks the wireless charging, waterproofing and also expandable storage. As a final verdict, I would say not to brainstorm your mind and just proceed to buy this one for the price.
