because I actually cancelled my order but long story short I've got it now
they still sent it to me and I'm happy to review it I feel that yeah okay we'll
look at it I've had a lot of requests to look at it now the reason I cancelled
was two things one was because of all the day 1 reviews that came out that all
the big YouTube channels got this phone a week or so before they've done all the
reviews and that makes it very hard for little channels like mine to compete to
get any views and that's what I didn't really want beginning the other reason
is to be honest I was quite disappointed the fact that oneplus decided to
increase the price and play it safe so they thought no let's not add a bezel
Bezel-less design let's not do dual loudspeakers things like that I thought
no will keep with what was successful on the 1 plus 3 and the 3 t which is good
you know that's a good fun I really did enjoy my time was these 3T I thought it
was a really good phone very fast I love the fact that it's almost like stock
Android oxygen OS no bloatware that was really good so I enjoyed the phone so
we've got a tweet revised really version here so that they've both the specs now
got Snapdragon 835 six gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabytes of us ufs 2.1 storage
anyway enough talking on this one let's get it unboxed and check it out so fully
sealed in the wrap here dual camera clearer photos they're really pushing
that aren't they so they're really hyping up this camera so I hope it's
going to be their best one yet which I'm sure it will be but I don't know whether
it's going to stand up against the competition so I will find out later on
so very similar packaging to the earlier models just laying b3t that I reviewed
so get the phone out if I can pull that up and look at what else we get so
inside here is just all your instruction leaflets should be the sim tool as well
and here there it is click guide the rather large - charger but
this thing is the fastest at the moment that you'll find really that they claim
that you can get about half while a full day's battery use out of just 30 minutes
of charge which is really good and then a quality USB to type-c cable there
so first up we'll check out the weight
157 grams which is not bad at all so quite light and 7.45 millimeters thin so
very thin so on the front there's a new 16 megapixel front-facing camera and
next to that the air piece of course and 2.5 D gorilla glass that's over the
front of our 1080 P optical AMOLED panel so the same panel used in the 3t
fingerprint reader module down the bottom which also doubles as the home
button capacitive key there and it does have a pre applied to screen protector
so this is what oneplus has been fussing a lot about claiming that it's a very
good camera arrangement they've got on the back here so you can see the LED
flash secondary microphone and the first camera sensor will be that 20 megapixel
one which is a Sony IMX 350 with an aperture of 2.6 next to that 16
megapixel autofocus sensor and that's the IMX three nine eight with an f1.7
aperture so they've really opened that right up to let more light in so
hopefully that's going to be good and low light I will check that out of
course you can see that little line there at the top that of course is the
NFC sensor and the antenna is right there at the top and then those antennae
lines you can see so you can see here that the rear of the phone is slightly
different now compared to the 3t because we've got of course that new dual camera
module on there the oneplus logo still on the same position and slightly better
rounded edges here now this does not feel any more slippery than your average
phone so you don't need one of those skins on it that all those big youtubers
are craning down our throats and pushing those douche brand skins everywhere they
sold their souls that I haven't so on the right side we still have that switch
whoops I'm quite fond of so you can quickly switch that into silent mode or
just vibration only with the flick of a switch you've got those three different
positions to control your different sound modes there which is great just
below that as the volume rocker made out of metal has a good feel to it and it
does not rattle anything like that so no build quality issues and on the right
side is the power button and the dual SIM tray and lastly on the bottom of 3.5
millimeter headphone jack microphone type C port and just a single
loudspeaker here so I'm a little disappointed to see that oneplus did not
add a second loudspeaker or a front-facing loudspeaker which would
have been really good okay so just go through the setup here very quick got
nice sim card in here at the moment and I won't worry about setting up wireless
and set up the fingerprint to read it now the AMOLED panels always do this on
camera they are so hard to record I don't know how the professionals do that
but you see you're getting these kind of horizontal lines both banding that
doesn't happen in person that's only on camera and apologies for that
okay so we'll add a fingerprint so first I need to just add a PIN number so use
my super secure pin that I always use
okay so let's set this up I think it's about ten times I need to do this
all right down now I can add the same finger again to increase the accuracy
