Gadgetory

despite being a somewhat affordable device and also coming from a pedigree that kept things pretty simple the oneplus 2 actually adds some new features in this new iteration so we wanted to take a look at what those features are and give you our thoughts on them so it's Josh regard for management authority what's going on everybody and this is a look at the new features that are put into the oneplus 2 now we're going to start off with the action slider which is found on the left side and this is one of the main additions that you see right off the bat it is a three-stage slider that allows you to toggle among the different notification settings in lollipop you can of course go for all notifications if you want everything to come in priority notifications if you start anybody in your contacts list for example and then of course have no notifications which is essentially like silencing the phone now moving among the three different stages is actually very simple and very meaty you'll be able to find this button very easily if it's in your pocket which i think is the main usage of it if you happen to have your phone in your pocket or it might be just lying on a table you can easily feel the textured button on there and slide it down to the bottom position or the top position depending on whether you want to have your phone silenced or not we then go into the other very obvious feature that is on the front of the phone the fingerprint reader now the fingerprint reader is also the home button but it's not a button per se it's just this little area that was carved out in order to house the actual reader itself now this is a press type rather than a swipe type which is always more preferred and basically what you have to do is just set up your fingerprint in the settings and you can do it with up to five different fingerprints but mostly you'll be doing it with your thumbs once your fingerprints are registered they can actually wake and unlock the device even when the device is sleeping so if you have the device lock so you just have to rest your finger on that area and the phone will wake up after sensing your fingerprint and unlock the phone directly now my only real caveat when it comes to the fingerprint reader down here and also the fact that it is a home button capacitive wise is the fact that it's not as sensitive as I would want it to be now I know that this is more of a personal issue but when I have my finger down on there to completely cover the entire area in order for it to register all even as a home button is not necessarily a problem with the way that it is constructed it might just be that I need to get used to hitting the button a little bit differently but really you have to put down a little bit of weight on there and also you have to cover the entire area and is then that you're going to have a much more consistent home button and fingerprint reader the next feature we're going to cover is one that actually is a pretty big deal but it might not seem like it out in the West and it's dual-sim capabilities now in the United States you don't really see dual sims and pretty much any of the phones and there are some pretty good reasons for that because that's the way our phone companies want it they want you to be on one particular carrier and not have really any allegiances to anybody else with the dual SIM phone you could use the data from one card and then take calls on another and you can really cater the experience to what you want it to be by paying a little bit of extra money to have two different carriers in your repertoire but what the dual sim here you can also use the dual sims for traveling so if you were to have your personal home SIM card inside in the one slot you can have a travel card in the two slot and not worry about having to remove anything and switching them out from time to time but what I did find is that in the operating system switching between the two SIM cards can be a little bit cumbersome having to change which data you want to use from which card can sometimes make the phone slow down and also it takes a little while for to even register that both of the SIM cards are in there and switched between the two now the problem with that is if you really need to change from one card to the other let's say you used up your data from one card and you want to use the data from the other so you don't incur any overage charges it might take a little while for it to finally finish now whether or not this is a software issue or if this is just a way that dual SIM cards really work on the oneplus 2 remains to be seen I have had other phones that have had dual-sim capabilities and they weren't quite as hard to use as this one that being said however one will remedy that you can use here is to go into the SIM card area choose which SIM cards you want to use for calls texting or data and then just restart the phone and it should work from there now the last Hardware future we're going to cover is the USB type-c port on the bottom and its subsequent cord now the cord is very similar to the one you got in the 1+1 in that it is a flat construction and it comes in that red and white now having it flat does mean that it's not going to tangle so easily which is always nice and it just looks kind of cool but the best part about the cord itself is that on either end it is reversible so no matter how you plug in no matter what orientation you plug it into the either the phone or the USB port it will go through which is nice kind of takes up the guesswork from the microUSB once if it was supposed to be upside down or right side up now the thing about the USB type-c cord here is that it is basically a 2.0 construction which means that it's not going to be using USB 3.0 for data transfer and it's not going to be using any quick charging capabilities trust me I already tried I used my mode of quick charger and the phone charged very normally but that being said the USB type-c charging does seem to be at least a little bit above average it's not necessarily a very slow charger but it's also not a very fast charger it's kind of in the middle path when the phone was off it took about 90 minutes to get from zero to 100% when the phone was on but not being used very often it took about two hours that's not terrible obviously we would want to have our phones charged within the hour like some of these quick charging capabilities allow for but the oneplus 2 simply will not be providing that but really it's nice that oneplus is at least going to be making those cords available for a very low price about five dollars so if you're looking to get into the standard of USB type-c oneplus is making it very easy for you to do so which brings us to the shelf now originally I thought of the shelf as just two widgets that were available for your frequent apps and your frequent contacts and during our first look that was pretty much how it was being marketed but then after a little bit more investigation I found that the Shelf is actually a page where you can put a bunch of different widgets so for someone like me that usually has just one page dedicated to some production apps well now I can put those widgets on the shelf and just scroll down underneath the two ones that are already included and I can have things like the Evernote app down there to easily access certain parts of my productivity you can also customize it a little bit by changing up the cover on the top small portion of it that is customizable but other than that adding various different kinds of widgets on there is actually pretty cool and you can always rearrange them pretty easily really it's not just a place for you to put or rather for the phone to put all of the apps that you use on a frequent basis it could also be where you put your frequented widgets that way you will keep your home screens pretty bare and everything that you need to use can be put onto a side home screen and finally there's the dark mode now the dark mode is something that's supposed to come in the future of edition of Android but oneplus has been able to put it into their version 2.0 of oxygen OS now the idea behind the dark mode is to just take all of the light elements in Android and make them dark obviously but the main crux of this is that it will make the phone easier to view in certain situations like let's say you're lying in bed winding down the day and getting ready for bed and all the lights in your room are off instead of having this really bright white color just emitting in your face you have a darker tone that makes it a little bit easier on the eyes now that is a great feature and I have used it already in the days that I've had the oneplus 2 and it has proven to be nice to have at the end of the day but also I've just kept at the dark mode on because it tends to really make the Android interface look different and my opinion makes it look a little bit better now the dark mode can be contextualized in certain applications like pocket casts it does change the elements in there as well but one thing you have to keep in mind is if you're using any other applications like let's say reddit you have to go into that application and find it's dark mode to make it match it's not going to be something that is automatic across the board keep it tuned to Android thority for my full review of the oneplus 2 we're going to put everything together including this the camera and the general usage of it on the daily and I will give you my full review pretty soon after we get all the updates from oneplus to finalize our experience keep it tuned to Android 34 all of that drop us some likes on our videos and subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and then when you're done with that listen to the Android podcast and then head on over to android authority comm for even more because we are your source for all things Android