So, I’ve been using the OnePlus Open for a few weeks now, and I like it enough to suggest it as a pick in our annual list, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. I recommend it because its overall balance of hardware, features, and options are a great mix.
So, I want to talk about some of the things I’ve learned over the past few weeks. I’m going talk both about the quirks and such that I’ve hit and the things I’ve really been pleased with when using the device.
OnePlus Open Main Screen
Desktop mode wipes the home screen when using the device in “Drawer” mode.
The OnePlus Open offers two home screen modes you can choose from. There is the “Standard” mode – where all the icons for all the apps you have basically land on the Home Screen when you install them, and you can group them in folders or move them between screens as you like.
They also offer an alternate mode called “Drawer” mode that uses an app drawer as the repository for all the icons for installed apps. This is closer to how Samsung does it, where you see the “Drawer” when you swipe up from the taskbar. From this drawer, you can drag the icons for the things you use commonly to your Home Screen, meaning you don’t have to hide the rest of the icons on other screens or in folders. I like the “Drawer” mode on the OnePlus Open, but I found a minor quirk or glitch. When I tried to utilize the “Desktop” mode (kind of like desktop modes offered on Samsung and Motorola devices) and then switched back, it seemed that it lost my Home Screen icons and arrangements (including widgets). All my apps were still in the drawer – that was fine – but I had to re-drag what I wanted back to my Home screen all over again. That was a nuisance.
I suspect many people won’t even try to use “Desktop” mode because it is a developer feature (you must first enable developer features in Android). Still, I found the lack of continuity disappointing.
So, speaking of a Desktop mode…
Let me backtrack a bit and explain what I mean when I say Desktop Mode for those that aren’t familiar. “Desktop Mode” is a mode where your device, when hooked to a monitor (or sometimes even on the big inside screen or a tablet screen), can display things as if you had a desktop – like you would on a traditional desktop. Apps usually run in freeform (or semi-freeform) windows instead of taking up the whole screen (but that’s not always the case). For most people, this lets you use a full monitor, mouse, and keyboard while still using the power and apps on your device. It’s a decent compromise when you want to get more work done and want the screen real estate to do it.
Historically, OnePlus usually had a rudimentary desktop mode, kind of like Motorola or Samsung, but a little more basic. It’s still hidden in the Developer Mode options, but it’s basically broken in Android 13. This isn’t OnePlus’ fault; others have found a way to work around it, but OnePlus hasn’t. I’m hoping it is repaired when they update their OS to an Android 14-based OS, but we wait for now because it isn’t usable in its current state.
The Kindle App for Android
The Kindle app doesn’t handle the screen orientation as I think it should.
So let me start by saying I’ll discuss the Kindle app here, but what I’m going to say can apply to several different apps and how they operate on this device. I mentioned this in my previous article about first impressions a couple of weeks ago, but I find it annoying, so that I will give an overview again. On this device, when you open the inside screen, by default, the device and apps behave as if that is “portrait” mode, and rotating the device 90 degrees puts you into landscape mode.
The problem with this is that the aspect ratio of the OnePlus Open is almost square. If you hold it either way, it could effectively be portrait or landscape. There should be no reason to rotate the device to be in landscape mode. On the Pixel Fold, you are in landscape mode by default. You are in portrait mode by default on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. In the OnePlus Open, you are also in portrait mode by default, but why is that necessary? Why can’t that be optional? This manifests on the Kindle app as unable to present two columns of text UNLESS you rotate it into landscape mode.
I could say that Amazon should fix this app to allow for the multi-column mode in either portrait or landscape, but I think a solution that would be more broad and applicable to other apps would be an OS-level switch for each app to indicate which mode it should use when it’s launched, regardless of device orientation. If that was possible, it could “switch” to the other mode when you DID rotate the device. That would mean you wouldn’t need to rotate the device for some apps and not for others. Games commonly switch automatically to landscape when launched. This then requires you to rotate the device to play the game. Again, on the OnePlus Open, this shouldn’t be necessary because the aspect ratio is nearly square. If they implemented what I’m asking for, it would eliminate this need to rotate the device except when you wanted to hold it that way.
As a side note – you probably wouldn’t want to do this on Samsung Z Fold devices because the aspect ratio isn’t square, but on the OnePlus Open, why not? It really would help people like me.
Picture this – A little good, a little bad…
I want to talk about the cameras and the camera app a bit. The OnePlus Open has some of the best camera hardware on any phone out there. It beats most other foldables and non-foldables on the market regarding raw camera specs. It has the potential to take amazing pictures, but there’s a bit of a caveat. You must learn to use the camera app, and that app isn’t the most intuitive thing on the planet. You must manually tweak some settings to get the best pictures.
