One Plus 5 Review

The OnePlus 5 is simply stellar.

It delivers a grade-A experience and nearly all the specs you demand in a flagship phone for hundreds of dollars less than the Samsung Galaxy S8, Google Pixel and Apple iPhone 7.

This is the fourth major phone from Chinese phone maker OnePlus, which has earned a reputation for creating cheap, quality Android phones that undercut the competition. While OnePlus doesn't have the volume or pure brand clout as Samsung, Apple and even Huawei, it has garnered a loyal following through flash sales and word-of-mouth recommendations.

The OnePlus 5 excels at serving high-performing hardware, like the latest Snapdragon chipset and an enduring, fast-charging battery. It's also on trend with a dual-lens rear camera that takes artsy portraits and can hold its own against the iPhone 7 Plus.

But it doesn't have super-slim bezels or the water-resistant body that so many top-tier phones do. And its price, while still hundreds less than its top-tier competitors, inches closer to them than years past due to its more expensive features. As a result, the phone isn't quite the deal it once was. But, rest assured, the trade-off is more than fair.

The OnePlus 5 hopped aboard the dual-camera trend and has two rear shooters. Unlike other phones that have two cameras for wide-angle or monochrome purposes, the phone has a standard 16-megapixel shooter and a secondary 20-megapixel telephoto lens. This enables it to take "bokeh" images that have a shallow depth of field and blurred backgrounds (as if you took the photo with an DSLR camera).

The effect turns my run-of-the-mill photos of my friends into something more artsy and dramatic, and it works the same way the 7 Plus' cameras do. You need to stand 1-6 feet away from your subject to use the effect, and there were times when the camera didn't recognize or "catch" the subject initially. But when it worked, my pictures looked great. Due to its longer focal length, the telephoto lens has a fixed optical 1.6x zoom (it then adds digital "multi-frame technology" to bring it up to 2X), so you can toggle between the standard lens or zoom in on distant objects clearly and steadily with the telephoto.

The effect doesn't always work perfectly every time on both the OnePlus and the iPhone. It can be patchy around objects with tricky outlines (like with stray hairs and such). But the iPhone did a slightly better job at reading these situations and determining where best the blurring should start and end. The iPhone's bokeh effect also looked softer and more natural at times. In some of the OnePlus' portraits, the foreground looked too harshly contrasted with the blurred background, and the effect looked too digitally rendered.

Overall though, not much has changed from the 3T. The OnePlus 5 carries over the fingerprint sensor that sits below the screen, as well as the headphone jack and the toggle button on the edge that changes vibration and silence levels. The display, which is now fortified with Gorilla Glass 5 to make it tougher, is vibrant and sharp, but it's the same 1,080p resolution.

The phone also isn't water resistant. This isn't a huge knock, and a few years ago it would be a nonissue. But it's one of the key features if you want to stay competitive against other flagships today. And while water resistance in phones isn't completely ubiquitous yet, it's soon evolving from a nice-to-have feature to a must-have among the higher-tiered devices.

There have been comments on how much it resembles the iPhone, but I'm not bothered by any of this. Sure, I'll be ready to praise any (successful) attempt of making a phone look different, but the majority of phones look similar anyway. What matters is that the device feels good and solid. In the case of the OnePlus 5, it does on both accounts.

After the OnePlus 5 launched, XDA Developers reported that the phone was deliberately skewing benchmarks and configuring its core processors to maximize its results.

In response, OnePlus claimed that, "We have allowed benchmark apps to run in a state similar to daily usage, including the running of resource intensive apps and games. Additionally, when launching apps the OnePlus 5 runs at a similar state in order to increase the speed in which apps open. We are not overclocking the device, rather we are displaying the performance potential of the OnePlus 5." Co-founder Carl Pei also addressed the issue on Reddit.

Optimizing for benchmarks is nothing new, but it can be misleading. As such, we forewent posting two of our three usual benchmark tests (AnTutu and Geekbench 4.0 -- which the OnePlus configured for). In its place is our remaining benchmark (3DMark) and two browser-based tests, Octane and Jetstream.