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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Harry_Wild - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I saw many interviews were Android App developers were ask what personal phone they are using responded shyly - "iPhone #*". So, that explains many things here!grayson_carr - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I am an iOS developer and my current phone of choice is the Nexus 5.Conficio - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Care to link to at least three of these "interviews"coburn_c - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Why do your custom screen and battery tests never line up with gsmarena? Their screen results always have different white brightness levels then yours, and their battery tests are always more in line with synthetic scores than yours. They put the contrast of this things screen at 800:1 and the battery life below the G3.2kfire - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Re: battery, GSMArena uses 50% instead of a fixed luminance.Cinnabuns - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Just to add to what 2kfire pointed out, the author states:"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."
I would not trust GSMArena's battery tests as they do not understand how to perform a controlled test.
coburn_c - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Their test was in-line with what the synthetic said here and in line with the common sense of less throttling and less software optimization don't make for more battery life.Master_Sigma - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Very pleased to see Anandtech coming around to reviewing this phone. While I disagree with the opinion that too many options are a negative, especially given the target audience for this device, I pretty much agree with the assessment of the hardware and software.FreakTM - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I think the opinion was more towards the fact that the options were causing some sacrifice on the user-friendliness of the experience, which I think is a fair opinion. Many options, good; many options presented in a confusing way, bad.mrex - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Better to have options than not having them. You dont need to use them if you dont want to, but if they dont exist at all, you could only dream about them... the phone is very user friendly, imo.