OnePlus officially announced the OnePlus 5 on June 20th this year, thereafter the phone landed in India on the 22nd, and we received our review device as well. Here are my first impressions of the OnePlus 5 based on my usage of 2 days.
Let’s commence by taking a dekko at the design of the phone. I have received the Midnight Black variant that does a wonderful job of engendering the ever-so-stealthy design, although inspired from Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus. Nonetheless, it takes a step ahead by diminishing the camera bump and curving the edges, which adds the OnePlus touch to the phone, in turn distinguishing it. All these slight alterations make the phone look sleeker on the rear, which is already simple, minimal, and deserted. All that can be located here are the curved antenna lines for a seamless feel, the dual camera setup, the microphone beside, and the LED flash, followed by the glossy OnePlus branding. This dual-camera implementation is rather the sharpest and the most robust on paper and as OnePlus claims, it comes with a 16 and 20-megapixel combination, where the latter is a telephoto lens alike the iPhone 7 Plus.
Moving on, the OnePlus 5 packs a Full HD Super AMOLED screen, producing absolutely deep blacks and vivid colours. Not to mention, OnePlus has also packed several screen tweaks in the settings to tinker with alongside a full-fledged reading mode that adjusts the temperature to mimic an actual book reading experience, which I will be testing out in the future. It works with several ebook reading apps such as Kindle. Thereafter, it’s all the OnePlus buttons on the edges of the phone – alert slider, a super fast fingerprint reader, volume rockers and power button on the sides, leaving the mono speaker, heading jack and the USB-C charging slot for the bottom.
We have talked enough of the exterior, let us now move on to address what the phone conveys internally – the beastly Snapdragon 835 Octa-Core chipset, clocked at 2.45GHz, accompanied by an 8GB of RAM, 128GB of UFS 2.1 fast storage, and an Adreno 540 GPU. There is also a Slate Grey version packing a 6GB RAM and 64GB storage, priced a little lesser than the 8GB version. Powering all those beastly specs is a 3,300mAh battery, which is lesser compared to the previous OnePlus 3T, but this time too, it accommodates the world’s fastest charging technology – Dash charging, which works absolutely bonkers! We will surely bring a OnePlus 5 vs Galaxy S8 Plus charging speed test in the near future, so do keep an eye out for that. Furthermore, with the two days of use I had, the performance is certainly something to mull over, and for now, I can vouch that it is surely incomparable to any other phone out there. That statement may or may not alter as I use the phone and come up with a full review in the future.
Lastly, moving to the camera, let’s just say I’m moderately impressed as of now. Images turn out sharp, with a great amount of detail, better natural colours, and a hit-or-a-miss saturation level. The dynamic range is also maintained well. Taking a gander at the images, it’s quite evident that sometimes the OnePlus 5 tends to over-sharpen, but attempts to retain the natural colours, and is able to easily develop a good dynamic range. The 20-megapixel telephoto lens, as I experimented with, works really well for macro photography, however, it lacks stabilisation, subsequently producing shaky images even in ample lighting, more often than not.
Buy The OnePlus 5 (India)
6GB, 64GB for Rs. 32,999
8GB, 128GB for Rs. 37,999
