Ahead of the new school, college and university term, OnePlus has introduced its first ever student discount. And it makes the OnePlus 5 even more of a bargain.
Students can get a 10% discount on the OnePlus range by signing up to the OnePlus Student Program. They will need to prove they are students by logging into their OnePlus account (or by registering for an account) and providing the relevant student ID. At the time of writing, the OnePlus 5 is on sale via OnePlus’ website as well as on Amazon. 10% off the OnePlus 5 brings it down to a very tempting £404.10 – not that much more than the OnePlus 3T, which launched at £399. Not only that, but the coupon – which can be claimed once per year – can be used on any products on the OnePlus site, so you may want to grab a cut-price case or spare dash charger while you’re there. You won’t be able to add more than one phone though – although if you could afford that, then what kind of student are you anyway?
You’ll also now have the option of buying a OnePlus 5 in Soft Gold. It’s a nice enough finish and subtle rather than glitzy (hence the official “Soft Gold” name), but I think the OnePlus 5 looks rather good in this colour, especially as the front fascia is white rather than the obsidian black like the other models of the phone. As ever with these things, the Soft Gold variant of the OnePlus 5 is a limited edition model, available only while stocks last, and it isn’t available with 128GB storage allocation, just the 64GB.
OnePlus 5 review: In full
The OnePlus 5 is one hell of a smartphone but then you’re not really surprised about that are, you? After all, if there’s one thing OnePlus has demonstrated over the past few years it’s that it has a keen eye for what consumers want from a smartphone. It’s a pretty simple recipe when you think about it: people want the fastest phone they can afford with the best camera they can get without necessarily having to fork out the premium prices that Samsung and Apple charge.
The OnePlus 5 doubles down on that, delivering everything previous OnePlus phones have and then some.
And that means, at its core, the OnePlus 5 is a fast, reasonably priced smartphone that builds everything around the latest, greatest silicon from Qualcomm – the Snapdragon 835. This is an octa-core chip comprising a pair of quad-core CPUs – one running at 2.45GHz, the other at 1.8GHz – and OnePlus supplements it with a generous dollop of RAM and storage. Depending on which model you buy, the OnePlus 5 has a huge 6GB or 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM, while storage options start at 64GB and rise to 128GB.
There are only two disappointing things about the core specification: first that OnePlus continues to eschew microSD storage expansion, although since you start with 64GB that’s not too much of a problem; second, that the phone doesn’t have any kind of dust- or water-resistance like the Samsung Galaxy S8 or most of its flagship rivals.
What you also don’t get with the OnePlus 5 is the long, tall screen of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6; instead, the Chinese manufacturer is sticking with its eminently sensible 1080p, 5.5in AMOLED panel (which is fine as long as you don’t plan on using your phone to play VR games all the time) and has focused on improving the camera.
And that’s where OnePlus has spent all of its R&D yuan this year: on a new dual-lens rear camera, which it has also repositioned from the centre at the rear to the top-left corner of the rear panel.
OnePlus 5 review: Key features and design
I’ve become used to the symmetrical design of previous OnePlus handsets, so this change of look is quite a wrench. It looks much less like a OnePlus phone now, and more like something Huawei or Honor might produce, except that the camera module isn’t flush with the back of the phone.
As usual, though, the finish is high quality and sensibly practical. This is the slimmest OnePlus yet, at 7.25mm, and it feels jolly lovely. It doesn’t have glass on the rear, so doesn’t look quite as slinky as the Galaxy S8 or even the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, but the anodised aluminium unibody design (available in Midnight Black and Slate Grey), coupled with the new curves and crescent-shaped antenna strips at the top and bottom, makes for a very smart look indeed. The fact that it’s aluminium means it should resist breakage a little better than its flagship rivals as well.
Nothing else has changed about the physical design, though. The OnePlus 5 continues with the three-position do-not-disturb switch on the left side that I and so many other OnePlus fans love.
