Gadgetory

with a compelling price the oneplus X hopes to marry the features of the most recent flagship with the value of their first offering and with the design overhaul it seems they may have been able to do it but is this the phone for you it's time to find out because it's Josh of agar from Android thority what's going on everybody and this is the oneplus X design is the most striking change seen in the oneplus X off the bat gone is the larger body and the subtle curves and now we have a black slate device utilizing dual glass panels and a metal frame now there is a ceramic version of this phone that is available that uses a special fire baked ceramic for the backing that also makes the phone a little bit heavier but that is more of a special edition device so what we have here is the Onyx Edition that utilizes glass primarily starting with the metal frame there are a number of micro cuts in it that help a lot with the handling they don't necessarily scrape the skin by any means but they are very easily felt when gripping the phone all the buttons are on the writes with the power button below the dual SIM and now micro SD capable tray and the volume rockers and opposite all of that is a returning feature from the oneplus 2 the alert slider on the bottom oneplus does return to the micro USB charging port and there are two grills here but only one of them houses a speaker and if you look really hard you can see the markings of capacitive keys underneath the 5-inch screen which are really close to the bottom and take a little getting used to in terms of actually reaching them the screen is just the right size for handling and above it the proximity sensor helps in triggering the ambient display then finally around the back you have the oneplus logo front and center and the camera optics nestled in the corner now we haven't really had any shortage of smaller devices this year but the oneplus X takes a pretty sleek design to keep this form-factor feeling pretty fresh one-handed usage is the highlight here with the flat sides and those micro cuts helping it sit very snug in the hand while reaching from side to side and with the dual glass design this is still a very fingerprint prone device and even in filming this review we had to wipe down the phone after every single shot so yes there are some sources of inspiration that the oneplus X might seem to derive from but we think that oneplus has done a good job of keeping it from being way too obvious and ultimately what you get is a premium looking and feeling device that somewhat surprises when you realize how much you'll be paying for but before we talk about that let's go to the display this is an AMOLED Full HD resolution display that brings the standard form of quality with some punched up colors due to the black levels that this kind of display provides text is sharp enough for a 5-inch display when reading and media still looks good and brightness is also pretty high and when you crank this thing up the white areas of the interface and any applications might kind of blind a little bit even in normal lighting situations however the choice of AMOLED is taken advantage of here by the oneplus software the ambient display is triggered by waving one's hand over the proximity sensor up top and it shows the minimal version of the lock screen to view notifications and then deeper in oxygen OS is now in dark mode by default which is a really nice touch and by keeping the AMOLED from showing too many brighter colors and spots it also would mean that battery life can get a bit of a boost underneath that screen we have what's pretty much a shrunken down version of the oneplus one what you actually think is a pretty great thing the Snapdragon 801 returns with three gigabytes of RAM showing that last year's phones are still pretty viable enough in today's space and for the most part it succeeds in daily tasks while writing emails listening to music watching the occasional video and all the general reading the phone really doesn't skip much of a beat and if you were to fire up a more recent high graphics video game though the speed might come down a bit but it's kind of negligible it's in actual comparisons to the current flagship smartphones that the 801 does really show its age while some of the blame might be put on a little bit of the Polish that oxygen OS still needs those instances were still fairly common there might have been little stutters when YouTube started playing a video or small but noticeable instances when flexi would fumble with a letter and it became clear to us that while the Snapdragon 801 is still a very viable processing package it is still over a year old so hardware might be a bigger focus as oneplus has replaced a couple of features from the oneplus 2 and put in a couple of new ones the main omission here is the lack of a fingerprint reader and also NFC is still missing the alert slider is back and proves itself as an easy way of mostly silencing the phone and though there are two grilles on the bottom as I mentioned earlier only one of them is a speaker which provides audio skew to the higher ends which is kind of unpleasant despite the audio being pretty loud speaking of headphone audio using a good pair does make for experience but your wires can serve an extra purpose the oneplus X actually comes with a radio tuner that works well enough if you really do want to listen to some local stations another feature that returns is the dual SIM tray but it also houses one of the most significant additions a micro SD card capability one of the trays can now house a micro SD card for expandable storage which really helps because the 16 gigabytes of on-board storage runs out pretty quickly though it doesn't have fast or wireless charging we found our time with the X to be pretty long getting three hours of screen on time might seem standard but then when you factor in the price of this phone it actually is pretty nice and a little bit above average though it is important to mention that we got that screen on time when using the phone on a more moderate scale standby time is actually pretty good on the phone as well but we give a lot of credit to the ambient display and the dark mode leveraging the AMOLED display very well now this one part I didn't want to leave until the end there is a problem when it comes