OnePlus One Review

The One arrived with a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801, 3GB of RAM and a 5.5-inch 1080p JDI LCD for $299, when a Galaxy S5 cost $650. That was the whole pitch and it worked: the phone was as quick as anything on sale, the 3100 mAh battery outlasted the flagships, and the Sandstone Black finish on the 64GB model remains one of the best-feeling backs a phone has shipped with. Getting one meant an invite, handed out through contests and forum posts for most of the first year, so the price you could not pay was the joke as much as the selling point.

The flaws were real. Early units had a yellow band along the bottom of the display, and a touchscreen firmware fault made the digitizer miss or double taps; updates helped and never fully cured it. The 13MP Sony IMX214 was fine in daylight and mushy after dark, a clear step behind the S5 and the iPhone 6. Then the software story broke: Cyanogen signed an exclusive with Micromax in India, an injunction briefly halted sales there in December 2014, and OnePlus wrote OxygenOS in response. The One got Lollipop from OnePlus and Marshmallow from Cyanogen, then lived on for years through community ROMs. It was not the best phone of 2014, but it changed what a $300 phone was allowed to be.