Introduction:
This is the OnePlus Open. It's the first-ever OnePlus foldable, and honestly the first OnePlus product in the last five years that's really impressed me. See, foldable phones up until this point, for most people including myself, haven't really made sense. You pay more money, almost double the price of a flagship, to get a phone that has a bigger screen, yes, but then it's compromised in almost every other way.
In terms of comfort, they're very thick when folded. In terms of cameras, they struggle to fit good ones in. You get hinge problems, crease problems, dust-stuck-in-your-screen problems—there's like 50 more examples of this. But this OnePlus Open is different. You can tell it's not just trying to be yet another company's take at the same thing, but actually the foldable done right, paying attention to all the pain points you normally get and actually trying to fix them.
So let's talk about it. The unboxing is a good start. You get everything you need with it, which shouldn't be a surprise for a $1,699 phone, but that's just where we are right now. The phone's on top, and that is a proper camera crater. You get a 67W fast charger. It is starting to feel a little dated that it's a traditional USB-A plug and not USB-C, though. And then a second, really heavy box.
There's a case included for both the back and the front. It's nothing crazy fancy, but it is all the protection that 90% of people are going to need. And then inside, a cable—classic OnePlus red—and then a welcome membership card, quick guide, and a safety guide. Why is the safety guide like 60 pages? What is this, like 1995? And then a SIM tool. Time for the big peel. Now, this hasn't been one of those experiences where I've had to dig to find the differences.
While it still looks and feels familiar if you've seen a foldable before, the improvements to the foldable formula are really obvious. The first thing I'll notice is how slim and light it is, mostly thanks to new materials in the body, like titanium instead of steel. Is it the most comfortable phone I've ever held? Hell no.
But is it close enough to feeling like a normal phone that you could just maybe forget? Yeah, I'd say so. To give you some idea, this foldable with an 8-inch screen on the inside is actually the same weight as an iPhone 14 Pro Max, which I have carried around for a year with no problems. But that is not the only interesting thing going on here—the hinge. The hinge on foldable phones is both one of the biggest opportunities.
Basic:
Potential vulnerabilities, and I'm just going to say it right now, this is the best hinge I've ever seen. It's very smooth; there's zero friction, but at the same time, at any point in the opening process, if you want to stop, you stop. And then, according to OnePlus, it's also a lot more durable than any other hinge before, thanks to being made from, no joke, exactly 69 parts as opposed to most hinges, which have over 100 and so, they're saying, are almost over-engineered.
There's more. The hinge makes for a basically gapless design all the way around when it's closed, which keeps dust and other substances out. But what's also kind of cool is that they've managed to do that while not making the hinge protrude outwards and while also giving the screen enough space to rest when folded such that it's not being pinched.
And so, when you unfold it, there is very, very minimal crease. I've used a lot of foldable phones at this point, and in most cases, the crease is just one of those side characters that you really dislike at the start, and then you just kind of have to get used to always being around. But here, what you have is a screen with traces of a crease.
It's minimal enough that if you choose to see it, you'll see it, but if you choose to ignore it, you absolutely can, and you're left with what genuinely does feel like a mini tablet on the inside. But the best bit, and the thing that really helps to sell this feeling, is this: the way that most foldable open is very gradually with a consistent amount of resistance until you basically decide, okay, this seems fully open; I'll stop pushing now, which would probably be the way to do it if you sometimes use a foldable like this, sometimes like this, sometimes like this. But if we're being very honest, 95% of the time you use your foldable, really you're going to be in this position, or you're going to be in this position.
And that is why I really love the fact that this phone snaps into both of those positions. It's satisfying, it leaves no shadow of a doubt that you are in the fully open or fully closed position, and subconsciously, it also helps that feeling of distinction, like, okay, I'm in phone mode now, I'm in tablet mode. That's how I would make a foldable.
There's also an alert slider, which used to be a classic OnePlus feature. They ditched it for a while, and now it's finally back, so that's exciting. I mean, it's fine; it does what an alert slider does, but it did need to be about 5 cm lower for me to actually realistically reach it. There's IPX4 water resistance, which is good for splashes.
Um, the point I was going to make, though, is that it's not rated for full-on immersion like Samsung's foldable are. And then the camera, which for some people I've showed this to, is massively annoying and intrusive, but for me, it's been okay. My fingers just kind of rest around it, and because it's at least centered and symmetrical, I found that.
Features:
OnePlus only has one model of this phone that comes with 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage by default. It's very easy to create a 128-gig model with 8 gigs of RAM to make the advertised price seem way more affordable and then just incentivize upgrades, but they just decided no, the full foldable experience requires this amount of RAM and storage.
That's the minimum amount that we're going to sell it with, and they're doing that while still undercutting the Samsung. The OnePlus Open is $1,699 versus Samsung's $1,799, and that's for a phone that has 512 gigs of storage versus 256 and 16 gigs of RAM instead of 12. It's still very expensive, but at least you're getting the best of the best hardware for that price.
These foldable right now, they are far too expensive for what they are, so even though I don't think we're quite there yet, at least this is putting some downwards pressure on that price. The actual software version here is Android 13 with OnePlus's Oxygen OS 13.2 on top of it, and it's got a nice level of customization.
It's not the best I've ever seen, but definitely enough to make the phone yours, and it's just generally a well-animated, nicely tactile experience. Any kind of list or web page you flick between, you don't just see it—you feel it. And you also can't notice, putting aside the stability problems for a second, the core decisions being made for the day-to-day user experience, they are very focused around it just being intuitive.
Like at the very start, I was struggling to reach the unlock pattern in the middle, then I realized that these two buttons on either side, they move the user interface towards whichever hand is holding the phone. I felt like it was hard to press the power button and the volume buttons at the same time to take screenshots, but then realized that a quick swipe with three fingers does the same thing too. It does also do that whole thing where it remaps some apps when you're in the half-folded position.
It's not as fleshed out as Samsung's Flex mode, but for me, there's not really a huge use case for either. The main thing this needs is polish, and the fact that OnePlus is now promising four full years of major Android updates is promising.
It's likely that they'll iron out the bagginess, but you can't guarantee it. So at this point, overall, the OnePlus Open is doing pretty well, and we haven't even talked about its crown jewel: the cameras. The thing that OnePlus has really zeroed in on with the marketing here is that most foldable phones have compromised cameras.
Basically, you have to fit those cameras into what's effectively half the depth of a normal flagship, and do you know what? They're not wrong about that. And what they're also not wrong about is that this phone, in response to that.
Conclusion:
It definitely loses a few points for stability right now, but the specs are world-class, the software is genuinely innovative, the cameras are up there, and it has the battery to back it all up, with the cherry on top being the fact that it's also more affordable than the market leader Samsung.
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