With the announcement of two large phones in the past couple of weeks, we thought we should put two phones of similar specs up against each other. Obviously, I’m talking about the ultra-powerful Galaxy Note 5 and the equal in power, the OnePlus 2. While these may seem different in many ways including price, they are similar in a lot of ways. Welcome to our comparison between the Galaxy Note 5 and the OnePlus 2.
Design is a big thing with larger phones. More and more companies are flexing their design muscle rather than their hardware department. The Galaxy Note 5 comes redesigned with a design more in line with their Galaxy S6 and the S6 edge. It features a flat slab front that stretches around 6 inches. Also, the minimal bezels on the Galaxy Note 5 play a nice role in making the Note 5 a little bit smaller in footprint compared to the Note 4. The Note 5 has also decreased in thickness all to the move to a non-removable back cover and battery.
The design of the OnePlus 2 goes a little more retro in my opinion. It looks a lot more like a Galaxy Note 4 than anything else in the design language: sharper sides and exposed metal around the OnePlus 2. And if you flip it over to the back, you’d usually a sandstone black texture. But that texture is not a particular favorite of mine so my OnePlus 2 is done up in this beautiful ebony skin from SlickWraps.
Screens between these two are also a bit different. The Galaxy Note 5 has a massive 5.7-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display with 515ppi while the OnePlus 2 has a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD panel with 401ppi. One can argue that more pixels is better but honestly, between these two, these panels look absolutely great.
Specs on the inside is where most of these phones excel in performance. The Galaxy Note 5 packs an octa-core processor from Exynos that’s stacked next to 4GB of DDR4 RAM and a Mali GPU. The Note 5 absolutely crushes GeekBench with single-core scores of nearly 1500 and multi-core scores in the low 5000. The OnePlus 2 has an octa-core processor, the only difference being it’s a Snapdragon 810 version 2.1. It also has 4GB of RAM but in a DDR3 variant. Lastly, it has an Adreno 430 GPU. Its GeekBench scores are still very impressive but not quite as high as the Note 5.
Now it’s time to briefly look at the main features and the selling points of these devices. The Note 5 offers Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with TouchWiz and its main selling points relies on a couple things—one of them being a new sexy design, secondly the S Pen offers a variety of writing on the screen in pen-like fashion; and the last one, being the best camera in the mobile business. The OnePlus 2 has a slightly different approach. Its main selling point is the price itself. By severely undercutting the competition by around $300, the OnePlus 2 offers flagship power at non-flagship prices. It also runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with Oxygen OS 2.0 from OnePlus, which is a slightly customized skin that offers a ton of customization options. Perhaps its camera is the weakest link of the package but like the Note 5, it has OIS and 4K UHD video recording.
The last piece of this comparison puzzle is the battery. The Note 5 chose slimness over battery life, which could prove unwise of Samsung. The 3000mAh battery on the Note 5 sounds small in paper and that’s because it is small. It’s smaller than the Galaxy Note 4’s battery and unlike that, it’s non-removable. The OnePlus 2 also has a non-removable battery but it’s a larger 3300mAh battery and through my week of testing thus far, has proven enough to survive my harshest day of usage. But we’ll reserve our final thoughts until we fully test the Galaxy Note 5 to make our definitive review. These two are proper powerhouses of the big phone market and we definitely cannot wait until we put these two in a proper versus video.
If you have any questions about any of these devices answered in our versus video, make sure to leave that in a comment below. Watch out for our next video.
