Killer Smartphone: 5.5", 2.5Ghz quad, unlocked, etc

[Bikerdude]

I knew this was going to happen sooner or later, but dear lord this one looks sexy on the outside as it does on the inside. It blows the Nexus 5 out of the water, never mind the over priced Galaxy S5 and its bloatware and locked boot-loader.

 

OnePlus One spec:-

• 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 Qaud core CPU,
  
• 3GB of RAM,
  
• 16/64GB of storage
  
• No microSD though (grrr, idiots)
  
• 5.5-inch IPS full HD display,
  
• 13-megapixel, f2/0 Sony Exmore Sensor 6x lens camera w/4k video capture support.
  
• 5-megapixel front camera
  
• GPS supports American and Russian GPS (GLONASS)
  
• BlueTooth 4.1
  
• Custom version of CynogenMod 11S (Android 4.4.2)
  
• upto 4G LTE.
  
• 3100mAH battery
  
• 162grams/8.9mm thick
  
• Waterproof.
  
• $299/$349
  
• The list goes on and on...
  

- http://vr-zone.com/articles/oneplus-one-official-fhd-screen-3-gb-ram-64-gb-storage-349/76452.html

- http://bgr.com/2014/...erating-system/

 

http://youtu.be/KP-5OlHINg0

[jaxa]

3 GB of RAM before Samsung did it eh (Galaxy S5)?

 

GPS, GLONASS, but no Galileo?

[Lux]

I don't own and have never owned a phone. So I wouldn't have to smash my old one, and this looks interesting.

[MasterHelpo]

That seems pretty damn nice. Looks like I may be able to get it in the UK for just under 300 bucks...

[AluminumHaste]

Looks okay, not a huge upgrade to the Nexus 5 or the Galaxy S5, both of which already have 1080p IPS screens.

And BTW, anyone who runs stock touchwiz on an S5 and complains, should just stop using phones, the S5 was rooted and romed within like 2 weeks of it coming out.

 

http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s5/development

[lost_soul]

Yeah, I saw that. It looks awesome, especially for the price. Finally a manufacturer that isn't raping customers who want lots of built-in storage. (The 64 GB model is hardly more expensive than the 16 GB model!)

 

Sadly, I already ordered that other phone. 64 GB internal-storage is nice, but SDXC support is nicer. The SDXC spec allows for up to 2 TB cards! I just want to fit my entire 83 GB music collection in my pocket.

 

I wonder *why* they dont ship with an SD slot? Some people say it is because of XFAT IP issues, but they can just not support that file system and use something like ext4 on the card. If a clueless user complains that the card isn't read when they stick it in their Windows machine, they can be educated as to why.

 

Hopefully this thing is legit and it puts pressure on the other manufacturers.

Edited April 23, 2014 by lost_soul

[Bikerdude]

And BTW, anyone who runs stock touchwiz on an S5 and complains, should just stop using phones,

The S5 has a locked bootloader, just like the S4. I know SS have now stated that having knox status set to 0x1 void the hardware warranty, but the whole know thing left a bad taste in my mouth. That and I am not spending £500 on a bloody phone, my S4 was bad enough at £300.

[Airship Ballet]

So why do you guys actually buy expensive smart phones? I've never bought one over £20, and all I use them for is to make calls and send texts, as you'd think. Aren't you just paying a ton for a smaller, less capable laptop?

[lost_soul]

Me personally... I just want a tiny computer that I can carry everywhere in my pocket, with my entire music collection on it, which can also browse the web. Most tablets are too big for that. I might not even get the phone I ordered activated unless I can find a very cheap provider. I spend less than 5 minutes on the phone a day so I don't need an expensive contract or a mandatory monthly bill.

 

 

I'm not one of those zombies you see out in public texting people and on FB constantly. I'm instead one of those zombies whose always listening to music or reading something.

[Airship Ballet]

You should look into getting a classic iPod and a Kindle like I did. I imagine they'd be cheaper overall and better at their respective jobs, sad as that is. I can't stand Apple but simple old iPods are great for storage. Kindles are great, really, and I still read old books whenever the mood takes me. I say old books because the price of books nowadays is ridiculous, hence e-reading. Until not long ago I had an age-old DS Lite with an R4 card that I used to listen to music and read books with Moonshell. It was alright, but the size and clarity of a Kindle screen is great. I've got 20/500 vision without glasses and glasses can only do so much, so the tiny screen of my DS didn't cut it. With the text at regular size 12 I can read it fine with glasses, and even without if I touch my nose to it or something. The best part is that they both fit in my pocket

[lost_soul]

Regarding your above post, I had a good laugh yesterday. All those cheap phones you speak of allow you to replace the battery, and almost none of these expensive ones do. What's the deal? It isn't as though those cheap phones are bulky and heavy either. That's the primary excuse I've seen for why smart phone batteries are not replaceable.

