New Delhi: Following Xiaomi, another Chinese handset maker OnePlus is all set to enter India with its One smartphone.
For $299 (unlocked and without contract) no other phone comes close to what the OnePlus One offers. With a specs sheet that I ssimilar to what you'd find in a flagship smartphone, the phone offers an unbeatable price and power combination.
The OnePlus One doesn't look like a $299 phone. Its polycarbonate built, elegant chasis and arched back can easily make you think that you've paid $600 for it. Overall, the device seems to give tough competition to a smartphone like Nexus 5 which has stood as the best combination yet of high-end smartphone hardware and affordable off-contract pricing.
The OP One comes with a large 5.5-inch LTPS IPS display with 1080×1920 pixel resolution, offering a pixel density of 401ppi. The display comes with Gorilla Glass 3 protection and the same adaptive backlight technology that's seen in some Sharp displays.
The device is powered by quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 clocked at 2.5GHz with Adreno 330 GPU and backed by 3GB of RAM. There's a a 13-megapixel rear IMX214 sensor with a six-lens array and f/2.0 aperture that boasts quick shutter speed of only 0.3-seconds. It also has a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. There's no microSD card slot in the phone, so you have to do with either 16 or 64 GB onboard storage.
It runs a customised version of CyanogenMod ROM called CM 11S. The software is based on Android 4.4 KitKat. CyanogenMod is a custom firmware based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and gives the user more freedom to fiddle around with settings, icons, themes and... well, nearly every aspect of the Android experience.
At a first glance, CyanogenMod may look no different from stock Android, but there's a lot of power behind the scenes, and it becomes more evident as you continue to poke around. There are several new features along with tweakable settings.
Connectivity options include 4G LTE (region dependent), Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, and NFC functionality. The device gets its juice from a 3100mAh non-removable battery.
The One will come in two variants: one for China (with Chinese-specific bands and TD-SCDMA) and another for the rest of the world.
