OnePlus X

The choice of material used plays a vital role in not only the design and build quality of a smartphone, but also its feel and flaunt-worthiness. The first offering from the company, the OnePlus One, used a unique sandpapery finish (on the 64GB variant) and offered very good build. Its sequel stuck to the same material, but added a metal frame to the mix. With the OnePlus X Onyx, the company is moving to a mix of glass and metal, that looks oh-so-sexy. It’s not that we haven’t seen something like this before – even Samsung moved to glass and metal with its premium flagships, and many others have used the same combination quite effectively as well.

The 5-inch AMOLED display on the OnePlus X is a beauty, with vivid colours and deep blacks. That’s the AMOLED goodness for you right there. Sure, phablet lovers might not love it for its size, but 5-inches is the right compromise between ample real estate for all your gaming and web browsing needs, while keeping the overall dimensions in check for one-handed usage.

If the outer casing is the phone’s body and the internal hardware is its guts, the software platform is the air it breathes. This crude analogy works well in the case of the OnePlus X, as handily, the software platform it utilises is dubbed OxygenOS. Just like its bigger sibling the OnePlus 2, the X runs the latest version of OxygenOS, with the underlying platform being Android 5.1.1. It won’t be a bad idea to jump to the software section of our OnePlus 2 review to get the full lowdown, since the interface and the features on the X are just about the same.

The camera chops on the OnePlus X comprise a 13-meg rear shooter featuring an ISOCELL sensor and phase detection autofocus, while an 8MP snapper stands guard at front in case you’re in the mood for a selfie or need to make a video call. The app is the same basic affair we saw on the OnePlus 2, offering modes like Clear Image, HDR, beauty, time lapse, slow motion and panorama. Sure, there are tons of third-party shootings apps on the Play Store, but the default camera app on the OnePlus X just seems too minimalist for our liking. At least in the OnePlus 2’s case, the image quality made up for the lack of features, but the scenario is a tad different on the X.

Coming to the guts, the hardware inside the OnePlus X isn’t too different from the brand’s very first smartphone. So you get a quad-core 2.3GHz Snapdragon 801 chip, mated to 3 gigs of RAM. This is the same combo that powers the OnePlus One, and also Xiaomi’s Mi 4. In fact, since the Mi 4 also features a 5-inch FHD display and is priced similarly, it’s one of the closest rivals to the OnePlus X. Now the 801 is a couple of generations old, and doesn’t even support 64-bit processing, a feature brought in by Android Lollipop and now offered by almost all recent chipsets from chipmakers like Qualcomm, MediaTek, Intel and others. Don’t let that act a deal breaker though, since it’s no wimp when it comes to number crunching.