There was a time when being on a tight budget and having to get a budget smartphone meant that you’re getting very low specs and a not so pleasant on the eye device. It seems that time is now long gone.
The OnePlus project is no stranger to adopting disruptive strategies and methods. They’ve done it time and again with their ‘Flagship Killer’, and now they’re attempting to have a go at the mid-range budget smartphone category with their latest OnePlus X. Let’s see how it fairs…
Design
Probably the best thing going for this phone is its design. Coming at the same size and weight as the iPhone 6S, it’s a beautiful slab of glass and metal that immediately catches your attention in a very positive way.
The OnePlus X smartly combines the phone’s dark aesthetic with the perfect blacks of an AMOLED display and a dark software theme, lending the device a sense of coherence. And it does make a great first impression from the moment you unbox it and hold it in your hand.
The metal sides with tiny ridges melting into the glass front and back give this phone a very premium look and feel and makes it very comfortable to hold in the hand. Much similar to the iPhone SE.
It has an alert slider on the left side that helps you switch between three modes, quiet, vibrate and full alert modes. Makes it very easy to switch between the three as and when required.
The other side of the device has the SIM card tray which accommodates 2 SIM cards or one SIM and a micro-SD Card to expand the memory. This is becoming quite standard these days and it’s nice to see this flexibility available on such a budget device.
Display
The second best thing this phone has going for it is the display. The OnePlus X comes with a gorgeous 5″ AMOLED display with 1080 x 1920 pixels at 441 ppi pixel density. It’s not Super AMOLED, but it’s quite fantastic as it is and while the colors come out vibrant and vivid, the blacks are proper blacks, lending their support to the all glass-black design of the phone, further improving its overall aesthetics.
Before you even wake the phone, lock screen gestures, like drawing a V or C, can turn on the flashlight or camera app. Ambient notifications also surface on the phone’s screen, much in the same way they do on Google’s Nexus 6P and Motorola phones. You can also double tap to wake the screen.
One place the display suffer is under direct and powerful sunlight. The glass panel coupled with the black become somewhat too reflective.
Hardware, Performance & Battery
The OnePlus X comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, Quad-core 2.3 GHz Krait 400 chipset and with LTE connectivity. It also boasts 3 GB of RAM and a tiny internal storage of 16GB, expandable to up to 256 GB via the micro-SD Card slot. There’s no NFC or a fingerprint sensor.
Performance wise, the device buzzed through quite smoothly. There weren’t any hiccups or lagging to note of, however, we did notice that it tends to slow down a bit if you’re multitasking and playing games. It’s not a power phone, so it’s understandable.
Another thing we noticed is that when it’s heavily used it tends to heat up from the back quite extensively.
The OnePlus X comes with a 2525 mAh non-removable battery. It’s decent enough for a phone this size, but again, not enough for power users, but more than enough for regular users. I spent a day casually using it, a few phone calls, texting, moderate social media usage, and the battery lasted for about 18 hours on one charge.
Spent another day playing games (with lots of display ON time), chatting and doing the usual, it died out on me by hour 10 or so.
This is quite standard for a phone and a battery this size, that’s why power users usually opt for larger phones that come with larger batteries.
Software
If there’s one thing that consistently stands out across the OnePlus devices is that it’s probably one of the most customizable smartphones in the market. Every single thing on this phone is customizable, the notification LED light, the back, home and recent apps touch sensitive buttons, the layout of the display/apps/widgets, the themes used, everything can be customized to your preference and liking.
There’s also a side menu (much like Google Now on Nexus and Blinkfeed on HTC), which OnePlus calls Shelf, plays host to your most used apps and contacts and also offers room for extra widgets. It can be disabled if you don’t find it useful.
The phone is running the firm’s own Oxygen OS which is based on Android 5.1 Lollipop. It’s extremely close to a vanilla Android experience, in fact, at first I thought it was.
Camera
The OnePlus X carries a 13Mp camera at the rear with an LED flash. It shoots in a 4:3 aspect ratio by default (as does the front camera), and the app is simplistic. There’s no optical image stabilization but there is phase detection auto focus.
The results are good but generally not great and we’ve seen much better 13MP cameras. At the front is an 8MP camera, which is good but not quite as detailed and sharp as we normally find at this resolution.
It’s also worth noting that I’ve taken the phone with me on a noisy night out with some friends and attempted to shoot some video. The ambient lighting in the venue was low and the music was loud. The video was decent, the sound was completely botched on playback though. All I could hear was noise.
On the plus side, video shoots in slow motion as well as timelapse modes. Check out the videos taken below in all 3 modes (including regular):
Tried taking some pictures with low light settings as well, results weren’t promising at all. Especially when using the front camera.
Conclusion
The OnePlus X impresses when pulled straight out of the box. The design is sleek and sexy and the vanilla-like, yet highly customizable, Android experience is one we often wish for when using devices by other makers.
This impression starts to somewhat fade away though once the battery starts running out if you’re a power user or when you take pictures and videos on your nights out with friends.
At $249 only, this remains to be a budget phone that attempts to sway buyers purely on looks and price point. The phone has a few more things going for it like software simplicity and customizability, but not much else.
