The OnePlus 5 is Finally Here: Playing it Safe

After months of rumors and leaks, the OnePlus 5 has finally been unveiled and although you will still have to wait a while before the images are available, we have every specification and a few confirmed pre-release images for you. As it turns out, the budget flagship king of the smartphone world has not taken any risks this year at all.

The OnePlus 5 comes in with a flat 5.5-inch 1080p Optic AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip and 6GB/8GB of RAM. While the higher RAM variant does look impressive on paper, we are not sure how much more it will add to the device in terms of actual performance and multitasking. The battery is 3,300mAh as predicted by rumors and support's OnePlus's in-house world's fastest charging technology, Dash Charge. There's also Bluetooth v5, NFC, a ceramic fingerprint scanner, a 3.5mm headphone jack and the interesting 20mp + 16mp dual rear camera. OnePlus has upgraded the 64GB/128GB storage options to UFS 2.1.2 which will allow for faster boot time, faster app opening, faster file transfer, faster installation and an overall smoother experience.

What do I think about the OnePlus 5? It's a very safe device that unfortunately fails to bring anything new to the field. The slimmer profile and the interesting set of cameras will need to be tested first, but my guess is that they will both be significant upgrades over the OnePlus 3T. While all this makes it a solid offering, especially if the price is kept as low as OnePlus is famous for doing, it just doesn't seem like a huge upgrade over its predecessor at this point of time.

Saikat Kar (tech-enthusiast)