OnePlus One – Is it for you?

I’ve had the OnePlus One phone since spring of 2015. It was touted as a “flagship killer”.

I bought this phone because it hit a tolerable price point of $350 when I bought it (I like to steer clear of phones that are $500 or more). With a 64GB of ram and a powerhouse processor it seemed like an awesome phone.

After receiving the phone it became clear that this was going to be a different user experience. First off, who ever owns this phone has to be patient enough to do their homework and willing to load new system roms (phone operating system). But that’s also what prevents this from being a true flagship killer.

Why? When the OPO came out Cyanogenmod was the rom provider. Shortly afterward, there was some sort of falling out between Cyanogenmod (CM) developers and OnePlus. There were a lot of delays with rolling out updates to address performance issues, primarily battery life. The user community believed they were supposed to receive rom updates via ‘push’, meaning no manual effort. Around that time Android Lollipop came out and then there were extra updates due to security weaknesses.  To add further fog to the landscape OnePlus developed it’s own rom called OxygenOS, but didn’t include the OPO in that.

So to actually enjoy the phone you had to be okay with cruising the forums for the latest OS updates and be willing to wade through the mountains of personal user rhetoric to get those nuggets of real information and hope that you had enough to make the right decision for yourself.

Why did I choose the phone? Because of my experience with CM on my Nexus 7 I felt familiar with CM and loading OS’es.

Have I been happy with my phone? For the most part. I make it about 18 hours on a charge and would have liked more. I can’t honestly say whether the batteries are under engineered or the CM versions I’ve used have just not taken care of performance well enough.

I do enjoy pouring through the information and making the phone do what I want. And it’s definitely the most powerful and largest phone I’ve ever owned.

Do I think this phone is still relevant? Yes. Just check the specs and you can see that it still performs with the best of them and the price point is very attractive.

Would I recommend this phone? Only with significant caveats and user awareness. If you like to get your geek on, have patience and are willing to learn, go for it.