OnePlus X

Unlike the OnePlus One and the OnePlus 2, the new OnePlus X isn't being advertised as a "flagship killer." Instead, it is aimed at shaking up the budget market. This compact Android phone doesn't make any major hardware compromises—and it's easy to use one-handed.

The OnePlus X has an attractive, premium build. It's essentially two slabs of glass held in place by a metal frame. It measures 5.51-by-2.72-by-0.27-inches (HWD) and weighs 138-gms, making it easy to hold and use with just one hand.

The glass back has a habit of picking up smudges, and feels a bit slippery in your hand, so you'll probably want to consider getting a case. The front of the phone is home to a 5-inch AMOLED display. It packs 441 pixels per inch into its 16:9 frame, matching the native resolution of 1080p video.

Everything looks crisp and bright, with rich colors and good viewing angles, even outdoors. This is an excellent screen for the price. Three capacitive touch buttons sit below the display, unlit and a bit hard to see. You have the option of switching to on-screen buttons, but I found that it wasn't worth the loss of screen real estate.

There's a clicky metal power button and a volume rocker on the right, and an alert slider on the left, all of which are easy to reach. The alert slider is a welcome feature introduced on the OnePlus 2; it toggles between All Notifications, Priority Interruptions, and No Interruptions without having to unlock your phone.

Notable features missing on the OnePlus X include a fingerprint scanner and fast charging, both of which are present on the OnePlus 2. Then again, you're paying a lot less for the OnePlus X, and neither of these features are indispensable.

The OnePlus X supports 4G LTE network. Voice calls and noise cancellation work perfectly fine on the smartphone. The bottom-facing speakers get loud without sounding too tinny. Wi-Fi is limited to 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n. Bluetooth 4.0 is included, along with a proximity sensor, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and an ambient light sensor.

There's no NFC, but that's not a surprise considering it's also absent on the higher-end OnePlus 2. From a hardware perspective, the OnePlus X is essentially a repackaged version of the OnePlus One. There's a Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage.

The OnePlus X can accommodate dual SIM cards, or a single SIM and a microSD card up to 128GB. In terms of general usage and multitasking, the Snapdragon 801 continues to hold up well, despite its age. App switching and app launching were both speedy in my tests.

The only time the hardware started to show its age was when playing games like Asphalt 8. I noticed the occasional frame drop, suggesting that the Adreno 330 GPU was struggling at certain points. Benchmarks also show this to be true. The OnePlus X got an AnTuTu score of just 39,787.

Battery life is good, though not great. With its 2,525mAh battery, the OnePlus X clocked 5 hours, 45 minutes in our rundown test where we set screen brightness to max and stream full-screen video over LTE. The OnePlus X takes crisp, clear shots with its 13-megapixel rear camera, with excellent detail. Autofocus and auto-exposure are both reliable, and the device can shoot just as quickly as most phones on the market.

The OnePlus X is capable of 1080p video capture at 30 frames per second (fps) and 720p slow-mo video at 120fps. Despite the lack of optical image stabilization (OIS), video recording is free from jerkiness or jittering. The 8-megapixel selfie camera is solid.

The OnePlus X runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, with OxygenOS 2.1.2 running on top. Despite being a custom UI, the only pre-installed app is SwiftKey. Aside from that, OxygenOS is mostly stock Android, with some extra features.

There are gesture controls like double-tap-to-wake, or drawing a circle on the screen to launch the camera. You can also customise the capacitive buttons to carry out similar functions. If you swipe left from the home screen, there's a page that shows your most frequently used apps and contacts. Overall, the additions are genuinely useful, and most Android fans will be pleased.

The OnePlus X sounds like a pretty great phone, right? So why the relatively average score? Well, it's hard to be overly enthusiastic about a device that packs in an aging processor and thus ends up offering average performance.

Still, the OnePlus X is a solid phone for an excellent price. It's easily the best-looking phone you can get for AED 1,199.