Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm KB HD here and this is the oneplus one it's a new phone from a new manufacturer and it's gotten a lot of attention it's actually one of the most polarizing phones I have ever seen so over in the tech community this phone is almost impossible to get people are swarming over this phone there is way more demand and supply there's an invite system it's just really really hard to get your hands on but then I go over to class and so on says hey what phone is that and I say it's the oneplus one and they go the what I don't I don't really know what that is so clearly there's a big divide over who cares about this phone why the short answer to that question is the price this phone when it's available will cost outright $300 for the phone off contract for perspective the iPhone 5s will retail $700 which off-contract the galaxy s5 $700 off contract the HTC one $700 off contract so when you put up a phone with very similar specs to that and it costs only $250 off contract its turn a lot of heads in the tech community and that's because we care about specs so let's try to find out if this worth caring about the specs for this low of a price so just to get it out the way it is rockin at 2.5 gigahertz quad-core Snapdragon 801 chip the audrina 330 GPU 3 gigabytes of ram a 13 megapixel camera a 30 100 million power battery all very similar specs to something like the samsung galaxy s5 and on top of all that for a premium slab style phone the oneplus one is built really well actually think it's design as one of its best assets so this white version here is extremely soft to the touch and they advertise that a lot it's super soft and yet it's also very durable it feels really solid on the hand thanks to all the metal involved around the frame so all the way around the phone no matter how you hold it you're touching metal somewhere and it really does actually have the perfect button placement for a big phone yes it's big it's that 5.5 inch 1080p display but the power button is low enough on that right-hand side and the volume buttons are low enough that it shows up actually took some notes I actually thought about where to put these buds and it keeps the phone pretty usable to even someone with smaller hands more comparable to the smaller five inch or 5.1 inch display flagships it's also pretty thin so really the design is one of the best points about the oneplus one so with the beastly specs and pretty top-notch build quality it seems like you're getting a lot for your money for this phone and it certainly feels like it when you're holding it again it feels like a beast of a phone you also have LTE 802 dot eleven AC Wi-Fi a big battery - like I said 3100 milliamp hours but it's not removable although you can take off the back and soon you'll be able to replace the back with other covers of different materials and I also notice that this phone has three microphones one on top one on the back and one on the bottom leading me to believe the audio quality would be great and it was and calls but for some reason the call volume of the person I was talking to was super low like I crank the volume and I could barely hear who I was talking to which was weird but I guess that can be fixed with a software update but for other apps the speaker sounded just fine maybe even a bit above average since it's real stereo instead of fake stereo like the iPhone or the Nexus 5 so if you've been looking really hard for a flaw that makes this phone's Hardware worth really less than the other $700 flagships it's trying to kill you probably haven't found it yet and neither have I I mean I've been using the phone for weeks as far as I can tell this phone is pretty much flawless a miracle piece of hardware for the price and I've been damn impressed with using it but really guys this phone is super similar on the inside to a lot of those others $700 phones thanks to the specs inside so what really differentiates it what really makes this a different phone is actually the software it's CyanogenMod and like I said in that top five video I did not too long ago for all intents and purposes this is a CyanogenMod phone this is going to depend on the features and the awesome stuff that comes with CyanogenMod 11s so it's a custom built OS for this phone based on the latest version of Android 4.4 KitKat and it's definitely filled with extra features specifically for this hardware which is nice to see I've talked about some of their stuff before so it lets you choose a lot of things to really customize your vanilla Android like experience so you can really make it your own you can make it seem very much like a nexus almost stock like me or you can hop in the theme manager and really go crazy all-out customizing not just a wallpaper and your icons but your boot animation and your lockscreen and everything all sorts of stuff and there are custom features like being able to choose between on-screen software buttons or off-screen capacitive buttons depending on what you like you can't do that on any other phone you can also customize what the software buttons show up by adding or subtracting or reordering them however you like so there's tons of stuff here that you'd probably be used to finding in a custom ROM because really that's what this is it's CyanogenMod even though this device is not rooted out the box no sign engine mod feature is you can say hey Snapdragon hey Snapdragon hey Snapdragon hey Snapdragon and sometimes it decides to wait and work and other times it doesn't and when you do it opens up Google now and it you have to train your voice for a while and haven't found this could be really all that responsive but like you just saw it does work sometimes they've also custom built a lock screen so it blurs your wallpaper or since it's Android 4.4 we'll also blur whatever album art of whatever music you're listening to while it's playing which is really cool and I'm actually a pretty big fan of this lockscreen just because it's a big screen and not everyone can reach the center with one finger so just swiping down from anywhere in the middle is pretty convenient if you're trying to use the device with one hand and of course you can always swipe to get into the camera directly from the lock screen as well and they've custom-built a few other apps like the Audio FX control which works really well for listening and music the themes browser again like we mentioned the gallery and the camera app so this is a custom built one by cyanogen again it's kind of a cross between the old Google camera and the new one but I do like how easy