OnePlus Open review - the best foldable smartphone today!
Hello everybody! Today we want to tell you about another smartphone in the foldable gadget market, namely the OnePlus Open.
We will compare it with more experienced competitors and tell you all the reasons for both praise and "hate" against it. We find out what is so unique that the company from "Heavenly" offers to sway potential buyers to its side. And we will also talk about all the difficulties that you may encounter in the process of using this miracle of technology.
We want to warn you right away that, unfortunately, we did not manage to get this phone, so in order to create this review, we processed more than one article from our "western" colleagues.
OnePlus Open - a successful debut?
Specifications
Parameter | OnePlus Open |
Matrix: | LTPO3 Flexi-fluid AMOLED |
Screen diagonal: | 7.82 inches, 196.7 cm 2 Screen-to-body ratio ≈ 89.6% |
Screen resolution: | 2268 x 2440 pixels |
Other display parameters: | Scan frequency - 120 Hz, peak brightness - 2800 nits, pixel density - 426 ppi |
Operating System: | Android 13, OxygenOS 13.2 |
Processor: | 4-nanometer Qualcomm SM8550-AB Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 |
Number of cores: | One Cortex-X3 core with a clock frequency of 3.2 GHz + two Cortex-A715 cores with a clock frequency of 2.8 GHz + two Cortex-A710 cores with a clock frequency of 2.8 GHz + three Cortex-A510 cores with a clock frequency of 2.0 GHz |
Graphics accelerator: | Adreno 740 |
Memory options: | 16/512 GB |
Main camera: | Main module: resolution 48 MP, aperture f/1.7, sensor 24 mm, matrix size 1/1.43", pixel size 1.12 µm, multi-directional PDAF (phase autofocus), OIS (image stabilization) Ultra-wide-angle module: resolution 48 MP, aperture f/2.2, sensor 14 mm, angle of view 114˚, matrix size 1/2", pixel size 0.8µm, PDAF Telephoto lens: resolution 64 MP, aperture f/2.6, sensor 70 mm, matrix size 1/2", pixel size 0.7 µm, PDAF, OIS, 3x optical zoom Video recording 4K@30/60fps, 1080@30/60/120/240/480 fps, Electronic image stabilization gyro-EIS, HDR 10+, Dolby Vision |
Front camera: | Island (in the display): Resolution 20 MP, aperture f/2.2, sensor 20 mm, matrix size 1/4", pixel size 0.7 µm, multi-directional PDAF, OIS Second camera: Resolution 32 MP, aperture f/2.4, sensor 22 mm, matrix size 1/3.14", pixel size 0.7 µm, multi-directional PDAF, OIS Video recording 4K@30fps, 1080p@30fps, Electronic image stabilization gyro-EIS |
Communications: | Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/6e/7, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, navigation services GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO, QZSS, USB Type-C 3.1 |
Sound: | Stereo |
Battery: | 4805 mAh, non-removable |
Charging power: | 67 W |
Wireless charging: | No |
Dimensions: | Closed: 153.4 x 73.3 x 11.7 mm Open: 153.4 x 143.1 x 5.8 mm |
Weight: | 239 g or 245 g |
Body materials: | Aluminum frame, back cover - glass or artificial leather |
Colors: | Emerald Dusk, Voyager Black |
Price: | From $ 1,699.99 |
Unpacking
The OnePlus Open arrives in a signature red paper box. And what's inside?
SuperVOOC charger - 67W (for Europe) and 80W (for all other markets). Despite this discrepancy, OnePlus has assured us that charging will not exceed 67W regardless of which adapter you get in the box. Therefore, the charging time will be the same all over the world.
It also comes with an 8A-rated USB-AC cable painted in OnePlus' signature red color. In the set you will also find a plastic case for both halves of the phone. The back has a matching color and leather-like finish.
And finally, the Open screen has a thin protective film. It's great for protecting against scratches, but its other function is to collect smudges on the new Ceramic Guard screen glass, which is already extremely durable.
So, the delivery set is standard, there is everything you need, nothing special, but at the same time, it is pleasing that nothing is missing.
Design, build quality
According to the company's representatives, our guest today can withstand at least one million folds, which is approximately 547 folds per day for five years. For comparison, the main competitor Samsung promises only 200,000 folds for the same period.
As for function keys, everything is standard here. It should also be noted that the power button functions as a fingerprint scanner. The body of the device is based on a metal frame.
Especially for the device, OnePlus has developed a "Flexion-hinge" design that minimizes weight and folds on the large screen. The hinge design used here somewhat resembles water droplets. The company reduced the number of hinge sections to 69, providing a relatively lower weight.
The hinge can easily maintain an angle of 90 ° without allowing any oscillations. But any angle exceeding 110° leads to full deployment of the halves of the device.
