OnePlus 5 Is Crazy Value For Money

One, Two, Three, Three T, Five. That's how you count if you're OnePlus, which is why the firm's latest flagship is the OnePlus 5. But ultimately the name isn't important, what is important is that this is a new flagship generation, and we all know what that means - this is intended as the best bundle of advanced tech the firm has to offer.

We now know that there's no OnePlus 5T on the way this year either. There where some rumours before, but sources since have said that such a model won't be happening. Apparently it has something to do with Qualcomm's decision to not begin supplying Snaprdagon 836 processors until next year. The OnePlus 5 runs on the Snadpragon 835 and in past year's Qualcomm has released a slightly tweaked update on its flagship chips - in 2016 it was the Snapragon 820 followed by the 821, and that was the main difference between the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T.

According to the reports which say a OnePlus 5T is no longer on the cards, OnePlus will instead focus its energy on the OnePlus 6.

That may be a ways off yet, so without further ado, let's look at the OnePlus 5!

OnePlus 5 Review: Design & Display

In the design department the OnePlus 5 falls under the "good enough" label, being decently premium looking for a flagship and definitely good for the price, but at the same time; it's nothing particulary special either. In a way, that's not even OnePlus' fault, in the sense that it's very difficult in the current market, saturated as it is with very good looking metal and glass slabs, to make something that really stands out.

There's a bit of everything in here; Huawei, Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, LG, HTC. None of it bad, mind you, as on the whole it's a very pleasing samsung s7 edge screen to look at. It is, to be fair, probably on of the best looking OnePlus handsets to date, using a minimalist aluminium unibody instead of the older design with various material finishes on the back panel.

For the display, OnePlus has decided to keep things fairly simple, likely in the interest of keeping the price down so that it's nice and competetive when all other specs are taken into consideration. The screen is not one of those fancy pants edge-to-edge affairs with an 18:9 aspect ratio - the kind we've seen on Samsung, LG, Huawei, and Apple's handsets this year. Nope, this is a regular 5.5in screen with a 1080p resolution.

OnePlus has enhanced it slightly with sRGB, custom, and DCI-P3 colour profiles, so you can really dial in the settings how you want them.

Long story short, it's a great display. It's just not a monumental or stupendous display like some key rivals. But as we mentioned, this seems to be a conscious decision to keep costs low and perhaps improve the battery life a bit (1080p is not going to be a huge drain, after all). So, we can be quite forgiving here.

OnePlus 5 Review: Performance

The OnePlus 5 is certainly not trailing behind its peers in the hardware stakes, it's running the same flagship tier chip as most of its competitors; Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 SoC clocked at 2.45GHz and either 6GB or 8GB of RAM depending on which variant you go for. In either scenario you're looking at blistering speeds, not only from the chip itself, but also both those RAM options are higher than a lot of competing phones using the same silicon.

Basically, you're saving £200 on what you'd pay for something like the Samsung Galaxy S8 or HTC U11, both of which have been some of the fastest phones we've reviewed this year; and the OnePlus 5 is easily just as quick, delivering very similar benchmark scores, multitasking performance, and real-world use performance too. GPU performance is even faster than the Galaxy S8 thanks to the use of a lower-resolution display.

OnePlus 5 Review: Battery

This is always where we start getting worried that a perfectly good phone in many other areas is going to be let down by poor battery life. There are, of course, more phones out there than ever before that have pretty good battery life, but it's still something of an elusive Holy Grail, on the whole.

Fortunately, the OnePlus 5 manages to seriously impress with its 3,300mAh cell. In our video testing, battery consumption was on par with the Samsung Galaxy S8+, which was and still is one of the best performers in this regard we've ever seen, let alone inside 2017.

Put simply, this handset is unlikely to leave you in the lurch, even if you're the most intensive of power users you'll still make it through from dawn til dusk, probably longer. For most people with normal use it's going to last several days at least on a single charge, which in the s7 edge replacement screen era is no mean feat.