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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MadDuffy - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Thanks for your review.Some corrections on page one specs: MHL not supported and BT 4.0 (not 4.1).
anneoneamouse - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
"Reception, at least for T-Mobile US' band 4/AWS LTE is noticeably worse than most devices that I've tried."This would seem to be a significant issue; yet this one-line detail is buried under the "misc" section, and not discussed in the conclusions at all. Three pages are devoted to analysis and discussion of photo / video quality, which for most users are likely to be secondary functions.
It's a phone; can I use it to speak clearly to a client? If not, I'll look elsewhere.
AoN.
DoktorSleepless - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Yes, this needs some serious elaboration.Cinnabuns - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I agree. Especially with all the praise and in-depth look given to the Moto X's cellular reception on this site, it would be helpful if all phones reviewed had a small section describing its reception characteristics.Harry_Wild - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
As a T-Mobile customer; this reception quality is top priority for picking a phone! LTE is for most data until T-Mobile changes it to Voice over Internet using LTE band. But that will be in middle 2015 and later.It not a hardware problem; it a software problem so One Plus should be able to fix it with T-Mobile's assistance.
Conficio - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
@Harry, how come you are sure this is a software issue. Could be bad placement of the antenna or bad antenna design in general. Also, I think we don't know if the issue is limited to T-Mobile. That was just the network he tested it on.You make a good point though, if this is an LTE issue (which the article does not say), then in 2015 this phone on T-Mobile goes from good voice and bad data to issues for both.
More questions: There were software updates mentioned. Did those affect the reception issues? And did they swap out the baseband?
Conficio - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
That also made me really nervous. I'm a T-Mobile customer and really need to know how he did notice this. I have seen some good cellular comparison tests in the past on Anandtech. Please lets get some objective comparison or at least some more detail on how this does effect the phone? Indoors, outdoors, calls dropped or not starting, get no reception where other phones have reception. Any reaction by the company?Munna2002 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I am a T-Mobile customer with an OPO. My family also all use OPOs. We have no problems with LTE speeds in the NYC Metro area, although we do not have the T-Mobile Wifi calling app, which requires messing with the bootloader and kernels from what I understand.jmasterj - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
This review is missing an important section that always appeared in Klug's phone reviews: network performance. There's one anecdote about how it performed on T-Mobile's LTE, but nowhere are listed even the HSPA or LTE bands supported by this device. It would be nice to see testing in this area.pjcamp - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Since you took the time to review this vaporphone, perhaps you could also do the Xperia Z3?