It’s not every day a phone comes out and changes the mobile landscape. We have your typical smartphones that cost around $600 and while they are great, they are sometimes out of reach of your average consumer. Unless you have serious brand loyalty for companies like Samsung and Apple, some people just want phones they can afford. So bring in a company that saw a need for that—they’re called OnePlus and this is their OnePlus 2, the sequel to one of the best phones of last year. It’s more powerful, better built, and has new features to make phones that cost twice it run for their money. Welcome to my review of the OnePlus 2.
The OnePlus 2 is a pretty special device this year. It has undergone some changes to make it more high quality and more powerful yet still attainable. Its first big change lies in the build—it’s slightly shorter and less wide than the outgoing model. However, it’s a tiny bit thicker and due to the aluminum band construction, weighs 13 more grams. You may see this as them going backwards but the feel in the hand is certainly more solid than the OnePlus One.
Another change on the outside is the relocation of some buttons and ports plus 3 new hardware features. First, the volume rocker now lives on the right side of the device, right above the lock switch. While you may think you pressed the wrong button, I think the placement and spacing is pretty good and the difference is fairly distinguishable. What does live on the left side is the new alert slider, somewhat like iPhone’s mute switch but unlike that it has 3 modes instead of just on and off. There’s 3 modes that correlate to the Lollipop notification menu of all, priority and none.
The last addition is the new charger port. Unlike most Android flagships, the OnePlus 2 uses USB Type-C. While it will eventually be the charger port for all smartphones in the future, its limited availability may be more of a headache to the end user and perhaps the cable you get with the phone will be the only cable you own. Another big change to the OnePlus 2 is the new home button. While it may not press down like buttons on Samsung phones, it also house the fingerprint sensor. It works about 99% of the time plus it’s super-fast and accurate.
The last thing to mention hardware-wise is the dual SIM slot. Unlike the OnePlus One, the SIM slot now lives underneath the back cover which is a heck of a lot easier to pull off this time. The SIM tray has two slots for two Nano SIMs and the great thing about that is this phone can do LTE on both SIM cards.
The display on the OnePlus 2 has also been updated. It didn’t get any more pixels or any larger but it did get slightly brighter. The screen is now rated to 600 nits of brightness and it looks even better than the outgoing model. The color accuracy and rendition is beautiful and also the viewing angles of the IPS panel is fantastic. I’m definitely not missing Quad HD on the OnePlus 2.
The bulk of the changes did happen on the hardware inside the OnePlus 2. The first and probably biggest change is the new processor. It’s an octa-core Snapdragon 810 sitting next to 4GB of RAM and the Adreno 430 GPU. Storage is either 16 or 64GB but no external expansion is found on the OnePlus 2. All of that equals some serious power and really good performance. And if you’re the type of person that goes off with Benchmarks, the OnePlus 2 scores really well. The single-core score is around 1400 and multi-core scores of nearly 5000.
With all of that power, the OnePlus puts it to use with their software experience. The OnePlus 2 is running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. But unlike the OnePlus One with Cyanogen, the OnePlus 2 is running OxygenOS 2.0. this is a skin that is a lot more close to stock Android but still retains the ability to customize just about everything. The software experience is definitely one of my favorites so far of 2015—it’s fast, snappy and the phone handles itself really nicely but I would be very surprised if it couldn’t especially with all that power on board. And over my nearly two weeks of usage with the OnePlus 2, it has not run into any issues with software or hardware.
The next piece is the OnePlus 2’s camera. The OnePlus One never had a groundbreaking camera in terms of quality. And sadly, the OnePlus 2’s camera isn’t groundbreaking either. It’s a 13MP sensor, but no longer from Sony, that has the ability to take 12.4MP photos and 4K UHD videos. The photos are pretty good but usually are overexposed if left to its own devices. You usually have to dial back the exposure manually. With the right exposure, you can achieve some really nice looking photos. Its video side is also decent. One thing that I’ve noticed is the autofocus via the laser autofocusing system hunts quite a lot. The last thing I’ve noticed with the OnePlus 2‘s camera overall is the slow shutter speed. From the time you hit the capture button to when the camera actually takes a photo, there’s a pretty large gap. OnePlus has come up and announced a manual mode camera software update that will be released sometime soon so we’ll have to revisit the camera when that update gets pushed out.
The last thing I want to mention is the battery and battery life. The OnePlus 2 has a 3300mAh non-removable battery. It’s 200mAh over the original OnePlus One. And this thing will last a very long time. I would say battery life is right on par with the OnePlus One, around 5.5 hours of screen on-time with extremely heavy usage. But on average, I would get around 5 hours of screen on-time with around 30% of battery life remaining at the end of the day.
So the OnePlus 2. Is it the best phone available right now? Probably so and it is the best deal you have right now. For $389 for the 64GB model, it’s a smoking deal. It’s powerful, modern, and it feels like a more expensive phone than it actually is. And with that battery life, it may very well be the best phone with the best battery life you can get right now in the Android ecosystem. I would probably take this phone over almost anything right now. And that’s why I took out the SIM card from my personal phone and put it inside the OnePlus 2.
So what’s the downside? I know what you’re about to put in the comments—I know there’s no NFC and I know there’s no fast charging. Those are downsides that I accept and take over paying double the price. So that’s my review of the OnePlus 2. It’s my favorite device of 2015 and I really think you should give it a look if you haven’t already.