OnePlus 6 equals – a whole lot more for your money
A beautiful, functional smartphone for less than £500 – why not treat yourself before the summer holidays?
W ANDER round any mobile phone shop these days and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d have your work cut out to get a decent phone for less than £700.
Of course, you can get cheap phones, but corners are cut, and not always the right ones.
What you don’t need is a halfbaked device that’s slow and takes rubbish pictures – you might as well not bother. Which is where OnePlus comes in. The company has aimed to take the middle way for some time – it doesn’t make cheap phones, it makes cheaper phones that are still good phones.
And with its latest effort – the OnePlus 6 – its plans really seem to have come of age.
It’s a full-featured, fast, beautifullydesigned Android smartphone with all the power you’d expect from one of the big boys. But it costs just £469. And although that’s for the entry-level model, it’s still a brilliant device that comes with 6GB of RAM and a 64GB of storage.
Camera-wise you’re looking at two on the back – one 16MP and one 20MP – and one on the front at 16MP. And the images returned are excellent – not quite as good as those you can get out of an iPhone X or a Galaxy 9, but good enough for most people.
There’s a wonderfully bright and sharp 6.28in AMOLED display, which adopts the “notch” pioneered in the iPhone X. This holds the front camera and all the tech required to enable facerecognition. Yes, you can unlock this phone with your face (although there is also a fast and reliable rear fingerprint scanner, too).
And there’s also a super-fast Snapdragon 845 chip inside, which ensures that with this phone you wait for nothing.
There’s only one speaker, but it’s still pretty loud. Another
compromise comes with the lack of waterproofing that you’d find in a more expensive phone. OnePlus says it’ll survive splashes in the rain, but it has no official water resistance rating. In other words, don’t take it swimming.
There’s also a glass-back to the phone (even though it doesn’t do wireless charging), which might be an issue for some, because although it looks great (some have been fooled into thinking it’s metal), it’s not quite as durable as it might be.
Maybe that’s why the OnePlus 6 comes with a translucent case, as well as a pre-applied screen protector, which I’ve never seen from any other phone-maker.
Curiously, OnePlus has boasted both about the fact that the 6 has a headphone jack, unlike most new phones, and about the release of a pair of Bluetooth headphones.
The OnePlus Bullets, which pair simply with the 6, will cost £69 when they hit the market on June 5.
The headline features are fivehours audio playback from just a 10-minutes charge, and easy access to the Google Assistant.
The phone runs a modified version of Android Oreo called OxygenOS, which OnePlus says streamlines Android rather than adding its own proprietary bloatware.
And if you had any doubts about the power of the phone, you should know it’s one of a handful of devices that is authorised by a Google to take part in the beta programme for the next generation of the Android operating system, Android P. You can find out more about the OnePlus 6 at oneplus.com