Review: OnePlus 2 as good as the best at half the price

This Chinese phone matches the Samsung Galaxy S6 for less than half the price. It’s being dubbed the “flagship killer”.

Chinese smartphone players OPPO, Huawei and Xiaomi have been taking the fight up to the likes of Samsung, LG and HTC with premium Android handsets at extremely affordable prices, and things are set to get harder with the entry of OnePlus 2.

When it comes to Android phones, the OnePlus 2’s predecessor, OnePlus One, comfortably set the benchmark for what an affordable handset should be while rivalling the best Android handsets available at the time.

The OnePlus 2 once again promises to turn the price-to-performance ratio on its head with a device that for the most part can go toe-to-toe with the Samsung Galaxy S6 for less than half the price.

It boasts all the features you would expect of a flagship smartphone, from the high-powered internals to a snappy fingerprint scanner and a sleek metal build. It also has a few unique features.

The first is the three-position alert slider, located on the left side, which easily allows you to switch between notification ­profiles — including a mode where alerts are restricted to messages and calls from your priority contacts only — all without ever needing to take the smartphone out of your pocket.

Using it day-in-day-out made me wish more Android phones had this feature.

The Dual SIM card slot is handy for regular overseas travellers, but also for when you want to milk the value of two plans while keeping your minimum monthly spend low.

Unfortunately, there’s no ­option to use that extra SIM slot for a microSD card as with some other phones.

The sandstone-textured back cover makes a welcome return, providing quite a bit of extra grip, and this time you can swap it out for bamboo, rosewood or even a back plate made of kevlar for more durability.

OnePlus has parted ways with custom Android software-maker Cyanogen in favour of its own Oxygen OS, but it retains some of its best features while also managing to keep things as close as possible to stock Android.

The net result is a software ­experience that’s fast, stutter free and devoid of any real manufacturer bloatware.

Some of my favourite software tweaks includes the ability to ­assign the two capacitive buttons and centre home button to ­almost anything you like.

For example, the double tap of the home button can be set to launch the camera.

Dark mode makes things ­easier on the eyes, though, unfortunately, it isn’t system wide so it will not show up within the dialler, messenger or apps.

The app permission feature gives you greater control over what information apps can have access to so you can, say, deny Facebook and Instagram access to your location, contact information and call logs stored on your phone.

The Shelf feature gives you quick access to certain widgets, frequently used apps and contacts. While it’s a nice idea, I didn’t find it compelling enough to use every day.

On the hardware front, the OnePlus 2 is one of the few ­Android phones on the market to sport a whopping 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage (the base 16GB model comes with 3GB RAM).

The Snapdragon 810 octa-core processor easily keeps pace with the Galaxy S6 and blows away the low-to-mid-range chips found at this price point.

All this performance doesn’t come at the expense of the battery, either, thanks to the sizeable 3300mAh battery on board, and which got us through a full day of use and well into the next.

It’s longer than we could achieve out of the Galaxy S6, however, the OnePlus 2 lacks support for wireless charging or quick charge and as a result takes a painfully long three hours to go from 0 to 100 per cent.

The 13-megapixel camera has Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) with a laser-assisted autofocus along with an f/2.0 ­aperture.

The outcome is a camera that can take impressive looking shots, shoot decent quality 4K video and is also a much better camera overall than last year’s ­effort.

But the low-light performance isn’t quite as good as the Galaxy S6 or LG G4.

The fingerprint sensor ­mat­ches the speed and accuracy of Apple’s TouchID and there’s also support for multiple user ­accounts.

It would have been nice to see OnePlus take things a step further and actually enable the ability to log in to multiple user accounts using the fingerprint scanner, but the feature remains tied to the one main account.

The FullHD LCD display is one of the brightest around and also impresses with its wide viewing angles.

However, it lacks the Quad-HD spectacle found in some of the higher priced competition.

You also won’t find NFC, which is an odd omission given OnePlus’s penchant for servicing the needs of power users and with Google’s Android Pay on the horizon.

While the OnePlus 2 isn’t the flagship killer that its marketing tagline suggests, it does offer the performance and a lot of the features normally reserved for today’s top-tier handsets — all for a rock bottom starting price tag of $US329 ($455).

There’s simply no other handset in its price range that can match what the OnePlus 2 offers.

But here’s the rub. You can’t just walk into a store or jump online and buy one.

Like last year’s model, purchase is restricted to a fairly ­convoluted invite system — while Australians will need to ­resort to third-party e-tailers that sell the OnePlus 2 at a higher price.

For those lucky enough to pick one up, the OnePlus 2 offers unbeatable value for the money.