OnePlus Open is Awesome – What's Happening with Folding Phones?!
– All right, we gotta talk about these folding phones for a minute, because it’s changed a lot since the last time we did. So the first ever folding phone from OnePlus came out this week. It’s called the OnePlus Open. Not a very good name, but a very, very, very good, first gen foldable. I’ve been using it for about three weeks now. I got lots of good things to say about it, but it’s actually, I feel like it’s so good, that it’s actually resurfaced the old question in my head from a couple years ago, which is,
what’s it gonna take for regular people to actually start buying folding phones? Because, yeah, I like this phone, and I’m gonna go ahead and guess that some other reviewers will like this phone too, and some enthusiasts will like this phone, and this video may even get a lot of views, but none of that necessarily translates into regular people just like, strolling into a store, or going online and choosing to buy one of these. So first things first, the details of this phone. So this is a super high-end phone in every way, and the design is
particularly well considered. You can see it’s basically the same size as a normal phone on the outside. This is a 6.3 inch, 20 by nine cover display, just
more reachable, it has better button placement, since it’s a bit shorter. But there’s no question this feels like a flagship phone on the outside, even if you never even open the thing. There’s also a bunch of design touches I really like, the flat sides all the way around, super clean. The alert slider is also back, so it’s way up there at the top of the phone, which is kind of tough to reach, but I love that it works exactly as you’d expect. Same as previous OnePlus phones that had it. And the power button also doubles
as the fingerprint reader, which we’ve seen with lots of these folds as well. It’s awesome. And then around the back, mixed bag, I would say. I’m not the biggest fake leather on the back of a phone person. It gives me like, Samsung 2016 vibes, but at least it does hide fingerprints. This is the other color now. It’s a green. It looks a little bit cleaner. But really, the feature is the gigantic camera bump. And yeah, it’s pretty crazy looking, but, but, it also happens to be exactly where my index finger rests on the back of
the phone. So it’s like a nice little shelf that feels really natural when using the phone while closed. So I kind of really like it for that. Also, the LED flash. I guess it couldn’t fit, so they shoved it up in the corner, for some reason. But, then you open this thing up, and it just, it becomes so obvious why they waited so long to do their first foldable. It looks nothing like some of the other first gen folding screens from years ago. It’s got this huge 7.8 inch corner to corner, LTPO 3.0 display, that
again, goes up to 2800 nits, and down to one hertz. Even bezels all the way around, got the hole punch in the top corner. And honestly, one of the least visible creases you will see in a folding phone in 2023. Now I think it’s actually debatable if we can technically call this their first foldable phone, because while OnePlus hasn’t made a foldable yet, their sister company, OPPO, clearly has. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this took a lot of tech from them. Actually, there is another just released OPPO phone called the OPPO Find N3, and
it’s the same as this, but the point still stands. And with this screen on, you literally don’t see the crease at all, and screen off, you still kind of have to look for it. And then, yeah, you hit the angle where the light reflects off of the middle of the phone, and then you can see it. But this is one of those phones that looks really good from almost every angle you would actually use it. And then it also has one of those hinges that stays at whatever angle that you hold it at. So if
you want a sort of a 90 degree angle, or a little bit more open or closed, you can do that. And then it has a nice satisfying spring loaded clap shut. It’s also, it’s impressively thin. It’s not the thinnest one I’ve ever seen, but pretty good. It’s lighter than you would expect. It’s actually, if you put it on a scale, it’s basically the exact same weight as an iPhone 14 Pro when they’re doing stainless steel. So, just a regular phone weight. So it’s an impressive piece of hardware. But then the software for this one is
OnePlus. So it’s OxygenOS 13.2, and it’s got all kinds of little tweaks and little features that power users are gonna love. Because let’s face it, this is a phone for power users. People who are gonna love the continuity features between the open screen and the closed screen. So once you’re done using a big app, you just close it like this, and then swipe up to pick up where you left off on the outside screen, if you want to. Just like the Pixel Fold, it’s gonna mirror your home screen set up automatically between the cover screen
and the inside screen. So if you change something, like move a folder or a widget or an app on one, and then switch to the other, it will have also moved from there too. Keeps them a little bit more organized. I kind of wish I had the option to change that, since this is Android, and I am a power user. But nevertheless, that’s the way it is. But then there’s also a ton of multitasking features on the inside screen, for having multiple apps open at once. So you can have, obviously, one app open full screen,
and that looks good for a surprising number of apps. It’ll stretch them if they’re not natively built for this. But then you can have two apps side by side, and then you can pick a third app to get in the mix. Then they’re all just sort of next to each other in this triple panel view, and you can move things between them really quickly. Or if you pinch out with four fingers, you can see all of the apps at once. So between that and the dock, with all of your apps and recent files, it’s just
a very well considered hub for sitting down and just getting stuff done. Like I feel like when I sit down and open this phone, I’m about to be really productive and get a lot done. This phone, the OnePlus Open, honestly, as a phone, it nails all five of my pillars of a great smartphone. Great screen, great battery, great build, great performance, great camera, and I’m not being generous with that stuff. It like, actually nails all of that stuff. Like you already heard about the great screen, and the fact that they match each other so well
inside and outside, is already pretty great. There’s also great performance. Super high-end specs. Snapdragon 8 gen 2, 16 gigs of fast RAM, 512 gigs of UFS 4.0 storage. I mean the pair of 120 hertz LTPO displays have a 240 hertz touch sample rate. It’s super responsive, and I mean, the whole thing feels very future-proof. And then you also heard about the build quality, which I’ll revisit that in a second. But then battery life has also been excellent, with this 4800 MilliAmp hour battery, and 67 watt fast charging, although it just skips wireless charging, for some
reason, which is like the most OnePlus thing ever. I think it adds like, no cost and no weight and no thickness, but yet they leave it out when all the other competitors have it anyway? Alright, fine. But then this huge camera module on the back kind of implies high end cameras, but you can never really be sure until you test them. And sure enough, this (indistinct) camera setup is pretty decent. It’s got this new stacked sensor for the primary sensor, a 3x telephoto, and an ultra wide. I found it’s pretty good most of the time,
although it’s not very good at freezing motion. Which is fine if you take photos of still subjects, but the second it’s people or animals, and those things start to move, then it can be kind of hard getting a shutter speed fast enough to freeze that stuff. You basically have to switch to action mode, which there’s a button for. And that works by cranking the shutter speed way up, as expected, but then ISO starts to get a little high, high enough that photos are now a little noisier, a little worse looking, so it’s just, that’s unfortunate.
