OnePlus X Review

OnePlus launched their third smartphone, the OnePlus X which is more affordable device than the company’s flagship phone, the OnePlus 2. OnePlus X was made available in India on November 4th via the invite system on Amazon. India is one of the few countries which have got access to the device. The Onyx version of OnePlus X went on sale for Rs 16,999 and the device comes with a 5 inch Full HD display, Snapdragon 801 processor with 3GB RAM and 16GB internal storage along with 13MP rear camera and Android 5.1.1.

Here is the detailed review of OnePlus X.

Related Reading: OnePlus X Unboxing

Design and Build:

Design is one of the key USP of the OnePlus X. At 6.9mm thickness and just 139gms in weight, you can clearly see that the company has focused on the design instead of going with high-end hardware. The phone has an anodized metal frame with 17 micro cut grooves running along the edges to give it a premium feel. The cuts also give a good grip on the sides. The front on both phones is covered by a 2.5D Gorilla Glass 3, but this makes the device slippery.

The front panel has 5 inch Full HD display, three capacitive buttons which are not backlit. It is quite difficult to find those button, but you can always use the on-screen keys. On the right side, there is power and volume keys along with the SIM tray which can hold two nano SIM cards or one SIM card and a micro SD card. On the left side, you have the notification toggle with three modes- silent, priority, and all alerts modes. On the top is the 3.5mm headphone jack and the secondary microphone, while on the bottom are the microUSB port, microphone, and a single speaker. The rear panel has the 13MP camera, LED flash, and the OnePlus logo.

Overall, OnePlus X is a compact and lightweight device which is great to use.

Display:

The OnePlus X has a 5 inch Full HD (1920 X 1080p) AMOLED display with a pixel density of 441PPI. Not too many phones come with 5 inch screen size as most of the OEMs are comfortable with 5.5 inch displays. The display on the OnePlus X is good. The colors have come great and the sharpness levels are very good for a device in this price point, thanks to the AMOLED panel. The touch response is very good and so are the viewing angles.

While the brightness levels are pretty good even in bright sunlight, the ambient light sensor takes a couple to seconds to get to work, which can be probably fixed with software updates. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla glass 3 and also comes with a screen protector which is built it. Overall, the display quality on OnePlus X is quite good.

Software:

OnePlus X runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with a custom Oxygen OS. The UI is mostly stock experience, but with some added customization options which are quite handy. The phone comes with app drawer and the notification center is also stock experience. You can also edit and customize the notification center.

Oxygen OS offers some added features in the customization options and the most important one is to switch between on-screen or hardware buttons. You can basically configure the buttons, reverse the actions and also configure what they do when you long press them. Even when you are using on screen buttons, you can still enable the home touch button.

It also comes with a dark mode and also the ability to change the accent colors across the UI. Oxygen OS also supports gestures which include double tap to wake and draw commands.

Overall, if you love stock Android experience, you will definitely like Oxygen OS loaded with added features.

Performance:

The OnePlus X is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset with Adreno 330 GPU coupled with 3GB RAM. While the Snapdragon 801 is indeed a powerful processor, it is also a dated processor which was released back in 2014. But having said that the performance of the device was mostly good overall. We did notice some slight issues when navigating through the UI, but this was not a widespread issue.

The 3GB RAM made the device pretty smooth in overall experience and the Oxygen OS responded pretty well. The gaming performance of the device was also pretty good and we did not notice any major issues except for some frame skips which was one off issue rather than a norm. Surprisingly, the heat generated while playing games was also on the lower side considering it has a glass panel on the rear side.

Related Watching: OnePlus X Gaming Review

Multi-tasking was very good on the device and switching between apps was pretty smooth. The call quality on the phone is very good and we seldom had any issues with calls. The speaker performance was also quite good and this was reflected in the gaming with good sound output.

The phone also supports 4G LTE in India.

The phone comes with 16GB of internal storage and out of which close to 11GB was available in first boot. This is one of the biggest issues with the phone. While you can expand the storage via micro SD card, but you cannot install apps directly onto the SD card and this we feel is a bug in the OS. We are sure OnePlus would be working on an update to fix this issue. You can expand the storage to 128GB via the hybrid SIM card.

Camera:

The camera on the OnePlus X is a 13MP sensor with f/2.2 and ISOCELL sensor, which improves color fidelity, sharpness, and dynamic range compared to regular BSI sensors. There is also phase detection autofocus available on the device. The front camera is 8MP with f/2.4. The camera interface is very simple with just 5 modes- Photo, Video, Panorama, Slow Motion and Time-Lapse. The photo mode has HDR, clear photo (which takes multiple photos and combines them) and also beauty mode.

Coming to the camera samples, the daylight shots have plenty of details including great color quality. The white balance is also pretty good overall. But the camera falls short of expectations in the low light performance where the photos have high noise levels and the clarity seems to be just average. The close up shots have come good especially with great colors. The front facing 8MP camera also works very well for selfies. The camera can record videos only in 1080p and there is no 4K video support. The 1080p sample is just average and not really great when compared to the competition. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.

Battery Life:

OnePlus X comes with 2525mAh battery and while the capacity seems to be on the lower side, the battery performance is quite good. We tested the battery performance using 4G LTE enabled SIM card along with Wi-Fi usage, calls, gaming, camera, and other social networking apps. We could get through a day of usage with almost 3 hours and 45 minutes screen on time (SoT) which is pretty good. But at the same time, if the phone is on 4G LTE network, the overnight drain was quite high and this could be due to inconsistent network.

Overall we would say, if you are a moderate user, you can easily get a day of usage on OnePlus X.

Verdict:

Priced at Rs 16,999, OnePlus X fulfills anyone looking for a great performing mid range phone. It has a stunning design, great display and good software along with great performance. Yes, the OnePlus X isn’t without the flaws which includes an average camera and battery capacity along with a year old processor.

But having said that, the biggest issue with OnePlus X is the invite system which the company should have removed atleast for this device. It is pretty hard to get the invites at launch although OnePlus plans to do open sales in December. If you can get hold of an invite, it is all worth the money!