At Rs. 17, 000, the OnePlus X is the company’s most affordable handheld ever, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. The OnePlus X is a gorgeous smartphone, and it packs a beautiful display and a capable feature set as well. In some ways it even eclipses its higher end sibling, the OnePlus 2.
HARDWARE
A pane of Gorilla Glass 3 up front and one of “fire-baked scratch-resistant glass” on the backside come together in an aluminum alloy midplate featuring Art Deco-style striping and subtle chamfers that twinkle in the light. The volume and power buttons are textured in radial circles, standing out much more readily than their equivalents on the OnePlus 2 and delivering better mechanical feedback as well. OnePlus has also carried over the notification slider from its flagship, 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 a rarity in the Android world: a smallish phone with top-shelf design that can be comfortably used one-handed.
SOFTWARE
The OnePlus X runs OxygenOS 2.1.2, a custom fork of Android 5.1.1 that we explored in detail in our OnePlus 2 review. The below impressions have been carried over from that review, with modifications where necessary.Waking the OnePlus X from standby is a simple matter of double-tapping the home screen or pressing the power/standby button, which is positioned perfectly for our average-sized man-hands. The OnePlus X also offers an enhanced version of the Nexus family’s Ambient Display; when there’s a waiting notification, the phone periodically projects it onto the screen in power-saving monochrome. OnePlus improves upon the Nexus implementation with Proximity Wake, which uses the front-facing camera to trigger Ambient Display when a hand is waved over the phone’s face.Since OnePlus opted not to include LEDs for the X’s capacitive buttons, we chose to sacrifice some screen real estate for the always-on softkeys instead. As before, the position of the back and multitasking keys can be swapped. If you decide to stick with the physical buttons despite their lack of illumination, you get some more shortcut options as well. Long-pressing or double-clicking those buttons performs other actions like starting the camera or opening Google Now.
CAMERA
Like the OnePlus 2, the OnePlus X features a 13MP camera sensor – but the similarities end there. Rather than sticking with its predecessor’s OmniVision sensor, OnePlus has opted for a Samsung ISOCELL module(Samsung 3M2 CMOS, the same sensor used by the Oppo R7) featuring an f/2.2 aperture and no optical image stabilization. The result is a camera that produces adequate results in bright light – and that’s about as good as it gets.
If you’re planning on keeping and 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 to a shadow of their former selves. Zoom in and the detail falls apart, edges corrupted by digital noise, a smooth blue sky devolving into a grainy stretch of dusty felt. Brightly-lit zones are often overexposed. Colorful rows of pink flower petals appear as a washed-out expanse of salmon-colored feathers.
The lower the light gets, the tougher it becomes to gain and keep focus: we’ve shot acceptable night photos right alongside terrible ones, with the only difference being half a second and a minor focus adjustment. As with most smartphone cameras, mild grain in good lighting degrades into full-bore digital noise at night. Setting the phone to HDR mode helps it gather more light in very dim nighttime scenes, and using the resolution-enhancing Clear Image mode does add needed sharpness by combining multiple exposures into one large photo, but these are inconsistent workarounds.
PERFORMANCE
Other handicaps are less significant but still worth mentioning. The bottom-firing speaker –only the left-hand grill seems to conceal a speakerphone– is easy to accidentally block with a finger, and while it’s usually loud enough, it’s prone to raspy playback. Battery life is better than we expected given the smallish 2525 mAh power pack, but it’s nothing special: while we were able to hit 4 hours of screen-on-time once over a moderate day of usage, a maximum of 3 hours SoT was more typical. That’s similar to the performance we got out of the Moto X Pure Edition – but that phone could be recharged rapidly, while the OnePlus X can’t. The lack of Qualcomm QuickCharge means that even using a 25W TurboPower adapter, the OnePlus X charges at a plodding 1% per minute or less through its USB 2.0 port.As you might expect given the phone’s aging silicon, performance suffers somewhat in high-demand applications. Games like Asphalt 8: Airborne, which used to run quite well on the 801, have seen upgrades since to enhance their graphics. As a result the OnePlus X struggles to run the game smoothly at maximum quality settings(“medium” is about as high as we could go to maintain a playable frame rate). In day-to-day swipes and taps the phone is usually very snappy, but like some other devices it does bog down during rapid typing on the Google Keyboard. Fortunately these slowdowns are confined to specific and small corners of the experience. Still, we wonder what OnePlus could have done with a more-modern midrange processor like the Snapdragon 617, which serves the HTC One A9 quite well(and brings rapid charging to boot).
PROS
CONS
– Extremely slippery
– Subpar camera
– Lacks important LTE bands for the US
– Aging chipset*
CONCLUSION
For those people, the OnePlus X is an excellent option. The dated processor and mediocre camera will probably go mostly unnoticed, drowned out by the brilliant build quality and a cohesive software experience that’s absurdly good at this price point. Even those with more demanding mobile needs may be tempted by the potent mixture of a sensibly-sized Android smartphone with a reasonable price tag in tow. In terms of fit and finish, the OnePlus X is the gold standard of midrange smartphones. For Rs 17, 000, you may be able to find a smarter sidekick … but you’re not likely to find a prettier one.
:)