Ready for round OnePlus 2: A hands-on with a solid phone

SAN FRANCISCO—In a breezy, open-air lobby of a small office building in the city, Bridget Hickey, a representative for Chinese mobile phone company OnePlus, invites a handful of journalists to check out two neatly organized rows of phones on a nearby table. “Basically this is super low-key,” she tells us, adding that a VR demo will be available later this evening to people around the world.

Hickey is right on multiple counts. Not only is the event relaxed and free-form, without any speeches from company officials or slides showing OnePlus statistics, but the company’s new phone itself, called the OnePlus 2 (that’s “two” in numeral form, not spelled out, company representatives informed us), is low-key, quietly offering improvements on the strong showing it made last year without taking any giant or unexpected turns in form or function. The phone looks very much like its predecessor, the OnePlus One (“one” is spelled out here, naturally), and it feels like its predecessor, too. There are some obvious hardware improvements, as well as more incremental software improvements. But there is one big difference from the phone’s debut last year—it’s no longer running Cyanogenmod, opting instead for an in-house OS called Oxygen built on top of Android Lollipop 5.1.

The OnePlus 2 runs on a 64-bit Snapdragon 810 processor with 1.8GHz “Octa-core CPUs” as well as an Adreno 430 GPU. The Snapdragon 810 does have some heat issues, but it's really unavoidable for most companies this generation. We'll have to see how well the OnePlus 2 deals with heat when we have more time with it.

It has added an extra GB of RAM (from 3GB to 4GB), and it retained its whopping 5.5-inch, 1080p display as well as a 13MP camera and 5MP front-facing camera. The new camera supports shooting 4K video, as well. The increased specs also merit a slight bump in battery capacity—the OnePlus 2 has a 3300mAh lithium-ion polymer battery, up from last year’s 3100mAh.

The new phone also comes with space for two different SIM cards to lighten the load of dual-phone carriers. (Although the spec sheet says that the OnePlus 2 will come with GSM and WCDMA support, a representative for the company said that only GSM networks will be supported in the US.) And, the phone relies on a USB Type-C connector for charging.

At first, OnePlus will only be selling 64GB models of its new phone for $389.99 to people with invitations. But the company’s representatives said that a 16GB model is on its way in the coming months, pricing at $329.99. The OnePlus 2 also has a detachable back cover—although all phones ship with the sandstone back that was on the OnePlus One, owners can buy four new flavors for $26.99 a piece.

Ars reviewed the OnePlus One last year and really liked it. So it’s encouraging to see that the specs are just as good, if not better, in most categories of hardware.

The software felt speedy as well, and Oxygen OS comes with some interesting features that merit more time exploring than we had to give during our hands-on. Some of these include off-screen gestures (if you draw an “O” on your sleeping phone’s screen, it will open the camera, for example); customizable color-coded notifications; and a new feature, still in beta, called “Shelf," which basically organizes your most-used apps and contacts, made accessible by swiping right on the screen. Oxygen OS also comes with custom camera, audio tuner, and file manager apps.

OnePlus is setting up nine “experience centers” around the world, two of which will be in the US, so that interested buyers can try the phone out before they buy it. (The two US locations will be in San Francisco and New York.) Invitations start going out August 1. Ars will be getting a review unit soon, so look out for that in the coming months.