OnePlus One is a beautiful Android smartphone from China (hands-on)

The smartphone business in China can be extremely competitive, and while most of you will be familiar with brands such as Xiaomi, Huawei or Oppo, the OnePlus name may be unfamiliar. Comprised mostly of former Oppo employees, the company has just announced its new handset in Beijing, the OnePlus One.

As cheesy as the name sounds (and confusing, if you were to start referring it as just the One), this 5.5-inch quad-core smartphone is actually pretty good. I’ve been holding on to a early set that’s almost similar to the final product bar some slight cosmetic alterations, and I must say I’m impressed.

Strangely though, I did find the OnePlus One very familiar — looking through my pictures of the Oppo Find 7, I found the form factor to be similar, though the layout and placement of the volume jack differed. I checked with OnePlus, who told me that the phones were being made on contract at the Oppo facilities. While the shapes of both handsets share what appears to be a common form factor, both smartphones do differ in their button layouts.

The full-HD (1,920×1,080-pixels) display is bright and vibrant, and I found it to be usable even under bright sunlight at noon. Weighing at 160g, the handset felt light despite its size.

Like the Find 7, the OnePlus One sports a slightly curved top and bottom. The power button is located on the right side, while the volume rockers are located on the left. I’m told that the rockers will be longer in the final retail version — right now, they are a bit hard to hit. Located above that is the microSIM card slot.

Instead of having the screen cover the entire front of the phone, the glass ends just slightly before the edges at the top and bottom. This exposes the silvery plastic below it and I’m not exactly fond of this design. It does catch the eye, but I have a feeling dirt’s likely to accumulate at the edges and it feels strange to touch due to having two edges instead of just one.

The OnePlus One has a soft-touch plastic rear, and it feels great in the hand. The curved edges mean nothing sharp digs into your palm when you’re holding it, and the phone feels balanced and not the least bit unwieldy.

The rear cover is removable — OnePlus intends to sell different covers in the future. Unfortunately, the 3,100mAh battery isn’t removable and there’s no micro-SD card slot located underneath. This means you have to choose between getting the 16GB model or the 64GB version.

Software

The OnePlus One runs CyanogenMod 11S, which is based on Android KitKat 4.4. It’s very similar to stock Android, but with a few modifications. These include an expanded desktop mode, the ability to use gestures to turn on the camera or the LED light when the display is turned off. Other interesting tweaks include a voice-activated wake up, and themes that let you customise how the UI looks.

If you’re thinking of switching from a Samsung or Apple smartphone, rest assured you won’t feel lost, as the UI is very simple to use (similar to stock Android) and the tweaks you can access make the experience even better.

Unlike some China handsets, the OnePlus One will come with Google Play, and you’ll find all the Google apps pre-installed including Gmail and Maps. This means you won’t have to sideload the Play Store to use Google’s services.

Hardware

In the time I spent with the handset, I was very impressed with its performance. Part of this is because CyanogenMod comes free of bloatware and spyware, but the main reason is the hardware this phone is packing.

Powered by quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.5GHz, the OnePlus One runs beautifully smooth. It has 3GB of RAM, and either 16GB or 64GB of storage. It comes with LTE support for following bands: 1,3,4,7,17,38, and 40. This is on top the usual quad-band 3G support. NFC, Bluetooth and dual-band Wi-Fi support round up its connectivity feature set.

The smartphone has a 13-megapixel camera with a Sony Exmor IMX 214 sensor. The shutter’s really fast, but image quality seems to be average, with some detectable noise in the pictures taken in the bright outdoors. Bear in mind the handset isn’t the final retail version and I’ll wait for a proper review unit before properly evaluating the performance of the camera. In the meantime, feel free to feast your eyeballs on some sample shots that I took with the phone.

Pricing and availability

The OnePlus One will launch in May in sixteen countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK and the U.S. The smartphone will be sold online, but will be shipped from regional warehouses located in North America, Europe and Asia. The 16GB version will retail for $299 while the 64GB model will go for $349.