but that should be fine okay all set so that wasn't too bad it wasn't too
painful to go through that set up and I'm going to lock it now and see how
click that unlocks okay you need to put the password in first time that is
normal so lock it again that is very quick as expected for a snapdragon 835
that's almost instant look at that really good happy with that so place
those on there of course even though this is a Chinese mobile it does have
Play Store on there have a quick look at the settings so Android 7.1.1 and this
is the 64 gigabyte version and I mentioned an oxygen OS version 4.5 at
the time of this video here so bloat we're so we look and see what we've got
so they put a lot of google apps on there but they haven't put any real
oneplus bloatware apps on there the only one I can see of course is just that
community out there so this is a reason why I liked their roms because they
seemed almost just like stock Android we're just a few little tweaks and
things so I have connected up to the Internet and it's advised me that there
is a system update here already so that's good to see that oneplus are
pushing out bug fixes and this improves the compatibility of third-party apps
Network Bluetooth and the camera there and system stability so we just got that
one nailed speaker down the bottom let's have a listen to how it sounds
so it's got something really good volume to it which is great but I can hear some
distortion at 100 percent volume there so with this background that they've
used the wallpaper you can see just how great the screen looks then with those
deep blacks you get on the AMOLED panels now the touch response things really
good to me very quick right now I've got the split screen running and you see the
scrolling that's my website there that seems reasonably smooth not too bad
that's chrome of course and here you can select between different apps now if you
touch double tap the recent apps button you see how it will quickly swap between
apps so you can have for example your recent apps in here and your web browser
at the top which I've got now and then just go along and swap between them
which is a nice little feature so this is something that was new with Android 7
that so far the performance of the ROM seems very smooth very fluid just like
the 3t that I reviewed at the beginning of the year now I ran a quick test of
antutu benchmark and there's been a lot of controversy behind this because they
have been discovered by xda-developers there's quite a good article on this
that they've been cheating in their benchmarks so it's basically detecting
that you're running a benchmark and it's maxing out and holding those cores at
full clock speeds a lot higher and a lot longer so they're doing some sort of
governor tweaks to try and cheat the scores there which is probably why the
3t also got that really good score but despite the benchmarks real-world use it
does feel really quite quick and snappy now I just wanted to point out I'm
feeling quite a bit of heat coming from this area here so be interesting to see
when I game and push this mobile phone really hard just how hot it's going to
get no doubt the Snapdragon 835 is probably located in this area and
they've probably got some thermal adhesive or thermal pad or paste in
there transferring the heat from the chipset
onto the back maybe so it feels like it's going to heat up a little bit there
which is a slight concern hopefully it's not going to be too bad but I'll report
back on that probably in the gaming review if I do one or in my full review
now there's one thing here I can't believe is happening and that is USB
on-the-go support doesn't seem to exist on this phone
I've tried plugging in all sorts of pin drives that work on other phones using
my type C adapters and not one of them will work for me which is super
disappointing hopefully this can be fixed via an update so let's have a
quick look now at the camera application so to quick launch the camera it's
similar to the way to Samsung's work well the Samsung's use the home button
double tap that this one you DoubleTap quickly the power button and you see
will go straight into the camera so to start with we have the first sensor the
16 megapixel sensor you could call that the default sensor and tapping here will
give us the two times zoom one now of course I've got some bright lights on
here at the moment so that shadow rate is basically instantaneous there and you
can see gallery performance that's all fine now we've got the video modes of
course but to get into the video mode you have to swipe up sorry swipe up on
the main screen there it doesn't have just the same bottom from the viewfinder
which I would prefer to have the shutter and then the camcorder all on the same
screen but anyway that's just a minor thing you do swipe up it's very quick
not too bad now in the camera mode you can use the second sensor so the 2 times
optical zoom 1 now you'll notice there's a little bit of shake here that's my
hands I've got shaky hands and also because the fact that none of these
sensors has any optical image stabilization which for me is a real
letdown to have a flagship without that I feel as a bit of a mistake now at the
moment I've got video set to 4k it does have 1080p 60 frames per second and then
