The price of Google’s Nexus phone was instrumental behind the success of OnePlus One. Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 devices were considered to be of ‘Value for Money’ category, but it was not seen with Nexus 6. The price of this device was around Rs 50,000. In such a situation, OnePlus One managed to achieve the title of ‘Value for Money’ product. Apart from this, the company’s marketing strategy also led to its benefits. The most important was invoice system. There is no doubt that the company managed to create a long army of fans in a short time.
OnePlus 2 (OnePlus 2) aims to redeem the old success. Even though the cost of the latest smartphone is higher than the previous device, it has a lot to keep the people of specification happy. OnePlus 2 has been developed keeping in mind the technofiles, but features like microSD card slot, NFC and fast charging have also been removed. The inclusion of the second SIM card slot in the device is a great decision for a market like India, where there is no shortage of OnePlus fans.
OnePlus 2 The second major change is to be included in place of Cyanogenmod (Oxygen OS). Oxygen OS has a stock version of Android with some additional features. Although we have been a fan of customization options present in Cyanogen, it was not as stable on the One device as it was seen on the rest of the device. In this way, it is a pleasant change. Theoretically theoretically OnePlus 2 should have low software bugs. Is this in reality? Let’s know.
Design and display
In terms of design OnePlus 2 The same is similar to its old version, although the device looks new due to some small changes. The most unique feature of this smartphone is Standstone Black Finnish. If you had wooed you in terms of design, then you should also like OnePlus 2. If you do not like this, then you can buy back covers of Bamboo, Black Applicants, Kevalar and Rosewood variants which are available on the Amazon India website.
OnePlus 2 uses a metal frame and also has a removable back cover. The speaker grill at the bottom has been given a greater modern look as we have seen in Apple and Samsung’s new flagship devices. The new USB Type-C port also exists in the bottom. There is no branding in the back of the phone other than the logo of OnePlus. Alert slider is present on the left side. We will discuss it later.
The OnePlus 2 smartphone has a 5.5-inch full-HD display with a viewing angle. According to us, this is the most bright display ever. Colors are quite natural, they are seen with a little rude and dry. Although comparison of overschurated panels is more liked by such displays, some people may find it a bit sad.
Software and performance
OnePlus 2 smartphone comes with the company’s customized Rom Oxygen OS 2.0 which is basically the same as Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, but with some new features. The launcher of the device is similar to the recently launched Moto G (Gen. 3). We were very happy to be a fan of the stock version of Android. During the setup, you have the option to activate a feature called Shelf, after which it becomes your left-free home screen.
OnePlus says that the Shelf feature is a variety of experiments. It does not look very useful at this time. We like Google Now. If you want, you can download and install Google Now Launcher. Now it will be fun to see what kind of changes are seen in Shelf in the coming days.
OnePlus 2 has multiple users and guest mode. The smartphone also has an app permission manager feature which allows you to manage the resource permission of each app. We get to see this type of feature in Xiaomi’s smartphone. This is a great feature, because it gives you complete control of your smartphone. One thing must be kept in mind that using this feature will also affect the core functionality of many apps.
There are two hardware features of OnePlus 2 which are largely associated with software. These are fingerprint scanner and alert slider.
It is easy to use fingerprint scanner to unlock the device. By the way, if you want your fingerprint reader to go smoothly, then you keep cleaning it after a time interval. If you are able to see visible print above the button, then there is a possibility that you will have to try two or three times to log in in the phone. We have rarely faced this problem with the iPhone. On many occasions, the fingerprint scanner did not work at all. We had to unlock it by putting a PIN in the phone.
Now talk about Alert Slider. This is a clever name given to a button through which you can switch between different profiles. If the lowest position is considered as general profile, within which you receive audio alert for notifications. If you take the slider in the middle, then you will get audio alert for important notifications. Now you have to decide which notifications are important. After sliding on the top, you will not get any audio alert. However, the notification will continue to appear on your screen.
OnePlus 2 has a 64-fit Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor and 4GB of RAM (RAM). As expected, there was no problem on this device in doing the work to be done commonly. It was very easy to swap between multitasking and different apps. We have never seen the review unit to slow down. Games like Asphalt 8 run very easily. However, we found that the device was very hot while playing the game for 20 consecutive minutes.
There are also some small shortcomings with this device. Some apps did not run and some sometimes crashed. Many times, when the calls were received, we could not see the anter or reject control over the lock screen notification. We had to unlock our phone, then choose the option of ‘Back to Call’ to answer the phone call. There was also a problem with the accelerometer. The video did not switch to landscape mode until we restarted the device. Once, cellular data stopped working. After taking all the measures for a few days, we had to reset the phone to the factory so that it could be used.
A shortage came out with the software update. When we booted the phone for the first time, we got the notification of update, but due to being on the slow internet connection, we decided not to install. We later realized that this was a big mistake because the message of updates was not found again. We also reset the factory to the device but that notification was not received. Although users can manually update the device, most users do not want to tamper with this functionality.
OnePlus 2 has a notification LED that can light up in different colors when different types of notifications come. The phone comes with swiftkey in default mode. It also has a Google keyboard. If you want, you can also install a third-party keyboard from Google Play.
As far as the call quality is concerned, the areas where the network was strong, OnePlus 2 did a good job. Its performance in the weak connectivity area was very poor.
Battery life and camera
Battery Life Cases OnePlus 2 gave two types of performance. The performance of the battery in our video loop test was average, while in the daily use. That too on 4G network. If our user is a pattern scale, then the battery should not have any problem in running for a day. We have recently met many batteries that give good results in the benchmark test, but not during use.
OnePlus 2 has a 13 -megapixel rear camera that takes pictures with great detail in good light. If you use Tap-to-Focus feature, the camera takes some time to focus on the object. The performance was also very good in low light. When it comes to the picture taken in the dark, OnePlus 2’s performance is also weaker than Apple’s flagship device.
The front camera is quite good. The camera app is very simple in terms of option. You also get support for slow motion video in this device, but despite having good light, these videos captured are quite dull. In the regular video, whenever you move the frame autofocus does not work as fast. The phone gets hot even after shooting a video in 1080p for a long time. A video of 4K resolution can also be shot from the device, but no more than 10 minutes of clip can be made at a time.
Overall, the camera of OnePlus 2 is not like Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge or not equal to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. It is believed that the price of these devices is much higher, but when you have given yourself the title of ‘2016 flagship killer’, then there will be comparison.
Our decision
OnePlus 2 is better than its older version in many cases, but it also has some flaws that remind us of the old device. Battery life and software cases are very improved, but there is scope for further improvement in software. We hope that the company has also improved its quality process. We know about many users who had either complained to the screen of OnePlus One or they got the handset stopped working within a few months.
The company has also tried to remove most of these shortcomings. We know many such onePlus fans who like their phone very much, but there is no shortage of complainants. This is not good for the company. Sadly, we cannot know about such deficiencies through a review unit. We use a device for a maximum of two weeks. Therefore, it is a challenging task for us to suggest a handset to the user.
Should you buy OnePlus 2 or not? If you are looking for a dual-sim Android smartphone whose battery life is good and works on the stock version of Android. And if the price is around Rs 25,000, then we will suggest that you buy this device, but be ready to compromise with some flaws. If you liked one, whose age was more rough than the new device, then you will also like a new device. If you are one of those users who give more attention to the trust than ‘value for money’ and want a smartphone that is stable like a product of big companies, then OnePlus 2 smartphone is not in that league right now. Finally clean one thing, we can give a review of OnePlus 2 not invite.