That sits just above the volume rocker, while the power button is directly opposite on the right-hand edge of the handset and everything else sits on the bottom edge. The 3.5mm headphone jack is retained, as is the USB Type-C port and the single speaker grille, while the fingerprint reader is, as ever, on the front – but now it’s covered in tough ceramic and will unlock your phone in a quoted 0.2 seconds.
And boy this phone unlocks fast. You only have to touch the sensor with your thumb or index finger and you’re into the home screen instantly. It’s the fastest fingerprint reader I’ve used on any phone and it really does add to the feeling that you’re using one of the fastest smartphones on the planet.
OnePlus 5 review: Display
As with last year, the display is a 5.5in AMOLED unit and the resolution remains resolutely Full HD. You might think that OnePlus would have left things as is, but there are a few changes afoot here. The main thing is that OnePlus is giving users a choice of colour profiles – Default, sRGB, DCI P3 and Custom – following criticism of the OnePlus 3 for its somewhat lurid default colour profile.
As with the OnePlus 3 and 3T, I think most users will probably end up sticking with the Default settings. In this mode, onscreen colours are bright and vibrant and don’t look nearly as candy coloured as on last year’s OnePlus 3. Yes, the colours are still bright and a touch over the top, but they’re not downright horrid.
That’s just as well because the sRGB mode isn’t quite as good as I’d like it to be. It covers only 89.8% of the sRGB colour space and red tones, in particular, look dull. My colour accuracy measurements, for what it’s worth, reflect that impression precisely. Overall, the average delta E in sRGB mode isn’t bad, hitting 1.76 – not the best result we’ve seen but far from the worse – but there’s a problem in the red tones as you can see from the graph below.
^ The coloured line represents the OnePlus 5’s attempt at matching the sRGB colour space; the dotted line is what it should be
The DCI-P3 pre-calibrated mode is better, with the phone reproducing 95.3% of that colour space, while the Default mode is more vibrant still, extending the displayed colours beyond even DCI P3. Despite this, it’s not distractingly garish.
^ Here, the coloured line here represents the OnePlus 5’s attempt at reproducing the DCI P3 colour space; the dotted line is what it should be
The Samsung Galaxy S8’s display is better and goes brighter than the OnePlus 5 in automatic brightness mode, but again the OnePlus 5 is no slouch. At maximum brightness, the display beams out at an impressive 419cd/m2 and with a polarising filter applied between the glass and AMOLED panel it’s readable in most conditions.
Thankfully, that polarising layer has been arranged so if you’re wearing polarising sunglasses it doesn’t black out when you’re holding it vertically or horizontally – unlike the HTC U11. HTC positions its polarising layer so that the screen blacks out your view entirely when the phone is held in landscape orientation.
All-in-all, the OnePlus’ screen is a very good one – a little off the pace in sRGB mode, perhaps, and not a match overall for the Samsung Galaxy S8’s – but I can’t think that anyone is going to complain too much about that.
OnePlus 5 review: Performance
One of the main reasons behind OnePlus’ continuing success has been its ability to include the very latest flagship Qualcomm chipset while keeping a lid on the price. That continues with the OnePlus 5. Inside is an octa-core Snapdragon 835 (comprising a pair of quad-core CPUs, one running at 2.45GHz, the other at 1.8GHz) and either 6GB or 8GB of RAM, depending on whether you choose the model with 64GB or 128GB of storage.
You’ll not be surprised to find that this produces stonking benchmark results and the OnePlus 5 feels ultra-slick in use. That doesn’t surprise me and it shouldn’t surprise you either. Here’s how the benchmark results stack up against a few of the OnePlus 5’s key rivals:
Basically, the OnePlus 5 matches the Samsung S8 (Exynos 8895 model tested) and the HTC U11 (Snapdragon 835), give or take, with the OnePlus 5 edging in front marginally. Interestingly, there have been reports that OnePlus has been manipulating the benchmarks; even if this turns out to be true, the difference is so small (below 5%) that you’d never notice it anyway.