720p those are our options there which are kind of standard now I have a look
at this menu here you've got different modes like the portrait mode that's
using both censors I believe to give us those depth
of field so the blurred backgrounds bokeh effect and I just do a very quick
sample here there's a software stitching between those two senses as how it works
so take a quick photo and you'll see now that the background is a little bit
blurred there now it apparently works best on people so not objects like what
I'm shooting at the moment death now back into the camera modes we'll have a
look at a few of the options we get there so you can change the aspect ratio
and all of that of course is to swap over to the front-facing camera and
you've got the typical sixteen by nine so it's a four by three aspect ratio
sensor high dynamic range is on automatically there so I'm going to go
out now and take a few samples there's of course re pro mode to they wanted to
show you histogram reading there you can change the shutter rate white balance
ISO so lots of settings there we're able to tweak which is great so we'll go out
and get a few samples now some shots from the rear and front facing cameras
as well as video just to get an idea of what kind of quality we can come to
expect from this new dual sensor arrangement we've got
so a sample now with the 16 megapixel front-facing camera the new sensor they
put on there Tomita quality looks excellent I mean
look at this it's capturing me really well now the field of view isn't super
white or anything like that so you have to hold it right back if it got really
long arms so you probably need one of those selfie sticks to help with that
now looking at the background here it's washing out the mountains you can't see
any details which is just over here those mountains they're not capturing at
it all but it's at least capturing my face
really well I mean you can see the lines in my face and everything so very
detailed and it looks like it has a touch of digital stabilization as well
to me it doesn't seem as shaky as the rear camera but overall I feel that the
front-facing camera quality is really quite good so far some recording now in
4k it's just warned me that I've only got 10 minutes maximum that's probably
to stop it from overheating and there is no optical image stabilization here
whatsoever I can use the secondary sensor which seems right and you can see
there the finer details of the castle there and just zooming out so very
disappointing to see there is no stabilization whatsoever so no
electronic used in 4k which I believe is an error but we do have it at least in
1080p so let's have a look at a 1080p sample now this is 1080p which should
have electronic image stabilization I
think it's always on by default and you can't actually disable it
the council building there of Denia it's going to walk over to my scooter and I
can see it shaking around a little bit just have a look at the two times zoom
again which is available to us also in 1080p mode there alright guys so just to
wrap up here that it feels like a solid mobile the build quality is excellent
definitely a flagship the screen on it is very nice for a 1080p AMOLED display
those deep blacks very responsive super smooth operating system is well great to
see that an almost stock light experience no real bloatware on there
apart from some of those extra google applications that they put on the rom
but besides that just going in and out of different applications multitasking
going through a recent app split-screen very smooth everything seems to perform
really great now I know they've got a bit of controversy with the antutu
scores benchmarks don't really worry me too much although I do like to show and
run them but just bear that in mind that they have cheated there a little bit
with the benchmarks but for me that's not really too much of an issue if in
real life use it performs well which it does now the cameras do seem to have an
improvement there but I'm highly disappointed at the lack of any
stabilization in 4k which I believe is a huge error they should have that and
then it comes to other things like yes it performs really well it's got a great
spec but where are for example new things like an extra loudspeaker do
loudspeakers would be great why haven't they also decided to go with a different
screen perhaps reduce the top and bottom bezels or something slightly new to me
this feels like a 3s so the 1 plus 3s and not a5 a true sequel but ok I've got
to use it more I've got to run more benchmarks do some gaming on there now
this one error area or that I have a slight concern and that is Heat it does
seem to get very hot even just doing things like Chrome n I haven't
run any games yet any serious benchmarks or anything that's going to push it
really hard and it's getting very warm on the rear which is getting interesting
to see when I start the game on it just how hot this thing will get so I will be
back probably in about one or two weeks more like two weeks going to take my
time with this one just use it and see just how things go and come back with my
full review and my overall final opinion here at at this point things are looking
very good and I do like the phone so far