OnePlus has officially announced the OnePlus 5, their flagship phone for 2017 which is poised to take on the big boys at offering flagship level specs at a lower price.
In the latest iteration, the company has decided to move away from their previous design language shown in the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T to a design that resembles the iPhone 7 Plus at the back. It still maintains its all-metal unibody with the fingerprint scanner at the front and the headphone jack at the bottom.
The smartphone still sports a 5.5 inch “Optic Display” with a resolution of 1080 by 1920 which is covered by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5. The Snapdragon 835 powers the phone which makes it at par with the latest flagship smartphones from Samsung, HTC and Sony. The RAM can go upto a healthy 8GB RAM which is double what we get from what we call “flagship worthy” phone.
It still maintains the no expandable storage policy where you can get one with upto 128GB of UFS 2.1 storage where OnePlus says it uses 2 lanes which doubles its bandwith.
The biggest change on the OnePlus is the inclusion of the dual camera system which replaces the single 16MP main camera we saw on the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T.
It features a dual 16MP colour sensor with a wide f/1.7 lens and 20MP monochrome sensor with a f/2.6 telephoto lens which is a move we have seen employed by Huawei on their Mate 9 and P10. The rear camera can shoot 4K video at 30fps, 1080/60fps/30fps and 720p at 30/120fps. It also has features like smart capture that uses algorithms to intelligently detect the conditions and optimize for accuracy and clarity, portrait mode for adding bokeh to make your subject the centre of your photo and a new “robust” pro mode that will appeal enthusiasts. OnePlus also says that this new system focuses 40% faster than the OnePlus 3T.
The front camera is the same 16MP sensor we saw on the OnePlus 3T that shoots 1080p video at 30fps.
The OnePlus 5 maintains its USB Type-C port with their proprietary Dash Charge technology which charges its 3300mAH battery quite fast. Other connectivity features include Bluetooth 5 which has this cool feature of beaming separate audio to separate connected devices, NFC and 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi. It also runs their Oxygen OS on top of Android 7.1.1 Nougat.
This is the most expensive OnePlus phone to date where it will cost $479 for the 6GB RAM/64GB model and $539 for the 8GB/128GB model, which is still reasonable. The OnePlus5 is available in two colours: Slate Gray and Midnight Black where the Midnight Black model is the 8GB/128GB variant and the Slate Gray is the 6GB/64GB variant.
