Oneplus 5
One plus 5 equals a great phone
Oneplus specialises in selling phones direct to customers at lower prices than other brands. This latest model has the kind of feature list that could push the cost of a phone over £600, yet it’s a reasonable £449.
This is the slimmest Oneplus phone so far, but not the most distinctive. The iphone-like aluminium back panel (available in black or dark grey) has lost its previous symmetry to integrate a new dual camera. This can do the popular fake-bokeh effect (blurred background) by taking two pictures at once, which works reasonably well. It also gives you HDR (high dynamic range), which we found was very prone to glitching due to slight movements while shooting.
The Pro mode has lots of extra features, but again they don’t all work well. The front selfie camera, which otherwise works fine, leaves your pictures reversed as a mirror image, unless you turn this off in settings. We’re not sure Oneplus has nailed this photography lark.
Otherwise, though, the phone works brilliantly thanks to a very fast processor, comparable to the much pricier Samsung Galaxy S8, and at 20 hours 40 minutes in our video-playback test its battery life is excellent. The screen may only be Full HD, but you don’t need more resolution than this unless you’re using your phone with a virtual-reality headset. Like the ipad Pro (see page 23), it accommodates the wider DCI P3 colour range, but with limited support in Android this can look slightly garish. The alternative SRGB mode only covers 90 per cent of that colour space, with reds a bit lacking, but the Default mode is a good compromise, and you can also choose custom settings. Most importantly, brightness and contrast are very good.
We didn’t notice anything amiss, but some Oneplus 5 users have reported a ‘jelly’ effect when scrolling, usually caused by the screen redrawing too slowly (see it in action at www.snipca. com/24842). Oneplus says it doesn’t believe this is a hardware problem, but is looking into it.
With an impressively fast fingerprint reader on the front completing the specification, the Oneplus 5 does seem good value, although unlike some rivals it’s not waterproof. 64GB of storage is standard, but there’s no microsd slot to add more. O2 is the only network to sell the Oneplus 5 itself (see www.snipca. com/24816), and only stocks the 128GB model, which on pay-as-you-go costs £504 plus a minimum £10 top-up.
The kind of features and performance that should cost more