To a certain group of people, you will never have to explain what OnePlus One is and why is it so freaking popular! Just a year after its inception, the Shenzhen-based company founded by two young entrepreneurs has effortlessly captured the hearts and minds of Smartphone geeks worldwide. The reason behind this is simple. Similar to manufacturers like Xiaomi, OnePlus wishes to bring out the best possible feature-packed phones at the best possible prices.
Their main objective is to start monetizing over a long-term period. They hardly make any money upfront with the sale of their devices. They have chosen to acquire as many ‘fans’ as possible and disrupt the current state of the Smartphone industry, which they consider to be faulty.
The demand for their first-ever flagship device, the OnePlus One, is so huge that they have devised a unique invite system in order to deliver their products to their fans. Many detractors have hailed this system by different names. However, it has worked wondrously, popularizing the product worldwide while allowing this budding company to rise exponentially without too much stress on the manufacturing, logistics, and statistics.
Currently, we only have the 64GB variant of the OnePlus One available in a Sandstone Black color which also features a unique sandpaper-like back panel. The rough finish of the back panel is unlike any other devices you have ever used and that too in a good way. If you take a look at the quality workmanship and design, the stupendous attention to detail in the OnePlus One will get you starry-eyed.
The back panel is removable, but it requires the use of a special tool known as the Spudger. The micro-SIM is housed in a removable tray since the back panel is not user-removable. It does not have an option for expandable memory; however, the 64GB internal storage should be sufficient for most.
The highly customizable ROM, CyanogenMod has a huge fan following around the world along with a global community. However, Cyanogen has already signed up with another Indian Company due to which it won’t be officially supporting the OnePlus One. Nevertheless, the device comes with stock CyanogenMod that you can choose to retain or update it manually later.
It has a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD display which offers quite good performance when it comes to color ratio and contrast along with outdoor sunlight readability. It has a 13MP camera unit with multi-lens optics and an Exmor sensor taken from Sony.
With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad core processor, it may not match up to iPhone 6 Plus and Galaxy Note 4 in performance. However, with brilliant uncompressed 4k video recording, a 3GB RAM, and an Adreno 330 GPU, the software benchmarks currently place it above the Xiaomi Mi4 and the HTC One M8.