As for graphics performance, that’s good enough that it’ll handle anything the Google Play Store can throw at it and then some. Once again, here’s a quick comparison chart:
You’ll notice here that the OnePlus 5’s onscreen result is better than the S8’s by quite a margin. Why is this?the simple answer is the S8’s extra screen resolution; this test was run at 2,960 x 1,440 where the OnePlus 5 only needs to render 1,920 x 1,080 or more than double the number of pixels. However, it is worth bearing in mind that, in the hunt for more performance, it is possible to reduce the resolution the S8 renders to either 2,220 x 1,080 or 1,480 x 720.
Perhaps a more significant performance indicator, though, is the speed of the OnePlus 5’s integrated flash storage, which dictates how fast apps launch and large files load. Just like the Samsung Galaxy S8, the OnePlus 5 uses two-lane UFS 2.1 flash and it’s super quick. In raw numbers, it delivers sequential read and write speeds of 731MB/sec and 213MB/sec, which is far quicker than the OnePlus 3T (420MB/sec and 168MB/sec) and around the same ballpark as the S8 (763MB/sec and 180MB/sec).
The final aspect of performance, but possibly the most important one, is battery life, and first impressions are that it’s stupendously good. In our test, we set the screen to a brightness of 170cd/m2, engage flight mode and ensure no background tasks are taking place, the OnePlus 5 lasted an incredible 20hrs 40mins. That’s more than twice as long as the Sony XZ Premium in the same test and in the same ballpark as the most excellent Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus.
And when the phone does run dry, this phone charges incredibly quickly – as long as you use the boxed Dash Charge 3 charger. One evening I plugged it in at 0% and in 12 minutes it had reached 21% and after 39 minutes it had charged to 75%. It slows down thereafter, reaching 93% in a less impressive-looking 1hr 28mins (from 0%) but if you need to give your phone a quick boost before you go home, the OnePlus 5 will oblige.
OnePlus 5 review: Dual-lens camera
So far, so good, but the OnePlus 5’s biggest main new feature is its new dual-lens rear camera. The specifications look pretty decent on paper, with one 16-megapixel f/1.7 main camera and another, dimmer, 20-megapixel f/2.6 telephoto camera making up the duo. There’s phase-detect autofocus, so it should lock onto your subject superfast, and thanks to a recent patch, you now get Electronic Image Stabilisation.
Like on the iPhone 7 Plus, the regular camera is your main shooter, with the 20-megapixel snapper offering a 2X zoom for when you need to get closer to your subject and, again like the iPhone 7 Plus, they can work together to produce portrait photos with a blurry bokeh effect in the background. I found this feature worked rather well, as long as I was careful to shoot my subject against a background a reasonable distance away.
Here’s one example; you have to look pretty close at the edges of my victim’s face to see that it’s an effect rather than a true SLR wide aperture shot.
The OnePlus 5 also features improved HDR algorithms, but this is considerably less successful. Not only is the effect subtle to the point of being nigh-on invisible, it’s also prone to double-vision effects. If your hands, or your subject, move even a little you’ll see a little fringing around the edges of objects in your photographs. And in some shots I noticed colours going completely awry. Take a look at the Tube sign below: you’ll see that, in the OnePlus shot, the no smoking sign is grey where it should be red.
Not good; in fact, I’d go so far as to recommend you don’t use HDR at all; it’s no match for the Google Pixel’s stupendous HDR+ mode, which rarely produces such artefacts.
Otherwise, the OnePlus 5 produces decent-looking photographs that are well exposed and reasonably crisp. Close inspection reveals a touch more unnatural processing than the equivalent Google Pixel shot, while in low light the OnePlus’ shots exhibit a more grainy, oversharpened look, but despite lagging behind the Pixel, the results are pretty good.
