The OnePlus One Review
by Joshua Ho on November 19, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Android
- Mobile
- OnePlus
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.
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melgross - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I know this may seem to be a very minor issue and nitpicking, but I would just like to comment that the thinness of the oleophobic coating, if there is one, would have no effect on the feel of the screen. You interact with the surface of the coating, not the thickness. It might lead to a shorter effective life for the coating, but not a difference in swiping feel.I bothers me, because this is something that a little bit of thought would have revealed as being illogical. And if writers write things that are illogical in one part of the article, where else will they do that where we won't notice it, and come to a wrong conclusion because of it?
cr0wb4r - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I think two options in CM11S will make all the nit picks worthwhile: Profiles and double tap to wake.Having a Home and Work profile allows me to turn off/on lock screen. Huge
Double tap to wake and see notifications and then double tap status bar area to go back to sleep. Again Huge.
Just my 2 cents on the plethora of CM11S options
cr0wb4r - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Sorry, forgot to mention that Profiles make it AUTOMATIC to turn on/off lock screen. I realize this is obvious to most...phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Profiles have been available in Android ROMs for at least a year now, if not longer. It's one of the first things I turn off when flashing an AOSP-based ROM on my phone.DT2W has been available in Android ROMs within a month or so of LG releasing their sources, as they were the first ones to enable it (works wonderfully with the LG G2 where the power button is on the back).
IOW, neither of these features are exclusive to CM 11S, or even CM, or even just AOSP.
toyotabedzrock - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I have read that the updated version of Chrome running on lollipop on the nexus 5 sees a rather large bump in the Octane benchmark.Allan_Hundeboll - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I was beginning to think this site would never review the OPO, much appreciated.But:
Oneplus One has strong reception! (But lacks LTE 800Mhz band)
And people should know that a 5.5" phablet is big, so how can the size be a problem?
Maybe the author also think the iphone 6+ is just too big? Let customers decide what screen size he/she wants, please.
Joshua Ho seem to forget this phone wasn't made for average joes! CM is all about customization so how can too many options be a problem? Please understand a lot of geeks chose android because we appreciate the almost endless possibilities and CM takes this further than google's stock android.
So this phablet is perfect for XDA members NOT for someone like my mother.
mfmx - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Are you sure your mother wouldn't like it? My grandmother that is 96 years old thinks 5,5" is the perfect size for her. Also my mother that has a 5,3" phone doesn't want a smaller device.Munna2002 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
My mother and grand aunt also like the size of the OPO.grayson_carr - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The display calibration results are perplexing to me. I know when the phone was first released, it was using a calibration profile created by then CyanogenMod employee François Simond (supercurio), who has also worked with Anandtech on reviews in the past. It didn't surprise me that the screen was very accurate then. But then a couple months ago, OnePlus released an update that did away with supercurio's calibration profile (and let supercurio go / didn't renew his contract) because too many people were complaining that the screen looked too yellow (warm), as 6500K often does to the untrained eye. The update shifted the white point drastically up to the 8000K range (super cold and blue looking) and presumably made colors less accurate. I sold the device a short time later due to annoying bugs, but now I'm confused by these results. What version of CM11S was this phone running as tested? Did you test an old version of the software or did they reinstate the proper calibration profile in a recent update? This review could mislead some people hoping for a properly calibrated screen if you did indeed test the One with the older software.techcrazy - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Where is Sony Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact review?