The OnePlus One Review
by Joshua Ho on November 19, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Android
- Mobile
- OnePlus
Display
Within the past few years, smartphone displays have improved immensely. Color rendition, peak brightness, contrast, resolution, viewing angles, and power draw have all improved since the first modern smartphones that appeared in 2007. Of course, while it was once possible to judge relative quality in displays by subjective comparison, most smartphones no longer have TN displays or poor maximum brightness. In order to better test displays, we turn to SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 with a custom workflow.
In the basics, we see that the OnePlus One has a reasonably bright display and acceptable display contrast, although there's room to improve in both. OnePlus has also done a good job of making sure that their display gets dim enough for night time reading, as minimum brightness is around 4.2 nits. Viewing angles are also great. While contrast with viewing angle changes isn't as good as AMOLED panels, I don't see any color shifting with viewing angle changes. This seems to remain an advantage of IPS panels for now.
In grayscale, we see that the white balance is just a bit blue, but there really isn’t a big issue there. The OnePlus One sets a record for grayscale accuracy. I would like to see a bit better color balance at the higher scales, but it's really just nitpicking. Specifically, red needs to be bumped up to be in line with green and blue. It's understandable why this is done though, as the display's backlight will be the weakest in red in general.
In the saturation sweep, OnePlus has done a great job to make sure that colors are as accurate as possible. The only issue here is that the red, magenta, and blue is a bit weaker than it should be. Some extra saturation would definitely tighten up the accuracy here in addition to making the display more appealing than it is now. However, the display is still incredibly well-calibrated, and will be more than accurate enough for general use.
The strong showing in the saturation sweep helps carry the OnePlus One through to do well in the ColorChecker. For the most part, we see that much of the error comes from the issues previously discussed with grayscale. The display overall is great, and while it isn’t perfect, it’s really just nitpicking at this point. The OnePlus One manages to display colors more accurate than almost everything on the market. The only real issue I've noticed with this display is that there's a bit more IPS glow than I'd like when shifting viewing angles.
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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?