to the mobile data bands on the oneplus X it will mostly affect people in the US who are on 18 T or t-mobile in the case of AT&T this phone does not have a band that will allow it to stay on LTE connections all very consistently and for t-mobile which is looking to go to band 12 all over the place when it does make that change this phone doesn't support that band so you're going to lose LTE connectivity on that network as well the issue with that is that this phone then becomes not future-proof quite literally in the u.s. if you do require LTE the fastest of speeds for your networks on those two carriers then this phone unfortunately will have an expiration date now that doesn't necessarily mean that this phone is not viable in the US you can still use it here and you'll still get good connections but eventually that LTE connection will probably go by the wayside for everyone else around the world however you probably will still have a great time with this phone given that it still supports a lot of the Bands outside of the US the camera of the oneplus X is a 13 megapixel shooter that uses phase detection autofocus and leverages HDR the front-facing shooter on the other hand is of 8 megapixels so you can get some pretty big selfies now we'll start off with the app which is the same as the app from the oneplus 2 and you use swipes on the viewfinder in order to change the modes and then after that you don't get a whole lot of control over your shots a few other modes are available though including slow motion video time-lapse and panorama even if you are going to have to use the portrait orientation on panorama which we thought was just a little bit annoying the app is fast enough getting shots done in a pretty decent amount of time so that moving to the next one isn't too far off but even in medium light situations the camera ops for slower shutter speeds in order to compensate for exposure so for pictures slower shutter speeds aren't necessarily a bad thing but it does make low-light situations like concerts a bit harder to achieve good results from but this actually permeates into the video capture mode in which video is tend to get a little bit choppier when the lower shutter speeds have to be used and this is one of the main flaws that we observed in the camera experience darker areas and photos are still quite fuzzy which is kind of expected and they aren't often that disgusting to look at and colors are not particularly dulled but they can use a bit more of a punch unfortunately when using HDR you're just going to get a brighter photo overall and the colors for the most part remain the same so for a daily shooter the oneplus X requires a little bit more diligence than usual to get good shots but for the price we don't really fault the camera too greatly for that unless your focus is for filming video and finally in software we have the return of the oneplus built oxygen OS which brings a mostly stock looking Android addition to the X much of it is really familiar as this is a lollipop build and you get the paginated app drawer and all the quick settings and everything pretty much looks familiar you do get the shelf where frequent apps and contacts are put along with user-defined widgets it is actually off by default and we do think that it is a decent place to put widgets on so you don't have to have extra home screens so we turned it on and more input options are available including using soft keys instead of the capacitive keys and then gestures like double tapping the screen to wake the phone we already talked about the dark mode but we do have to mention that there's a bit of customization here as you can change the accent color so you can give the interface a bit of a different look what oxygen is able to boast when it was first released was its own version of app permissions which give a nice insight into the kinds of things that apps are trying to access on your phone that's kind of the whole story with oxygen OS but we will say that by highlighting the dark mode oxygen has taken that little step forward to make its version of Android be that little bit different from stock editions we do think that oneplus a company that prides itself in being different should continue to add even more to oxygen OS in the future to further set it apart and finally the moment of truth a premium body and pretty good internals make this phone seem like quite a steal as the price of the oneplus X is 250 dollars with an invite yes invites are still required but open sales windows will start small and gradually become full-blown and it's with that low low price that we have what might be one pluses most compelling offering yet which is interesting because this is only their third smartphone this is not supposed to be a flagship device and it doesn't succeed in really meeting that standard at least this year what oneplus has basically told us here is that it knows the oneplus one was a great phone so here it is again in a different looking package we think that this is an actually pretty great phone but that sentence has almost always ended with the phrase for that price and that's not really a bad thing when you get a phone that just about anyone can get and get some good usage from no it isn't future proof by any means and for users who need LTE it might expire sooner rather than later but for now this is one of the best bang for buck phones we've had all year so as always thank you guys very much for watching and hope you enjoyed this review of the oneplus X it is out right now in the States and is available for purchase using an invite so you can head on over there and get a phone that is incredibly accessible easy to use and just might be one of the best entry points for Android today there are some flaws with it but you kind of expect that because this phone is not supposed to be a flagship killer per se but it's supposed to be the best bang for a buck and that's what we think it is keep it tuned to Android authority for even more you can see content from my colleagues in Android right over on the side and then you can go to the full written review at Android or decom after that you can subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and drop us some likes on these videos and then you can stay tuned for even more because we are your source for all things Android