ONEPLUS 2 – LONG-TERM REVIEW
When my colleague Andrew Williams first reviewed the OnePlus 2 last year, he was enamoured with it – and rightly so. OnePlus was selling a smartphone with specs that could rival the flagships of 2015 and, better still, for a lowly price of £239. Purchase was by invitation only, but if you could get your hands on one, the OnePlus 2 was a steal.
A lot has changed since then. You don’t need an invite to buy the OnePlus 2 anymore. And a brief check on the OnePlus UK store tells me that the 16GB £239 version is no longer available. Instead, OnePlus is now selling just the 64GB OnePlus 2, albeit at a discounted £249 (down from the £289 launch price).
I used the OnePlus 2 for about nine months, and only recently traded it out for aSamsung Galaxy S7. This phone was my daily driver and was, for the most part, great. The camera took nice pictures, battery life and storage were never an issue, and the griptape back offered welcome friction to my buttery fingers.
But the halcyon days of 2015 are over, and I now have some serious complaints about the OnePlus 2.
The first issue is charging, and the sheer slowness of it. The OnePlus 2 might use a USB-C connection, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get fast charging. In fact, the OnePlus 2 generally took just north of two hours to charge from empty to full. Charging the Galaxy S7, by comparison, is…well, there’s no comparison. Fast-charging devices are the future, leaving the OnePlus 2 feeling like a bit of a relic.
The second issue is performance, and this is the big one. We’ve received plenty of complaints about the OnePlus 2 from readers, all of which claim that the phone has slowed down significantly since purchase. I can vouch for this. The OnePlus 2 often slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason. Near the end, I was having to reboot the phone at least three or four times a week.
But here at TrustedReviews, we’re all about the actual numbers.
In our original review, the Geekbench 3 score for the OnePlus 2 was 4,460. I recently ran 10 tests on the phone, giving me a new average score of 3,654 – with a low of 2,121. That’s not great, but it’s not a huge drop either. In any case, this probably isn’t the real root of OnePlus 2 performance problems.
That’s because once an app is running on the OnePlus 2, it tends to work just fine. But switching between apps, loading apps, and other multi-tasking functions often – and inexplicably – make the device unusable.
What’s telling in this regard is how much the RAM write speed has dropped since our original review. Back in 2015, tests showed that the OnePlus 2 managed an 8,000MB/s write speed. But now the average (over 10 tests) has dropped to 4,494MB/s – that’s with a high of 5,061MB/s, and a low of 1,223MB/s.
The storage read and write speeds are similarly concerning. The original storage write speed for the OnePlus 2 was 125MB/s. It’s not 98MB/s. The original storage read speed for the OnePlus 2 was 234MB/s. It’s now 184MB/s. Yuck.
To make matters worse, the OnePlus 2 was marketed as the ‘2016 flagship killer’. But as is evident by the performance drop, that’s simply not true. The last 12 months have brought us a smorgasbord of powerhouse flagships – like the Nexus 6P, the Samsung Galaxy S7, and the HTC 10 – all of which run rings around the ailing OnePlus 2.
To be fair, OnePlus tells us that it is trying to address these issues with software updates, but a quick search online shows that customers are still experiencing issues, and have been for a while.
ONEPLUS 2 – LONG-TERM VERDICT
The OnePlus 2 is a phone that looks like good value for money on paper, but it’s not the 2016 flagship killer it was marketed as. If you need a cheap phone, the OnePlus 2 isn’t a bad choice. But if you have the extra money to spare, I’d recommend grabbing an actual 2016 flagship instead. Hopefully the company’s rumoured OnePlus 3 will fare better when/if it arrives later this year.
Buy Now: OnePlus 2 at Amazon.co.uk from £249 | Amazon.com from $299
You can check out our full OnePlus 2 review below.
WHAT IS THE ONEPLUS 2?
Just like the OnePlus One, the OnePlus Two hits the bullseye. It offers a slick build and a spec-list that matches most of the far pricier high-end devices, like the Samsung Galaxy S6. Oh, and it only costs £239.
Yet, it's not perfect. You still have to battle with the annoying invite system and even though the phone has been out a few months you can't just go onto the website and buy one. It lacks NFC too, which isn't ideal if you want to take advantage of Android Pay.
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