Everything You Need To Know About The OnePlus Open
Move over Samsung Galaxy Fold 5, and squidge up Google Pixel Fold – there’s another contender in the red-hot foldable market, and it has all the makings of a market leader. The OnePlus Open is OnePlus’s very first foray into the foldable market, and it’s worth the wait. With an excellent hinge design and a giant screen when you fold it out to all its double-sized glory, it shows the world why foldables are tipped as the future of smartphones.
It does the basics too – the camera takes great, sharp images, even if it’s no iPhone or Google Pixel. And multi-tasking between apps (as one can easily do in a foldable phone), it has a smooth performance and a solid battery life that can easily last a full day.
Intrigued about the newest foldable on the block? Read on for the lowdown on the OnePlus Open.
Camera
Even the slickest foldable will struggle finding an audience if it takes bad photos, so it’s expected news that the Open’s cameras are solid. There’s a Sony sensor employed as the main 48MP camera, and there’s also a 64MP telephoto camera with OIS (that will allow 3x optical and 6x lossless in-sensor zoom, as well as up to 120x Ultra Res Zoom) and a 48MP ultrawide sensor. For selfie cameras, you’ve for a 20MP camera for the internal panel, and a 32MP one on the front. That’s a solid line up, made all the better for the software that processes the images into professional-looking shots.
Battery performance
Battery life can be a bugbear of foldables, given what it takes to power a double-sized screen. But this is an area in which the Open performs best. It has a 4,805mAh battery, which is among the largest in a foldable, and it’s made better by the energy-conserving processor that means it easily lasts for a full day of reasonable use. When the battery does deplete, it charges back up quick-smart – expect to go to 100% in just 40 minutes with the charger that’s provided. It doesn’t offer wireless charging, but that’s a small niggle in otherwise great battery and charging achievements.
Design and display
There’s plenty to like about OnePlus Open’s design. It’s thinner and lighter than its competitors while also bigger, which already means it’s market leading on that front (but those with diminutive hands may find they aren’t able to operate this with only one hand). The hinge is a smart bit of engineering. Using a mix of titanium alloy, carbon fibre, cobalt alloy, and zirconium metals, the hinge is stronger than stainless steel while also lighter, and it all leads to a smooth opening and closing motion, with a shallow crease that adds to the usability of foldables. It’s durable too, having been tested to last 1,000,000 folds.
The inside screen is a 7.82” AMOLED panel with a 12Hz refresh rate and a whopping 2,800 nits of brightness – significantly more than the Google Pixel 8 Pro (2400 nits) and the iPhone 15 (2000 nits). That makes it suitable for a variety of uses, from gaming to texting in bright daylight.
One major downside is that it’s not very waterproof or dustproof, so it’s a phone that needs extra care. In the UK, it only comes in one colour: a modern, moody green entitled Emerald Dusk.
Tech spec
The Open is powered by well-equipped tech that’s already found in OnePlus’s flagship phone, the 11. It has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, 16GB of RAM and 512MB of storage (no other size options are available). The operating system is the Oxygen OS, which leaves a bit to be desired, but with four years of updates and five years of security patches bundled in, it’s sure to improve in months to come. In all, the good tech leads to a smooth experience, even when you test out its three-apps-at-a-time maximum.
Price and availability
The OnePlus Open is priced at £1,599.00, making it slightly cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and the Google Pixel Fold. It’s available to buy now.
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