OnePlus 5 - Review

I’ve been using OnePlus 5 for the past two years. Having previously owned the OnePlus X, I was pretty excited about the OnePlus 5, so I bought it the day it was released. My main attraction towards OnePlus was the fact it started out as a small company selling quality smartphones at affordable prices. I’ll be honest, that ‘affordable’ moniker is slowly fading away now, but it’s quite understandable, given that developments in this field of technology come at a blinding pace, and that good things come at a price. Add to it the fact that OnePlus is really a community-driven smartphone brand, as it listens to the users as to what features they want and what they hate.

The biggest advantage of the 5 in my opinion is the ease-and-speed of use. The near stock feel of OxygenOS combined with a superfast processor makes you forget what loading times are and a huge amount of RAM ensures that apps stay running for longer, turning it into an overall snappy experience. I feel like I’m only limited by the dexterity (or lack thereof) of my fingers while using it, and not by the phone’s speed.

The 5’s tagline was “Dual Camera, Clearer Photos”, and I got really thrilled to try this setup as very few phones had it back then. But here’s the irony. The portrait mode works fine for simple geometries, but the edge detection is not that good. The phone also struggles in low light conditions, as the photos suffer from excessive grain and dull colours. The grain issue is evident in Slo-Mo videos too. There’s another thing that I’ve noticed in more recent OnePlus phones too, and that is the oil painting effect – the RAW photos come out all good, but something in OnePlus’s post-processing software makes photos look like oil paintings when zoomed in a bit, even in broad daylight conditions. OnePlus said it’s working on this, but I’m yet to see substantial improvements.