The external display is protected by a new glass called Ceramic Guard, which is said to be 20% more impact resistant than Gorilla Glass Victus.
The phone comes in two color options – Emerald Dusk (green) and Voyager Black (black). The back panel of the black has a plastic layer covered with black vegan leather. It should be said right away that this coating does not collect fingerprints.
In contrast, the green version, which will be the only color variant for Europe, has a frosted glass back. And that's why the Emerald Dusk version is 6g heavier and a hair (0.2mm) thicker than the Voyager Black.
In general, the appearance is, so to speak, standard for this type of smartphone. An unequivocal plus is the claimed million smartphone unlocks, lower weight compared to competitors and, of course, high-quality case materials, which clearly add "pluses" to this gadget.
Speaking of screens, the main 7.82-inch 10-bit display has a 2K (2400 x 2268 pixels) resolution.
It uses a variable refresh rate ranging from 1 Hz to 120 Hz depending on the content being displayed, which minimizes energy consumption. So the maximum refresh rate here is 120 Hz, and not the popular 144 Hz among flagships. However, in our opinion, this is also enough for comfortable work.
The use of a flexible AMOLED panel with a maximum brightness of 2800 nits in our test today is also an undoubted plus.
Watching movies on a large screen is a pleasure, but let's immediately note that for comfortable viewing of a movie or video clip, the file must maintain the aspect ratio of the screen. In practice, some movies were a bit difficult to fit completely on a square display.
OnePlus Open supports sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces and switches between them in the app/content bass. Its display options offer three color modes - Natural, Pro and Vivid. Natural is the default color, with soft and mostly accurate colors, except for slightly bluish whites and grays. On the other hand, the Pro has perfect accuracy with the D65 white point. Vivid has a slightly cooler color temperature compared to Natural, but you can adjust the white temperature using a dedicated slider.
So, the display of this gadget deserves only positive reviews.
External screen
The OnePlus Open's 6.3-inch display is perhaps one of the most practical displays among all the sophisticated devices currently on the market.
The 10-bit AMOLED display presented here provides a resolution no worse than on the display, namely 2K (2484 x 1116 pixels). The variable refresh rate has also not undergone significant changes compared to the main display, and ranges from 10 Hz to 120 Hz.
Another "plus" compared to the competitor Galaxy Z Fold 5 is that here most of the programs on the external display work efficiently and efficiently. Even watching YouTube Shorts was no problem, which is not the case with the main display, as the videos couldn't stretch from edge to edge on it.
In general, we don't have any comments about the external screen either, and we even have words of praise, because in some aspects it even surpassed its competitor.
Cameras
When choosing cameras for its new smartphone, OnePlus turned to the world-famous Swedish company Hasselblad, which has been at the forefront of the photography market since its creation in 1841.
On the back panel there are two 48-megapixel cameras (wide-angle and ultra-wide-angle) and a telephoto lens in the form of a periscope, which supports 3x optical zoom and 120x digital zoom.
The camera sensors are placed inside a massive round module. And here is an immediate minus, because the size and thickness of the round module is quite significant, and this can be a problem for some.
The front camera is integrated on the external display in a round slot, in the center of the upper part. Another similar camera is embedded in a circular slot in the upper right corner of the main display.
The main camera on the Open uses a 48-megapixel Sony LYT-808 sensor, a sensor from Sony's new LYTIA line, which features the latest multi-layer architecture similar to Sony's current flagships, the Xperia 1 V and 5 V .
From a technical point of view, the new sensor is designed to capture more light and combine details in pixels without requiring additional physical space for the cameras. Nevertheless, not all shooting results turned out to be quite good - in some cases, competitors have better results than our guest today.
Photos taken in daylight with the 48-megapixel Sony LYTIA sensor contain a lot of detail. Some of the photos taken had high contrast and low saturation. In some images, colors appeared natural, but the representation of facial tones needed improvement.
In low-light conditions, the OnePlus Open sometimes over-processes areas with bright colors, resulting in a loss of detail in certain areas.
The software setting used here does not allow you to minimize glare, which, by the way, some competitors, such as the Pixel 8 Pro , do much better.
There are no complaints about the work of the telephoto lens at all. Photos with 3x zoom look natural, sharp and with a rich bokeh effect. Even with the 6x zoom that the main camera uses, details are surprisingly sharp.
With two selfie cameras, not everything is so cool either, because the results do not always match the expectations after watching the presentation. A definite advantage of using a complex device is the ability to conveniently take selfies using the rear camera and simultaneously view the resulting photos.
For fans of experimenting with filters, Hasselblad has prepared several surprises. In addition, there are many options for using the ProXDR mode, which allows you to create images in RAW format.
