As the hype is now over the arguably cheapest flagship smartphone for the year 2017 is out, let's now take a look at the best and the worst parts of the OnePlus 5.

The Right

The combination of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, 8GB or RAM and 128GB of internal storage are specifications that no other phone on the planet can deliver at the moment. Consider the fact that the Galaxy S8+ with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage, which is its closest competitor in terms of specs, costs more than a thousand dollars in China and India. The OnePlus 5 with 2 extra gigs of RAM and a brilliant dual camera setup costs about $539! Say what you will, no other phone can beat the OnePlus 5 in terms of price-to-performance value. Add all of this to the super smooth and ultra useful Oxygen OS and we have an instant winner on our hands.

The Wrong

It looks like an iPhone 7 Plus and that's not a good thing. In a world where a lot of people blame Android smartphones for copying Apple iPhones, the OnePlus 5 took a step backward by copying the iPhone 7 Plus in terms of the design and losing its own unique appeal in the process. Also, there was the initial false claim of 2X optical zoom (it's actually 1.6X as it was found later) and an AMOLED display that needed to be QHD this year.

Should You Buy it?

To be honest, nothing can match the feeling of actually using a Galaxy S8/S8+ and its curved QHD+ Super AMOLED display and bezel-less design, but then again those phones cost twice as much (unless you get it on a deal). Having said that, there is no smartphone in existence today that can match the experience offered by the OnePlus 5 at under $550. If that's your budget, you just cannot go wrong with this one.

Saikat Kar (tech-enthusiast)

You would think that Samsung would by now be able to decipher what exactly made the Note 7 catch fire, but you would be wrong. Lithium ion batteries do have the potential to explode or spontaneously combust if something goes wrong inside and that was exactly what Samsung and everyone else thought the problem was. However, it was apparently not exactly what they thought it was. What the problem actually was, remains a mystery still today!

According to Samsung, "We recognized that we did not correctly identify the issue the first time and remain committed to finding the root cause."
"Our top priority remains the safety of our customers and retrieving 100% of the Galaxy Note 7 devices in the market."

Experts examining the smartphones and the scenarios are of the opinion that there could be multiple reasons responsible for the explosions and one of the potential culprits could be that the battery case that wasn't sufficiently big to accommodate the battery of the Note 7. A finer problem could lie in the software of the phone itself, which may have failed to direct battery interactions with other hardware parts inside the phone properly. Whatever the reason is, Samsung needs to clarify it publicly, if it hopes to win back at least some of the trust that it has lost due to the incident.

Saikat Kar (tech-enthusiast)