Edited April 24, 2014 by lost_soul

[AluminumHaste]

You can't make a phone cheap, waterproof and have expandable storage and removable battery. It's either sealed or it's not.

[lost_soul]

I personally don't care if its waterproof. I mean, by the age of thirty, I've figured out that high tech gadgets and H2O do not mix. Note that I've *seen* plenty of phones and Ipods that went for a swim. I've also seen loads with crushed screens, even though they supposedly make them very tough and I've never crushed an LCD on a tablet/phone/player myself.

[jaxa]

Regarding your above post, I had a good laugh yesterday. All those cheap phones you speak of allow you to replace the battery, and almost none of these expensive ones do. What's the deal? It isn't as though those cheap phones are bulky and heavy either. That's the primary excuse I've seen for why smart phone batteries are not replaceable.

 

They want to control the accessories/distribution/repair and make phones thinner and thinner. And ideally they want you locked into a contract and getting a new phone every couple of years.

 

So why do you guys actually buy expensive smart phones? I've never bought one over £20, and all I use them for is to make calls and send texts, as you'd think. Aren't you just paying a ton for a smaller, less capable laptop?

 

You're paying for a power-efficient (< 2W) pocket supercomputer with upwards of a billion transistors, the ability to communicate via cellular network, WiFi, or with nearby devices (Bluetooth/NFC/mesh, etc.), satellite positioning, a camera that increasingly rivals professional cameras with $500-2000+ lenses every year, and a screen/system capable of full Web browsing. You're also paying for an advanced surveillance device that you carry around.

 

"35 percent of U.S. adults carry a cellphone that is not a smartphone". Globally, smartphone shipments now exceed non-smartphone shipments (see the last image). In 2013, 1 billion smartphones were shipped for the first time. Developing markets such as "Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines" are increasingly buying more smartphones, and that trend will continue as...

 

...smartphones are becoming more accessible. You can spend $500 on the latest and greatest iGalaxy device, $100-300 on devices like Nexus or Chinese newcomers like the one described in this thread, or potentially $25-100 on even cheaper, yet smart, phones, such as a Firefox OS device. What qualifies a low-end device as a "smartphone" and not a "feature phone"? You'd either know it when you see it, or you know that for the same low price (£20) you can get a better quality phone next year and the year after that.

 

If you don't need or want a smartphone, a feature phone is fine too. They are becoming indispensable all over the globe, including in Africa, where they may be the primary, more convenient, and more power efficient computing device rather than a laptop or desktop. Interestingly, the mobile money transfer concept that has become super popular in Kenya may soon be spreading from Africa to Europe. Smartphones are reportedly beginning to replace feature phones in Africa, and you can expect that to continue so long as $50-60 worth of last year's features can be sold for $20-30 the next.

 

The future of the high-end smartphone over the next 4 years may be as a laptop/desktop killer. You carry your high-end supercomputer around with you wherever you go, and when you want the better usability of a mouse and a keyboard, you can plug it into a dock connected to a mouse, keyboard, and display. Maybe that dock will include some hardware like a graphics card to augment what the phone is capable of carrying. Anyway, that was the vision behind the Ubuntu Edge fundraising campaign. The inflexible $32 million goal was stupid, and it hence failed, but it reached an unprecedented $12 million in crowdfunding. That phone promised 4 GB of RAM, 128 GB storage, quad/octocore, sapphire crystal display, etc. This type of setup is even more likely if you consider that phones and personal computers in general are going to increasingly rely on cloud computing and storage in the future. Google and Amazon are fully engaged in a price war over $/compute units.

Edited April 24, 2014 by jaxa

[stumpy]

you can make them all waterproof with this

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5PxQ2LReXs

[Briareos H]

@Airship Ballet: I own a mid-range smartphone (old Galaxy Nexus when the Nexus 4 started replacing it, before that I kept my HTC Desire for a few years). I don't use it for multimedia, and I'll always keep a dedicated Rockboxed music player in my other pocket -- same goes for my camera, but a smartphone is still very useful for replacing other things. With it I can:

• Check bus, metro and train stops around me, know when the next one is leaving, calculate routes: replaces paper time tables and maps;
  
• Check a map at any time, locate myself with precision, follow routes: replaces city maps and street guides;
  
• Calculate navigation routes when driving: replaces GPS navigation systems for cars [downside: online];
  
• Record my walks and jogging runs, from pace to path, from profile to heartbeat, even without internet access: replaces dedicated sport devices and GPS navigation system for hiking [downside: battery life];
  
• Search for points of interests, restaurants, bars, parks, concerts: replaces paper weekly guides;
  
• Manage my server through SSH from anywhere, surf the internet, check my bank account, read and send email: replaces a PC with internet access [downside: screen size];
  
• Send MIDI messages over wi-fi to the computer: replaces an additional control surface for my DAW;
  
• Tune with very good precision my instrument: replaces a costly high-performance tuner;
  
• Translate from almost any language to another, including pronunciation: replaces heaps of dictionaries;
  
• etc.
  