Filming in this phone is implemented at a high level. It is possible to record video using Dolby Vision.
OnePlus Open also supports the ultra-stabilization feature in Full-HD resolution. Microphones on average pick up speech well, but with a certain amount of ambient noise, which competitors do not have.
In general, the cameras here are of a decent level. Despite its shortcomings, cooperation with the famous Hasselblad brand is pleasing not only on paper, but also in practice. However, compared to competitors, the devices here do not beat them, but rather go hand in hand.
Productivity
OnePlus Open is powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the standard version. This processor has 1 main Cortex-X3 core at 3.19 GHz, 2 Cortex-A715 at 2.8 GHz, 2 Cortex-A710 at 2.8 GHz and 3 Cortex-A510 at 2.0 GHz. It should be said right away that this is one of the best processors available today.
The Adreno 740 GPU takes care of the graphics, and it's definitely one of the most powerful mobile GPUs on the market right now. And there are no problems with even the most powerful games. The only downside is that we never managed to get more than 60 fps.
Our guest today uses 12 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512 GB of UFS 4.0 storage.
OnePlus Open also supports RAM expansion feature. As the name suggests, this function allows you to expand the RAM of your smartphone - albeit virtually - using the phone's internal memory. You can add from 4 GB to 12 GB of virtual RAM. This feature is active by default, and OnePlus chose 4GB as the default setting.
Although on paper everything looks great in all aspects, but the inability to get more fps is a little disappointing.
Software security
The OnePlus Open runs OxygenOS 13.2 UI based on Android 13. It's worth saying that some apps require optimization for the main 6.82-inch display. The fact that the developer noticed this problem and already promises an update in the future is encouraging.
On the main display, the user can run three programs at the same time. OnePlus calls this functionality "Triple Division". When switching from the external display to the main one, everything works quite smoothly.
Since OnePlus Open was developed together with OPPO, some functions were borrowed here, for example, dual screen sharing - to activate the mode, you can swipe two fingers in the middle of the screen.
Like Samsung, OnePlus promises four years of Android OS updates and five years of security updates. OnePlus also has a surprise in the form of an IR sensor that allows users to control air conditioners, TVs and even some cars directly from the smartphone.
A few words about the Always On display function, which can be always on or off, on a schedule or in power saving mode (displayed when moving/clicking).
The lock screen is also shared by the two displays in almost every aspect, including the clock style, widget selection, and notification display. Everything, except for the selection of wallpaper, which can be customized for two panels. The same goes for the main user interface.
The main screens are identical; it's just that the main one shows two home screen panels instead of one. The notification and control centers, as well as the additional application bar, look normal on the cover display, and on the main folding display they are expanded.
However, a huge disadvantage is the shockingly small number of applications compatible with the large screen. Consider for example the work of the Gmail program. To make it work in large screen mode, you need not only to unfold the smartphone, but also to turn it 90 degrees. And this is not the only situation where compatibility problems arise.
It should also be noted that popular websites rarely want to load in tablet mode, suitable for the internal screen. Only when we go to the sites of the BBC or the New York Times will we get the right interface, adapted to tablets or smartphones with large screens of the appropriate proportions.
When viewing a video on YouTube, using the full-screen image surface, the result on the direct competitor from Samsung was much better than on the OnePlus Open, because here, in order to maintain the correct proportions of the material, the video was accompanied by large black bars at the top and bottom.
In general, despite the fact that the interface based on OxygenOS 13.2 is well developed, without any complaints, the biggest disadvantage is the already mentioned small number of programs adapted to such rather non-standard display sizes.
Autonomy
The OnePlus Open is equipped with a 4805 mAh battery that supports 67W charging, which is not the fastest solution, but for a foldable smartphone, the result is very good.
In real life, the battery lasted a full day at the set screen refresh rate of 120 Hz and AOD, which is about the same as the Galaxy Z Fold 5 . However, with intensive use of the camera and multimedia playback, the device had to be charged twice a day.
With the included charger, the OnePlus Open charges up to 40% in about 25 minutes. A full charge takes about 55 minutes. Undoubtedly, the disadvantage is the lack of support for wireless charging.
In general, everything is quite good, of course I would like better. But, as they say, we have what we have.
Price and Conclusions
The price of the novelty is $1,699.99
Although this is the first smartphone of its kind from OnePlus, a comparison with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 showed its relevance. For a sophisticated first-generation smartphone, the OnePlus Open has a lot of pluses and positive reviews, especially in terms of design and fast charging. From the point of view of the software, there is nothing to complain about.
The cameras are decent, but in some aspects require software refinement, for example, improving photography in low light. The OnePlus Open isn't very portable, but it's comparatively lighter than its competitors.
So all in all, it's really one of the best, if not the best foldable smartphone out there today!
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