And by the way, this isn’t one of the five pillars, but I also found that the microphone on this phone is actually quite good. They’re usually not this good. I was pleasantly surprised. But it all comes together in a really nice phone that I think a lot of people including myself are gonna really like using. So the question is, why do I think people aren’t buying folding phones that much, if they’re this good? It turns out, a phone can hit all five pillars of a great smartphone, and not be a great buy for everyone, necessarily.
And so it really comes down to three things, I think. Number one is still price. Number two is the durability question. And then number three is just the power user problem. So on price, this phone is $1700 US. That is a lot of money to spend on a phone, no matter how you chop it up into monthly segments or staggered payments. It’s just a lot, right? It’s literally twice as much as an iPhone 15. But guess what? That’s literally right in line with its folding competitors, like the other two folding phones available in the US,
Pixel Fold, $1800. Samsung Z Fold 5. $1800. So this one’s actually kind of a bargain. That’s the most obvious thing holding these back, ’cause they’re still so expensive. But then number two, durability is also questionable at best. Now of course, they do all the testing that they can, and guess what? They’ve got IPX4 water resistance, which is nice. And they have a durability rating for a million folds of the hinge, and that’s great. But then, what about these dead pixels that have started appearing at the bottom middle of my screen, right around the hinge? I
had this one for three weeks, and babied it, and this is already starting to show up on mine. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna be bad for everyone, but that’s not great, and I suspect it’s not gonna happen on non-folding phones. But the third and final reason folding phones, as great as they’ve been getting, aren’t necessarily translating to mainstream success, is that they’re power user phones. They’re, folding and unfolding is a power user feature. And power user features, as much as we love ’em, don’t sell a ton of phones. We figured this out many times when
LG spent years and years making some of the most manually adjustable cameras in the smartphone world, and now they don’t make smartphones anymore. And we still have Sony, who can’t stop making professional cameras in a smartphone body, but their sales are putting them in danger of the same thing. And Asus ZenFones are absolutely incredible right now, for enthusiasts like myself, but they’ve already thrown a head fake. Clearly they’re not doing super well either. I’d honestly be willing to bet, without even being able to look into anyone’s books, that the folding phones are not at the
top of sales in any of the lineups of any of the companies who are making these things. Probably the most compelling folding phone hardware I’ve seen yet, is this HONOR phone. This thing’s called the HONOR Magic V2. Bro, look at this thing! This, it’s super thin, it has all the right things in all the right places. It’s got a 3D printed titanium hinge cover, barely showing any crease when it’s open. Thin bezels, nice screens all the way around. Somehow it has a 5000 MilliAmp hour battery inside, and high-end specs. Like, playing with this phone over
almost anything else, over even Samsung’s, has helped me appreciate what folding phone hardware can actually be. But despite all that awesomeness, it still has those kind of obvious downsides for a regular person, to probably not pick it over a regular phone. The price, it’s like 1400 bucks. The durability? Potentially compromised, we don’t know. And then even though it is thin and awesome, it’s still just like, the power user thing of wanting to carry a slightly thicker phone around and have that extra ability is not something everyone sees as obvious and something they actually want. We
are starting to finally see some of those flipping phones come at least closer to the mainstream, because they are lower in price. The the Z Flip 5 is down to a thousand bucks from Samsung. And Motorola just launched their most affordable flip yet, the Razr 40, I think is launching soon at 600 bucks. So that seems to be getting closer, but it’s just, we need a lot more of that stuff. So, folding phones are simultaneously very evolved from their beginnings just a few years ago, and yet still have a long way to go. So I
guess until we get there, it’s more fun for us nerds. Thanks for watching! Catch you in the next one. Peace. (chill beats and uplifting strings music)