it is to switch between shooting modes they made it really easy here just a vertical swipe up or down to move between modes so I actually found myself using us a lot just to quickly switch to HDR real quick I used to use it all the time just because of how easy it was and the camera itself on the phone was surprisingly nice to me like I've heard some other people didn't really like it that much but I think it's pretty good certainly better than the Google Play edition One m8 I'm coming from so it takes 13 megapixel photos and it's capable of 4k or slow-motion video and I'm actually a fan of how low-profile the physical camera itself is people don't really talk about it that much but it reminds me a lot of the Oppo find 7 here which is probably the phone that this is physically most similar to and it's six out just a tiny little bit but I say good job to them on keeping the camera pretty small and low-profile and the actual pictures it takes look pretty nice so there's no optical image stabilization but it does have dual LED flash and multiple lenses and everything else you'd expect from a nice camera and the photos were detailed and saturated and well colored and sharp I actually like the action mode because it forces a faster shutter speed which freezes stuff at the expense of a bit of a higher ISO but it does reduce blur really well so it almost kind of makes up for that lack of stabilization low-light pictures again were okay compared to other decent phones I mean this is a solid camera I mentioned in my fine 7a review that I'm a fan of the slightly over aggressive HDR and we see it again here almost the exact same way I mean this one plus one camera is where I was probably fully expecting to be let down by the price tag but nope gets a thumbs up for me here so the only real con here in this phone is signage and mods bugs which is good and bad bad because it's the whole OS and it's a custom OS both for the phone so you'd expect it to be perfect yes but it's also good because even though it's not perfect it can be fixed with software updates so during my use of this phone I kept coming across little forced closes and little errors that I just don't normally see on other phones and a lot of them were easily reproducible for example if you open up the camera app directly from the lockscreen then hit the kind of invisible home button your wallpaper will glitch a bit and black out the bottom part and will not fix itself until you sleep the phone and then wake it again where the bottom part of the wallpaper reappears kind of weird but happens every time little stuff like that regular performance you know zipping around the phone and multitasking is just fine opening and closing apps animations frame rates are all high even gaming is pretty great I've played a couple of games on this phone I'm not a big hammer on my phone but it's it seems solid but this is where it really gets weird really almost all of the other animations throughout the OS are fast except for the home button now of course I have on-screen buttons but I tried this with the off-screen buttons too and I got the same issue the home button response time is super slow a lot of you guys mentioned this in the top five video like what is that lag coming from it's not really a lag it's just a palpable delay a delay between hitting the home button and then actually starting the animation to go home it's so big of a delay that a lot of us notice it every time they got annoying for me so I actually put it up next to the Google Play edition One m8 like just to make sure I wasn't going crazy and sure enough yeah it's got some serious delay and I don't know why the other buttons don't have a delay the back button is actually faster and the multitasking button works just fine so I thought it was waiting for a home DoubleTap to see if I was sleeping the screen but I turn that option off so I really have no explanation for this massive intrusive delay for the home button and I can only hope signage in already knows about this issue and is working to fix it with a quick over-the-air software update so that's kind of the story of using this phone I love the hardware and using it in everything it just doesn't feel quite as polished as a nexus or another high-end flagship when I'm using it and that's evident by the little software problems here and there the occasional delays and force closes when working around and trying to use all the awesome features of this custom operating system so at the end of the day yeah this phone comes down to CyanogenMod and whether or not signage in can keep improving and keep sending updates to this phone I've already gotten one in the time I've spent with it and whether or not they can live up to these specs because I would really expect a phone with such awesome specs like this to perform kind of like a $700 phone I'm not expecting it to match every part of that phone but I expected a custom OS for a brand new company's phone to to release perform optimally on it so really this phone is going to live or die on CyanogenMod and whether or not the updates come and keep it stable like it would on a nexus because you can already expect that to happen on in Nexus so yeah this is a really impressive phone I am I am really big fan of the hardware I like how soft the back is I like how sturdy it's built I like the specs I like the way it looks it is a big phone but I have big hands I don't mind that and I can understand why people are clamoring over this phone especially in a tech community I don't think you should smash a $700 phone to get it but hey marketing is marketing and this is a pretty well priced phone for what you're getting for the money so I say if you're willing to take that risk inside engine mod and you think they're going to actually maintain it and update it like a nexus is pretty much guaranteed to be from google and you want that experience for a hundred bucks off it might just be a damn good deal for the risk of taking so if you trust them do it it's going to be worth it I don't have any invites I can get you an invite if you're trying to get this phone I'll keep you guys updated on Twitter of course in the link right below that like button for availability and things like that if you're trying to get your hands on it but for now there might be a giveaway coming up maybe soon but really the idea here is if you're trusting CyanogenMod is a pretty good pick so there you go guys thanks for watching this review video hope you enjoyed it again there's a thumbs up button below to click if you liked it and I will talk to you guys in the next video