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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
148 Comments
View All Comments
nspyraishn - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I would contend the "too big to use with one hand" issue is overblown. I have been using it for a while now and have no problem using it with one hand. MMV, but claiming "it's almost impossible to use it comfortably with one hand" is just plain not accurate, and reflects a strong bias by the reviewers against larger phones. I would contend that if you used the phone a bit longer, you would likely come to appreciate the larger "phablet" size, and find that particularly for its diE it's surprisingly comfortable to use due to innovative form factor design choices. Other than that, a solid review :)Socius - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
How does it feel to be the idiot who benchmarked this phone on the "balanced" performance profile? Lol. Change CPU to performance mode in settings for serious gaming or benchmarking and you'll see those results jump significantly.Also regarding your comment about cheating...you're being disingenuous. Cheaters clock the chips higher than stock, and temporarily increase thermal limits in order to get performance that wouldn't ordinarily happen. The "cheating" by switching to 2.5GHz is actually a feature in the phone for "per application performance profile." The phone comes with "balanced" mode preselected. But runs An tutu in performance mode, which is a fully selectable and sustainable mode as even your benchmarks showed little to no throttling happening.
Poor review, IMO.
HubbaMaBubba - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Holy shit, I didn't notice that. For everyday usage balanced is the best though, so it makes the most sense for the benchmark.Socius - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Actually for daily use I stick to power saver. Other phones benchmarked don't have the CPU profiler installed at stock. So for benchmarking, performance mode should be enabled. And even if you disagree with that, even though the other phones you're comparing to are running in performance mode all the time, you can't make the claim that this phone cheats on benchmarks by running in performance mode.And for the record...in performance mode, this phone dominates all other android devices.
mrex - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Lol, funny =) hopefully he checked also it is not running max 1036mhz. It is a known faulty setting, and easily fixed by enabling developer options and check that cpu is running at it should and not locked to max 1036mhz. I actually had that issue, and in the performance mode it was still running at 1036mhz before i checked that setting.mrex - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Hit the submit button accidentally. I was sarcastic about did he check the mhz before testing (his phone was running correctly), but if you feel your phone is slow, check your phone isnt set to max 1036mhz.Jc.ray - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I've been using it for a month. Besides some initial bugs to make it work properly which where solved in a couple of weeks I have no other complains. You might prefer to start using two hands for typing but many of us already where doing that with tiny iphone4, as for the rest I am able to manage everything in one hand which in my case is not particularly big. As for the phablet: yes, here is the measure, as much as I love it I haven't used my ipad mini not even once since I received oneplusone, you can just do everything here so, if any, biggest danger is how you scale your internet use for any porpoise with this devicejomo60 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
"First, the size is definitely too much to handle".The opo is 152.9mm x 75.9mm, the iphone 6+ is 158mm x78mm.
Your iphone 6+ review had no problem with a phone larger than the oneplus one, and rounded corners "feature" does not make a screen more reachable.
mrex - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
What else can you expect nowadays? Unfortunately I feel that you dont get objective reviews about apple anymore from anandtech. This is a good example.neogodless - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Re: terrible camerahttp://robinwong.blogspot.com/2014/09/oneplus-one-...
The hardware of the camera is actually pretty good. There's no getting around the lack of OIS, but otherwise it works well enough when pair with good software and capable hands.
I've had the phone for two weeks. I have little experience with Android and none with Cyanogenmod, but I was not confused about the optional... options that allow you to customize your phone, if you, you know, want to.
The battery charges quickly on my AC charger and the included USB charger, but it charges really slowly on several other micro-USB chargers that I got with Nokia and Motorola handsets over the past two years.
I did notice a little weirdness to the feel of the touch screen, but I put an amFilm screen protector on there, and have no issues now.
I use the phone about the same as I've used smaller phones, though I guess I was never much for one-handed operation. I like the stability of holding the phone and then using my other hand to do all the things.
I think the bottom line is that there's very little you give up in comparison to phones that cost $300 more. I don't think there's anything you can't live without.