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.
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tipoo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
That last part wouldn't make sense either, the M8 and 6 Plus have longer battery life during the test too.tipoo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Oh yeah, and I'm pleasantly surprised this phone is getting a review at all, having much less mass consumer knowledge than some others despite a strong enthusiast following (yay, us!).JoshHo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Compared to S801 devices the OnePlus One throttles relatively little.tipoo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Ah, thanks for explaining. Any idea why this is? Just a big chassis, or the heat spreader on it, or software?jjj - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
You need to at least specify what NAND the iphone you tested are using,All the iphone 6 and 6 plus numbers are compromised by Apple's usage of both MLC and TLC. You got major NAND perf and RAM usage differences and that should impact pretty much all the numbers.
ziangc - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
thanks for the review :) that mentioned, would a comparison with the Oppo Find 7 yield a similar review conclusion? being a user of the Find 7, i would be interested to hear your 2 cents' worth on it as well.jjj - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
"the first to kill the concept of a 650 USD"Hilariously how little you know and understand the market.
tipoo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Go on? If you're thinking subsidized prices, you're still paying for that one way or another. The cost of the phone is included in the bill. Besides that, most carriers will take some percent off your bill if you bring your own phone. And besides *that*, some carriers just have plain crappy phones.tipoo - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Also for someone like me, I like having a smartphone, but since I'm in a wifi zone for so much of my life I don't bother paying for data. Bill is so much cheaper.Flunk - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
That's funny, I thought I bought a Nexus 5 for $350 without carrier of any kind last year.