You get the gist of it. It's very useful every day, a lot of those things can be done more efficiently than if I had to use a laptop, because they can be done on the go without downside, have dedicated interfaces ('apps') and only require one hand.

 

The important thing is not to rely on it too much and whip it out at every occasion like most people unfortunately do, as it should replace existing tools, not brains. But used smartly, it's a great thing to have.

 

Anyway, that CyanogenMod phone sure sounds nice and cheap but it's far too big for me. I already find my Galaxy Nexus too big. Plus we all know it's going to have terrible battery life, like everything else. Battery life is so bad in smartphones that it made me consider forgoing them altogether at least twice.

Edited April 24, 2014 by Briareos H

[Lux]

There's two things about this phone that intrigue me one of which I think will prove to be a detriment.

 

1) The phone is by 1+. Who's heard of it? I haven't and no one I know has either. That makes it unique. I personally like being different and not having what everyone else has, even if its sub standard which isn't the case here.

 

2) The phone case is magnesium. Being a machinist I love the part of that video where that taper mill is machinging the logo in the back of the case. That also brings with it a con. We have machined and had a few magnesium parts in our shop over the years and it not an exotic material but its close. It weighs ~half of what aluminum weighs which is super cool. The bad part about magnesium and aluminum to a lesser extent; they're soft metals. If you do drop this thing and it hits concrete, it will be like dropping a stick of clay. When its dropped on hard materials it deforms similar to clay. Just not as extreme but the deformation is very similar to that. Its just a harder more crystalline material. That worries me as far as the durability. As for the weight of the device, you can't beat it.

[Lux]

I'm not one of those zombies you see out in public texting people and on FB constantly. I'm instead one of those zombies whose always listening to music or reading something.

 

I guess that makes you the walking dead and that makes me Rick Grimes. I'm Rick Grimes, biatch!

[Bikerdude]

you can make them all waterproof with this

I dont know what i like more, the tech, that very intelligent sales girl, or that cool accent!

[Bikerdude]

Check bus, metro and train stops around me, know when the next one is leaving, calculate routes: replaces paper time tables and maps;

• Check a map at any time, locate myself with precision, follow routes: replaces city maps and street guides;
  
• Calculate navigation routes when driving: replaces GPS navigation systems for cars [downside: online];
  
• Search for points of interests, restaurants, bars, parks, concerts: replaces paper weekly guides;
  
• Manage my server through SSH from anywhere, surf the internet, check my bank account, read and send email: replaces a PC with internet access [downside: screen size];
  
• Translate from almost any language to another, including pronunciation: replaces heaps of dictionaries
  
• You get the gist of it. It's very useful every day, a lot of those things can be done more efficiently than if I had to use a laptop, because they can be done on the go without downside, have dedicated interfaces ('apps') and only require one hand.
  

Exactly this, but also a calender coz i forget stuff all the time.

[Airship Ballet]

While it's impressive what they can do, I imagine I'd have a use for all that on a smartphone specifically if I was actually on the go all the time. As it stands I'm graced with the ability to just use a laptop since my life is generally sedentary. Really I'm always either sat down here or sat down at work, or at most backpacking with a satphone. I definitely understand the need for it for somebody who's driving around to new places all the time, has a job that keeps them away from home, that kinda thing, but I'm rarely in a position where I can't whip out my laptop and do it all on that. Maybe I'm lucky in that sense, because I rely on my laptop and occasionally my iPod for geo-location, directions, train times, all that stuff, and never feel pressed for flexibility. I tend to just figure it all out before I leave and stick to the plan, and if I need to I can always check again when I'm out, the only downside being having to use my leg as a mouse mat. Almost every time I've been backpacking we've ended up using a map or just spelunking and ending up somewhere even more interesting. The saddest part is that I was using Starbucks' free wi-fi (never bought coffee there, never been picked up on plain leeching wi-fi from them either) the other day and moving files across FTP was faster than it was at work and home put together. Maybe I'll become a trucker; that way I have an excuse to buy a smartphone and be sat down all day.