What’s perhaps most impressive about the OnePlus 5’s camera is the Pro mode, which allows you to manually adjust focus, ISO sensitivity, shutter speed and white balance and handily displays a live histogram and levelling gauge onscreen. The latter looks especially useful and means you should be able to frame your shots more accurately and judge exposures as you shoot. In practice, however, I found it slightly out of skew: whenever I took a shot with the gauge completely level, the resulting photograph always seemed to be tilted a few degrees to the right.
This wouldn’t be a problem if you could calibrate it, but there doesn’t appear to be any way of doing that within the OnePlus camera app. A shame, because this would otherwise be a handy feature.
The camera can also shoot in RAW but there’s a problem with this as well. When I tried loading the .raw photos into Photoshop, it didn’t know what to do with them and although Lightroom happily dealt with the same files, I found that JPEGs of the same scene looked cleaner and less noisy.
As for the front-facing camera, that’s an impressive 16-megapixel snapper with an aperture of f/2. That’s more than detailed enough for your pouty Instagram selfies, but there’s another small glitch here. Where with most smartphones the preview shows you a mirror image, then reverses it once the picture is captured, the OnePlus 5’s camera software leaves it reversed. It’s a bit daft, evidence not of a bug, but some wonky thinking at OnePlus: you can, in fact, have the camera behave normally if you look at the settings and flick the Selfie > Invert photo switch to the off position.
OnePlus 5 review: Software and other features
Manufacturers always seem to add an extra feature or two on the software side of things, whether or not they’re needed, and that’s very much the case this year with the OnePlus 5. As usual, the phone runs the firm’s own Oxygen launcher and that’s lies on top of Android 7 Marshmallow.
The most interesting new feature is Reading mode, which OnePlus seemed to claim works like Apple’s TrueTone, analysing ambient lighting in order to set the screen’s white balance. You can set which apps you want this to work with in the phone’s display settings.
In reality, though, all it seems to do is turn the screen monochrome. It’s a touch disappointing and it isn’t the only gripe I have with the display software. The other is that the brightness slider has a very small range of adjustment at the low end, which makes it tricky to set the right brightness level for late-night reading.
Elsewhere, the app drawer is now semi-transparent, which is supposed to make it feel less separate from the rest of the UI, but in reality is the most minor of minor updates. More significant is the new screenshot facility: swipe down on the screen with three fingers and Oxygen grabs a screenshot, offering you a number of options along the bottom of the screen as you do so.
You can choose to share the screenshot immediately, edit it, delete it, or – and this is cool – if you’ve grabbed a portion of a vertically scrolling app, menu or web page, tap an icon to have the phone scroll down and capture the entire thing. Just tap when you want it to finish.
I’d love to show you how this works through a series of screenshots, but ironically you can’t screenshot the screenshot tool, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
Elsewhere, Oxygen retains all the features that make it special, including the ability to use onscreen navigation buttons instead of the capacitive buttons that flank the fingerprint reader, quick gestures for launching the app of your choice or pause and play music, plus flip to mute.
One final change is that OnePlus has changed the phone’s vibration component so that it delivers a stronger, yet shorter buzz. This is another subtle improvement but a welcome one nonetheless.
OnePlus 5 review: Verdict
There are plenty of people looking to knock the OnePlus 5, principally due to the price rise. And, yes, it’s disappointing the OnePlus is now more of a mid-range than a budget handset. However, if there’s a better phone for £450 I haven’t seen it.
The OnePlus 5 is beautifully designed; it’s fast and battery life is fantastic. The camera isn’t top class but it still takes cracking photographs most of the time. The display is spot on, eschewing unnecessary pixels, instead providing perfectly sharp images with excellent colour rendition and low power consumption.
With rivals – particularly from Honor and Huawei – producing excellent smartphones for £500 and below, competition for the OnePlus 5 is steeper than ever but there’s still nothing to touch it at this price.
Sоurсе: alphr.com