OnePlus 6 review: At half the price, can it beat the flagships?

The OnePlus 6 is the most sophisticated smartphone from the company yet.
OnePlus 6 review: At half the price, can it beat the flagships?
OnePlus 6 review: At half the price, can it beat the flagships?

What are the top things we look for in a phone? Good looks, speed, battery, camera and of course, the price. 

This phone made a 100 crore rupees worth of sales in the first 10 minutes of going on sale. The OnePlus 6 has clearly garnered much excitement with its launch earlier this month. With a stunning design, the company promises speed like never before. And compared to your Samsung iPhone flagships, it's half the price. So, does the OnePlus live up to its hype?

The OnePlus 6 comes with a 6.28-inch display, which is slightly larger than the previous flagships but fits fine in your hands. It’s a stunning full-screen display, with the much-talked about notch. The space next to the notch houses the notifications. But there is an option of hiding the notch as well. The notch houses the earpiece, front camera, notification light, and proximity sensor. 

The OnePlus 6 is the most sophisticated smartphone from the company yet. Its entire body is made of Corning Gorilla Glass 5, making it resilient and malleable. While it looks great, the only drawback is that the back is susceptible to fingerprint smudges. Oh, and it doesn’t support wireless charging either.

This time, the Alert Slider has been pushed to the right. While it is said to have been done to make it easy to switch between modes, being on the right side definitely makes it more convenient. And, the entire glass body has been sealed well, making it weather and dust resistant. But remember, it's only slightly water resistant. Don’t try dipping it in liquid, taking it for a swim or wetting it fully in the rain.

Coming to speed and performance, The OnePlus 6 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset, making it the first smartphone to get the latest processor. And then there is the massive 6 or 8GB RAM. The result? A phone that runs very fast even with multiple apps open. There is never a lag, no matter what application is in use.

And the best thing about a OnePlus smartphone is that it comes with absolutely no bloatware and the Oxygen OS lets you customise the phone, letting you get the most out of Android. Some of these customisations include changing the navigation buttons, changing the colour theme of the phone. You can even pick gestures that can open your phone.

It also has some additional interesting features such as the earphones mode, which resumes music every time you plug in your earphones. You can also use parallel apps to use more than one Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp account at a time.

And to support this super-fast performance, the OnePlus 6 comes with a 3300mAh battery. This is no upgrade from the previous flagship. I was disappointed that with heavy usage, the phone lasts for just over half a day and sometimes, the performance also gets affected when the battery is below 10%.  But the saviour here is the Fast Charge. Whether the screen is off or not, half an hour’s charge can really give you enough power to last almost a day.

Coming to the camera, the OnePlus 6 houses a dual rear camera set up which includes a 16mp + 20mp sensors. It comes with portrait mode, HDR and Pro mode.

OnePlus has brought back Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) tech to its camera on popular demand with the OnePlus 6. OIS ensures that the blurring caused by the camera moving during exposure is reduced.

According to the company, it has upgraded the 16mp sensor with a 19% larger pixel size. With several such technical upgrades, the camera does a very good job in day light conditions. The highlights are protected, exposure is just right and so is the detailing.

Image clicked with OnePlus 6

But what’s slightly disappointing is the pictures in low light. They tend to get grainy and slightly blurry. While it still isn’t very bad, it definitely doesn’t compare to an iPhone, Samsung flagship.

Images clicked with OnePlus 6

The portrait mode works well but doesn’t blur the background much like OnePlus 5.

Image clicked with OnePlus 6

The phone has a 16MP camera at the front. The front camera too is expected to get a portrait mode soon.

And all this comes at a price of Rs 35,000 for the 6GB variant and 39,999 for the 8GB variant. OnePlus 6 also has an 8GB RAM Silk white variant priced at Rs 39,999 and a Marvel Avengers variant priced at Rs 44,999. 

In conclusion, is the phone worth the buy? Definitely yes. For a phone that’s less than half the price of an iPhone X or Galaxy S9, the OnePlus 6 looks great, is extremely snappy and fast performing, takes great pictures and of course, charges in a jiffy.

Watch the review here:

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