The big players in this space, Apple, Samsung, and Google, all have better AI, in my opinion, in their “automatic” modes. If you do nothing except point and shoot, then those devices will give you more consistent results and possibly more desirable results (depending on your color saturation and night exposure preferences). But if you can put the time into learning it, you can tweak the settings in the pro mode on the camera app to do just about anything. There are a few YouTube videos out there in the world discussing this. Admittedly, I have not done enough of this yet, but my results have been pretty good despite my limitations. So, the potential is definitely there. I’d like to see OnePlus improve the camera app more for novice or amateur photographers. Make better choices by default and use more logic and processing, especially at night.
One more camera note – the delay when taking night shots is so long that it’s hard to hold still long enough to get a great shot unless you have it on a tripod and/or your subjects aren’t moving. All the competition does a better job with this, so it’s doable, but it needs the software to handle this type of exposure better than it currently does.
But again, overall, the picture quality I am getting is still reasonably good and is excellent in daytime shots. It also does a great job with portrait-mode type shots, but you must try things out and learn what you can to make good choices and get the best pictures out of the impressive hardware on this device.
Here are a few examples that compare the iPhone 14 Pro Max (on the left) and the OnePlus Open (on the right).
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| Christmas Tree taken with iPhone 14 Pro Max | Christmas Tree taken with OnePlus Open |
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| Period Dress taken with the iPhone 14 Pro Max | Period Dress taken with the OnePlus Open |
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| Period Outpost taken with the iPhone 14 Pro Max | Period Outpost taken with the OnePlus Open |
Dang, this thing is fast and smooth
I can’t say enough about how fast the OnePlus Open charges when you use the charger it shipped with. It’s blazingly fast. But the price is that they didn’t include conductive charging (often incorrectly referred to as “wireless” charging). That means it can’t use the charging plate in your car; for example – you must plug it into a USB port to get a charge.
Beyond the charging, this device’s day-to-day operation and use is also speedy. It makes the most of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset at its core. I suspect that part of the reason for its speed is that they also included 16 GB of RAM in the device – that’s more than most of its competition. This also means that its multitasking is also swift and smooth. But I have to say that multitasking is also smooth because the Open Canvas approach they have toward multitasking makes it more intuitive to use than you’ll find in most of its competition. You drag and drop apps into the mix (up to three total), and they sit side-by-side with just a little of the next app overshowing, so to change over to an app, you need only tap on the part you can see, and it jumps into the frame (if it was mostly out of frame before). And these can be split onto the main screen or take up a full screen (almost) by themselves. It’s really, really, flexible and easy to use. You can save these as “sets” on your Home Screen. Very nice.
It’s the little things…
There are a couple more cool things I wanted to call out. For one, this device includes an IR blaster, which we haven’t seen regularly in phones in a while, but I always liked it when we had it as a feature. This allows you to use software (use the basic one that came on the OnePlus or get something from the Google Play store) to control things like your TV or your set-top boxes, DVD players – whatever you want – as long as it has an IR (infrared) based remote. It’s nice to see this feature make a return, even though they didn’t make a big deal out of it.
Another “little” thing is the OnePlus Open feature, where you can write a symbol on the cover screen when the device is closed and off, and it will operate a function. Other devices do this by tapping the back button to tapping a dim icon on the screen while the device has an always-on display. This is more flexible than that. There are several “symbols” you can draw to do various things. You can draw the letter “o,” and that will open the camera. You can draw the letter “v,” and that will turn the flashlight on or off. There are additional controls for managing your music, and you can program a few more to launch other apps. It’s an excellent and exciting use of gestures on an “off” screen. I thought it would be gimmicky, and in some ways, it is, but I also find myself using it more and more. It’s much more practical than I expected.
So what else do I want?
I would like to see more spit and polish on the OS. I find the settings menus to be a little bit of a confusing mess. Everything is there, but it’s not always in a logical place. For example, the desktop settings (the home screen settings) are spread across multiple main menus, and it’s hard to remember which features appear in which desktop menu.
And I want a compatible pen. I saw online that the Oppo Pen, designed for the Oppo Find N3, is also compatible with this device. That makes sense since the OnePlus Open is the North American version of the Oppo Find N3 (which is primarily sold in Asian markets). The problem is that the pen is difficult to find in the North American marketplace. It would be best not to confuse the Oppo Pen for the Find N3 with the Oppo Pencil for its tablets – they’re different. Some third-party products claim to be compatible as well, but they don’t seem to work quite as well. Therefore, I hope that OnePlus will release it themselves and make it much more widely available here. This phone seems to be showing up on a lot of influencers’ “top of the year” lists and is proving to be more popular than I think many of us expected, so it seems reasonable to hope the pen will eventually show up here as well.
OnePlus, are you listening?
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The post One Plus Open – A Few Weeks In… appeared first on iTechGear.org.