The OnePlus One Review
by Joshua Ho on November 19, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Android
- Mobile
- OnePlus
WiFi
On the OnePlus One, it's quite surprising to see the retention of 802.11ac WiFi as such features are often the first to be cut to reduce the price of a product. In the case of the OnePlus One, we see Qualcomm Atheros' WCN3680 solution, which is a single spatial stream for a maximum physical link rate of 433 Mbps. While the physical link rate is one thing, practical bandwidth and performance is another. In order to test this, we use iperf on Android with Asus' RT-AC68U for maximum perfomance in this area.
In this test, I saw that the OnePlus One noticeably out-performed the rest of the single stream competition, but I suspect that there are some irregularities here as iperf would report bandwidth above 433 Mbps in certain cases. Subjectively, there are no real issues with WiFi performance and one should have little issue with this on the OnePlus One.
GNSS
As one might have guessed, the OnePlus One leverages the on-die modem for GNSS. This means that one can expect IZat (GPSOne) gen 8B. In general, I haven't found any issues with GPS on this device. With a cold lock (airplane mode on, no assistance data) I found that it took around 50 seconds to first acquire position, then around another 30 seconds to get high accuracy.
Misc
The haptic feedback on the OnePlus One is noticeably different from every other device I've used, with much more noise than vibration. The same TI BQ27541 fuel gauge is shared with the Oppo Find 7A, as is the TI BQ24196 charger chip. Reception, at least for T-Mobile US' band 4/AWS LTE is noticeably worse than most devices that I've tried. The dual speakers are loud and the quality is relatively good, but no better than what one might find on the iPhone 6.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
148 Comments
View All Comments
flyingpants1 - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
It doesn't matter, since the screen takes most of the battery power. You have a point about the bezels, though.tipoo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Yes, but the added area for the battery has consistently been shown to outweigh that con, ie larger phones are nearly always at the top of the battery life charts outside of outliers like super low power SoCs or huge thick batteries.srkelley - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Honestly, the bezel sort of disappears while you're using this phone. I can definitely see how it would bother some people now, but in the end it can negligible if this is your sort of phone.Also, great review Joshua. I could not have done anything better myself here.
piroroadkill - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
"but it couldn't have accommodated such a large battery with a smaller one."So there's no way I have a 4.7" phone with a 3300mAh battery then.. oh wait, I do..
DIYEyal - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
I have a 5" phone with a 5000mAh battery.nevertell - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
"While one can guess that an airplane is for airplane mode and a flashlight is for the torch, a circular arrow is utterly ambiguous in nature. Given the quick access nature of this menu, one might guess that this is a rotation lock toggle but for one reason or another it's actually the auto-sync toggle."Yes, but this is the same icon Google has used in their quick-settings-toggle widgets, with the only difference being that in this case, the quick settings ribbon is accessible in the drop down notifications shade instead on a homsecreen. Whilst it may be hard to understand the meaning of this icon, it is not like the same icon isn't used on most other devices to represent google's autosync.
JoshHo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
The issue is that this icon is given without any text to explain what it really is. It can be obvious to some but confusing to a lot of people.metayoshi - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I don't think the Auto Sync circle-arrow has actually been in the quick settings in any official Google ROM, correct me if I'm wrong, so I feel like CM and the rest of the AOSP community may have came up with it themselves. From what I remember, you have, User, Brightness, settings, WiFi, Bluetooth, Battery, Airplane Mode, Auto Rotate, and recently, Cast Screen. Android 5.0 finally added a flashlight officially. No Auto Sync mode.metayoshi - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Correction to my post: Auto Rotate was only on Tablets. The Auto Rotate quick setting was replaced by Mobile Data on Phones.tipoo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Why does the Oneplus One set a record for final run score in the degradation test, when the 6, 6 plus, and HTC One are above it? Or is that including how long it runs relative to those?