The OnePlus One Is As Pretty As You Would Have Hoped

OnePlus-One-front

I don’t know about you, but after all the hype surrounding the OnePlus One in recent months, I was worried it was going to be ugly as sin. After all, it has all the cutting-edge specifications you’d expect from a high-end smartphone, but something had to give to meet that $299 price tag — right?

Maybe, but it certainly wasn’t the design. The One is as beautiful as you would have hoped, with a super-sleek magnesium construction that measures just 4.6mm thin and weighs just 162 grams. It will be available in Sandstone Black and Silk White as standard, which a choice “StyleSwap” back covers including wood, denim, bamboo and Kevlar.

The One has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, but its stunning edge-to-edge design means the handset itself is narrower than a Sony Xperia Z2 with a 5.2-inch display. Inside the device, there’s a 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor — the same chip that powers the Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M8 — and 3GB of RAM.

OnePlus-One-side

It also delivers Adreno 330 graphics, either 16GB or 64GB of internal storage, a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, and a 13-megapixel rear-facing Sony camera with f/2.0 aperture. It has 4G connectivity and Bluetooth 4.0, and it’s powered by a 3,100mAh battery.

The One is the only smartphone that comes with CyanogenMod preinstalled. OnePlus also claims it’s the world’s first handset with bottom-facing stereo speakers made by JBL — though HTC and fans of the M8 would argue that front-facing ones are better.

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Not only does the One look good, then, but it has everything it needs to compete with the latest flagships from Sony, Samsung, HTC, and others. It almost looks and sounds too good to be true when priced from just $299 in the U.S. and £229 in the U.K.

The One will be available in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S. at launch — but you’ll need an invitation to get one initially. Once you have that and you’ve placed your order, OnePlus promises your handset will ship within a few days.