We’ve been speculating about it long enough, but the time has come to finally get on with it – the OnePlus X is here, the second phone that the China-based upstart has put out this year (and its third in all). Once again, OnePlus’s strategy is to blow you away with the amount of high-end features and feel this gadget has, while only costing USD$249. The good thing about it is that it actually succeeds there – provided that you can actually get your hands on one.
Let’s start with the specs. The OnePlus X is a phone that competes for being single-handed in design and one that will fit in your pocket. The new phone uses an AMOLED screen from Samsung, all of 5-inches but giving you Full HD (1080p) resolution. The result is around 440ppi goodness, everything on the display is bright, crisp, and oversaturated the way you want it. The phone is powered by a year old flagship rather than a current midrange chipset – the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801. While the chipset is natively 32bit (rather than 64bit like most new ones), it is certainly not slow. And the Adreno 330 GPU performs better than the Adreno 405 in the newer Snapdragon 600-series midrange chips.
You get a Samsung ISOCELL camera, the 13MP sensor that most likely featured in the Samsung Galaxy S5 – so you’re not getting a crappy camera at all. The storage is at 16GB, which is generous at this pricing. You can actually expand that via microSD. Users have the choice of either using the SIM card slots for two networks or one with a microSD for storage expansion. The non-removable 2,520mAh battery should be enough as the AMOLED screen would give it battery savings from the unlit black pixels.
There are actually two variants of the phone, one that has a glass “onyx” back and a limited edition that has a ceramic back. Even at this point, we would like to encourage you guys to forget that the ceramic edition even exists, however tempting that might be. It will most certainly be given to OnePlus forum fanatics and overlords, and with the invite system and only 10,000 units to be made – that ceramic variant will certainly be out of reach.
On the software side, the demo units that OnePlus has sent out to most tech blogs would have OxygenOS embedded – no longer Cyanogen OS. It is still based on Android 5.1 Lollipop, no news yet on whether a Marshmallow update is forthcoming. At USD$249, the phone certainly competes with the Motorola Moto G, the Sony Xperia M2 Aqua, and the Honor 6 – but it manages to outshine them all with generous specs at this price point. The eternal question, it seems, with OnePlus phones is how to get your hands on one with the infuriating invite system. With these specs and at this pricing, it might just be worth it to get in line for the OnePlus X.
SOURCE: OnePlus