Edited April 24, 2014 by Airship Ballet

[Lux]

Why do all the reviews of this phone say that the back case is plastic? Mistaken identity? I recall reading it painted magnesium which is very light. Or... so where is magnesium used I wonder.

 

The actual handset will be manufactured by Oppo, and from the first glance, the similarities between both handsets is evident. With a weight of 162 gms, the One is the lightest 5.5-inch smartphone in the world. OnePlus mentioned that the use of magnesium allowed the vendor to bring the weight of the device down. The thickness of the One is at 8.9 mm, with the edges of the device measuring 4.6 mm. The device itself looks sleek and well-constructed.

 

 

Ah...

 

What sets the OnePlus One apart from most flagships is its magnesium-based case with easily interchangeable covers.

Edited April 25, 2014 by Lux

[woah]

This might be taking this thread on too much of a detour, but I often daydream about an "ultimate portable device" that would just be a pocketable computer with a streamlined/simplified, SmartPhone-like OS touchscreen interface on top of a real desktop OS. For example, something like the upcoming Pyra Handheld (clamshell, touchscreen, full physical keyboard, game controls, expansion and docking ports, debian OS, powerful enough but also with extremely good battery life, user-serviceable and replaceable parts (no soldering BS), etc etc). I actually own the predecessor to the Pyra (the Pandora) and while it is an excellent device with amazing battery life, the supported linux distribution is a dated mess (will be fixed with the Pyra).

 

However, I would add two things to the Pyra:

 

First, use a swivel hinge for the clamshell so that the screen can be rotated to face outwards or inwards. For one-handed typical smartphone use, the screen would face outwards and one could interact with the touchscreen as usual to make phone calls, send short messages, do simple web browsing, play simple android games, etc etc. Then, when one needs access to a more capable user interface (say to use a desktop application, play a "real" game, use the terminal, write code, ...) one could rotate the screen back around and use it in the typical a two-handed open-clamshell fashion. Whenever I'm out of the house I always find myself wanting to bring both my smartphone and my pocketable computer because the smartphone is too limited and the pocketable computer does not have a one-handed, simplified interface. The Pyra developers actually considered a swivel hinge (several times) but all of the good solutions are apparently patented by unfriendly individuals.

 

Second, to complete the "ultimate portable device," in addition to the usual LCD/OLED screen, incorporate an E-Paper screen on the opposite side of the of the LCD/OLED--like the Yota Phone. With this, the battery life could be extended to weeks and reading would be comfortable. There are many applications that do not always warrant power hungry, eye-straining OLED/LCD screens (reading books, phone calls, messaging, simple web browsing, terminal usage, coding, ...) and this would be a great way to save both your battery and your eyes (if you're interested in an ePaper-only smartphone--which does last weeks, check out the Onyx MIDIA InkPhone)

 

A device that incorporates all of these things would amalgamate the cellphone/smartphone, portable computer, tablet, mp3 player, handheld gaming device, and e-reader all into one device that has a modern OS and both open software and hardware. And if your desktop performance needs aren't that significant (and you don't need to, e.g., run multiple monitors), then with the docking ports many of your at-home needs are covered too. I would really love to do away with all of the clutter, redundancy, synchronization, closed and gimped software, soldered and underutilized hardware, etc etc of modern devices and just amalgamate it all into a single, open device.

 

The Pyra will be pretty close. It will not have a swivel hinge, a secondary epaper screen, or simplified apps for smartphone-like usage (although it will, like the Pandora, run Android), but it pretty much has everything else covered, so I think my "ultimate portable device" dream is certainly a possibility. When the Pyra ships I may actually look into 3D printing a custom case design that uses a swivel hinge (of course incorporating a custom epaper screen is beyond me). There is also work being done on an Android compatibility layer for ARM-based linux OSs (at this point in time each Android app requires that the user write some "helper functions" but the Pandora community has many apps running this way), or perhaps Android itself could be run within a VM.

Edited April 25, 2014 by woah

[lost_soul]

Yeah, the Pandora looked awesome. I followed that project until it was finished. The problem was that (because it was made by a small. group of guys), it was outdated upon release and supplies were limited. They had lots of great ideas though, like dual SD slots.

[SteveL]

• Calculate navigation routes when driving: replaces GPS navigation systems for cars [downside: online];
  

 

If you roll back to Google maps version 6 you can download and save maps, big or small, by drawing a box on the screen, so it works offline. I have no idea why they removed that facility in v7, but all the v6 features that they removed still work: saving maps, sharing maps with mates on desktop pc then seeing each others' bookmarks in the phone app (useful for planning trips).

 

It's easy to get used to being able to access the sum total of human knowledge in your pocket at all times. I put up with all the disadvantages for that.