Gadgetory

take a look at any roundup of the best smartphones under 300 bucks and you're bound to find a lot of compromise particularly in industrial design with its newest smartphone oneplus looks to change the game the oneplus x is the company's most affordable handheld ever but you wouldn't know it by looking at it out of the smarts hold up to the looks I'm Michael Fisher with PocketNow and let's find out in our 1 plus X video review more than anything the oneplus X is about style while our initial hands-on featured the more expensive ceramic Edition even the standard onyx build is exquisite a pane of Gorilla Glass 3 up front and one a fire baked scratch resistant glass on the backside come together in an aluminum alloy mid plate complete with Art Deco style striping and subtle chamfers that twinkle in the light the volume and power buttons are easy to find with a thumb easy to tell apart thanks to their texture and their mechanical feedback is almost perfect on the opposite side the three way notification slider is back allowing ringer settings to be changed with the flick of a switch in the hand the feel is nothing short of sublime by making use of a modest 5 inch display with fairly minimal bezels oneplus has produced an android rarity a smallish phone with top-shelf design that can be comfortably used with one hand it's vaguely reminiscent of Sony's compact series but at alyssum 6.9 millimeters the oneplus X is quite a bit thinner than those devices and the use of a full HD AMOLED panel means that blacks blend right in with the bezel while colors seem to leap right off the screen in this way the oneplus X outshines its higher-end sibling the oneplus 2 whose colors seem quite faded by comparison not all the hardware is so winning for one thing this is one of the most slippery phones we've ever used tabletops pant legs arm rests you name it our review device has slithered off all of them to fall on the floor and while it's glass is unscathed its soft aluminum bares the scratches to prove it also the oneplus X is an absolute magnet for finger and sadly they can't be put to any practical use there's no fingerprint scanner in sight that's not the only missing feature spec hunters will lament the phone uses an older Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 for its processor backed up by just 16 gigs of storage only 11 and a half of which are user accessible there's no NFC so Android pay is out and while there's LTE baked in Ben 12 and 17 are not supported and more on this in our test notes in just a minute but oneplus has built in some surprising pluses to three gigs of ram for one thing which helps a bit with app shuffling and a microSD expansion slot good for another 128 gigs of storage if you don't need that extra stockpile you can double up on Sims instead use the phone on more than one wireless carrier as we discovered with the oneplus 2 this can come in quite handy speaking of the oneplus 2 the oneplus x software is almost identical it runs oxygen OS a custom fork of Android lollipop with a few added features most of which are very useful probably our favorite one is one we've seen before the oneplus X offers an enhanced version of the ambient display that Google's Nexus family has when the phone detects that you've picked it up it projects the time and you're waiting notifications onto the screen and a power saving monochrome if you've enabled proximity wake it'll also do this when you wave a hand over the front-facing camera many parts of the software experience offers small but convenient upgrades over stock Android swipe anywhere on the home screen to deploy the notification shape decide which shortcut toggles you want displayed within that notification drawer choose what accent and LED colors suits you best or skin the entire OS and a dark or light theme and individually dictate app permissions like you can do in Android marshmallow as you can see we're using unscreened soft keys instead of the hardware buttons mainly because there are no back lights on the latter if you do decide to use the capacitive buttons you can assign shortcuts to double taps or long presses and speaking of shortcuts you've still got the option to draw a circle on the lock screen to launch the camera or draw a V to turn on the flashlight they're a little awkward but once you get used to them they can come in handy it's sort of like the Shelf that oneplus has included on the most homescreen a vertically scrolling array of widgets if you don't like it you can remove it on the hole oxygen OS remains one of our favorite Android flavors it's added features are convenient at best and inoffensive at worst and it's cosmetic customizations do a nice job of complementing the beautiful hardware here oneplus tells us a marshmallow update is coming sometime next year but the company has yet to commit to a firm date oneplus is opted for a 13 megapixel Samsung ISO cell camera for this phone with an F 2.2 aperture and no optical image stabilization the result is adequate results in bright light and that's about as good as it gets if you're planning on showing most of your photos on the phone itself the AMOLED display helps a lot by artificially boosting contrast and saturation take them off the device though and the colors wither zoom in and the detail falls apart edges corrupted by digital grain brightly lit areas are often overexposed colourful rows of pink flower petals become a washed out expanse of salmon colored feathers the lower the light gets the tougher it becomes to gain and keep focus setting the phone to HDR mode helps it brighten very dim nighttime scenes and using the resolution enhancing clear image mode does add needed sharpness but these are inconsistent workarounds there's nothing special about the phone's video performance which maxes out at 1080p and exhibits many of the same handicaps as the stills do with the added shakes and shimmies that come from a lack of stabilization selfie quality on the front facing eight megapixel camera varies significantly depending on lighting but who's going to use this for professional glamour shots as with most selfie shooters it's good enough given plenty of light with a skin smoothing Beauty mode that does a good job of evening out your complexion without getting ridiculous about things the camera suite is probably the weakest aspect of the oneplus X if you can find your photo sharing too casual stints on Facebook and Twitter yeah it'll get the job done but if you take even a small measure of pride in your smartphone photography even say to an Instagram degree you may want to look elsewhere we tested the oneplus X over six days on the eastern Long Island New York and as expected 4G network performance was inconsistent the lack of band 12 and 17 makes this phone incapable of using 700 megahertz spectrum on either AT&T or t-mobile meaning we couldn't get LTE in many places and AT&T even thought our phone was a 2g device at one point the oneplus X will not perform as well as phones custom-made for those networks on the bright side none of this effects voice quality the oneplus X brings a clearer earpiece and it's 138 gram mass is no burden to hold up for a long call the user experience and other fundamentals ranges from average to slightly below the bottom firing speaker is easy to accidentally block with a finger and while it's usually loud enough it's prone to raspy playback playing high demand games like asphalt 8 requires you to step down the graphics to medium at most anything higher results in so much choppiness has to render it mostly unplayable battery life is better than we expected given the smallish power pack but it's nothing special four hours of screen on time over a 13 hour day was the most we were able to manage three hours screen on time is more typical and finally there's no quick charging here no matter what kind of adapter we used the oneplus X charged at applauding 1% per hour or less through its USB 2.0 port the Onyx Edition oneplus X will go on sale in the US on November 19th through 1 pluses invite system at a price of $249 if you're the type of buyer who prizes performance over physical allure there are better options out there including the oneplus 2 for just $80 more the oneplus X was built for those who care more about beautiful presentation than raw capability for 249 you can certainly find a smarter sidekick but you're not likely to find a prettier one we've got a lot more to say on the oneplus X folks and it's all in our full written review at pocket now linked in the description below click it and leave a comment there if you have some feedback for us otherwise follow us on social media pocket now is at pocket now on Twitter I am at captain two phones most importantly thanks for watching we'll see you next time