It turns out Samsung’s latest phablet isn’t the only one with a design flaw. Owners of the OnePlus 2 have discovered a strange issue with the handset’s fancy new home button, which causes it to become unresponsive when the device is held in two hands.

The OnePlus 2’s home button looks like a tactile button, like those found on the iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy devices, but it’s actually capacitive. You don’t feel anything when you press it — other than a vibration if you have feedback enabled — but it’s there for the fingerprint scanner.

Sometimes the home button becomes unresponsive, which is a problem I mentioned in my review. Most figured this was simply a software bug, but it turns out it could be much worse. The problem actually occurs when the hold the OnePlus 2 in a certain way.

As demonstrated in the video below, which was uploaded to the OnePlus forum by billy_boolean, the button begins to suffer when the device is gripped in one hand. When held with two, it won’t register presses at all.

To confirm this wasn’t an issue with this specific handset, I did the same experiment with our OnePlus 2 review unit. While ours appears to work fine in one hand if it’s not gripped too tightly, it won’t work when held in two.

Given the OnePlus 2 has a metal frame and this issue only occurs when the phone is held in a certain way, it seems like this is a grounding issue, which means a software update isn’t going to fix it.

Fortunately, it’s not that severe. You have to grip the device relatively tightly with two hands to produce this issue, and no one really holds their phone like that. The problem can also be eliminated by using a case (so long as it’s not made of metal).

Nevertheless, this is a complaint OnePlus won’t want to see. Hopefully it can be fixed somehow, but I get the feeling this will be like the OnePlus One’s touchscreen problem, which seemed to take forever to solve.

• SourceOnePlus Forum