Recently, I’ve been getting into foldable smartphones. There are currently three big players in the North American market: Samsung with its Galaxy Z Fold series, Google with the Pixel Fold, and now OnePlus with the Open. I have all of these now in my possession, and In the near future, I’ll be talking about how all three compare, along with another comparison, but for now, I wanted to talk about some first impressions of the one I most recently obtained, the OnePlus Open.
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OnePlus Open
A lot of people have been reviewing this device lately, and I’ve been hearing a lot of superlatives surrounding it. People are calling it “the best folding phone ever.” Is it? I will spoil the surprise by saying it’s a great phone, but not without a few compromises, some of which I’ve read in other places (or seen in YouTube reviews) and others I haven’t heard people talk much about. I’m going to tell you now that I won’t be spouting a lot of specs in this overview – that’s not the point of this. The point is to focus on my first impressions as I start using this device and maybe compare it to other devices I’ve used. So, that said, let’s get into it.
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Samsung Fold 4, OnePlus Open & Google Pixel Fold
First, you’ll hear from many people that the build quality is excellent and that OnePlus got the hardware aspects of this phone right. I would agree. The phone is big, don’t get me wrong, it is a little smaller in length and width than an iPhone 14 Pro Max (but a little thicker). It is a bit wider than the Samsung Galaxy Fold 4, but about the same height, but much thinner than the Galaxy Fold series. Weight-wise, it’s similar to an iPhone 14 Pro Max but much lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Fold or the Google Pixel Fold. The materials are very nice, and the phone feels very solid. Something that everyone mentioned that I agree with is that the way it opens up, with a satisfying “snap” at the end, is really lovely. For its size, it’s really not too heavy, especially when you compare it to its competition, and given that folding phones tend to be bigger/heavier in general, this is a big deal.
The other big thing about it physically is that when it is open, the crease is barely noticeable except under specific lighting. You don’t feel it with your finger, either. With the Galaxy and Pixel devices, I notice the crease visually and as I run my finger across them, but you get used to it. With the OnePlus Open, I don’t notice it. I don’t mean you “get used to it”. I mean, you really don’t see it. It’s a delightful surprise and one that its competition needs to pay attention to. I believe this is the level of seamlessness they all need to aspire to.
What IS noticeable, however, is the huge camera bump. It houses the Hasselblad camera array. I’m not going to drive into the specs here, but needless to say, it’s among the best, if not THE BEST, camera setup on a foldable in North America. It’s very impressive hardware, but it IS a significant bump on the back of the phone. It’s the thing you’ll either hate forever or learn to ignore. For me, I am getting used to it being there. I haven’t done any aggressive camera comparisons yet, but everything I’m reading and seeing seems to imply the camera system is good and that it will be “worth it” to put up with the bump. Just below it is where my hand rests when holding the phone, and it’s balanced well enough there, so it’s not a massive problem for me, but it doesn’t balance as well sitting flat on the desk as I’d like, but I can say that about all phones with camera bumps if I’m being honest with myself.
Hardware Features
On the subject of the phone’s hardware, a lot of other bloggers have commented that they like the fact that this device doesn’t have big bezels, unlike something like the Pixel Fold. That said, I don’t mind bezels, especially on tablet devices. It gives me somewhere to hold onto. I don’t understand all the complaints against them. So that said, I’m sensitive to how I will hold this thing without noticeable bezels and not accidentally trigger stuff on the screen. So I need a good way to hold this. The good news for me is that the OnePlus Open has flat edges (as opposed to the rounded edges on the Pixel Fold and the Galaxy Z Fold 4. I find it a lot easier to hold without accidentally triggering something on the screen – so it’s a good deal!
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OnePlus Open
There is also an exciting feature on this device – it has a slider switch that’s used to turn off the audio on notifications – I liked this on my iPhones (although it’s a toggle there), and I appreciate it here! On another note about the buttons/sliders/etc. on this device: Several bloggers have complained about the placement of the power/fingerprint button and the volume rockers. They are placed relatively high on the right side of the device. I don’t mind this, and it keeps me from accidentally hitting them. So it’s all a matter of preference and learning in your head where they are, in my opinion.
Let’s talk about the battery and charging for a moment. This phone will charge at up to 67 watts (wired). It charges very, very quickly when using the supplied charger and plugging it in. For those of you who like wireless charging (which isn’t wireless, it’s conductive), then this phone will be disappointing since it doesn’t offer that. Some bloggers say that isn’t a big deal because it has to suck fast wired charging, and others complain that a “premium” device, in this day and age, should have it. I agree it should have it, but I’m not heavily dependent on the feature and don’t mind that it doesn’t have it. It charges fast when plugged in and that’s good enough for me, but your mileage may vary!
And continuing about the battery – so far, battery life seems good to me – at least on par with its competition, if not a little better, but it doesn’t disappoint. I get through the whole day on a charge. We will see how it does once the device is more broken in, but so far, it’s so good!
Setting up the phone itself was interesting. The OnePlus setup process, like many, gets you on the network first by adding a SIM card and/or connecting to a WiFi network). When that is done, they ask if you want to transfer from another device. If you answer “yes,” then it asks you to grab a cable and connect your old phone to the Open. It then asks you some questions about what you want to transfer, and away you go. Overall, it does a decent job, but initially, and confusingly, it will put copies of everything in the app drawer AND on your home screen(s). You can remove those shortcuts if you don’t want them, but it would be nice if it had asked me if I wanted that first. You can change it in the phone settings, but not until you’ve first gone through that setup. It’s only a minor annoyance, though.
One note on the home screen and setting up your icons and all that – OnePlus only offers you one grid size, unlike other devices, and that’s a little limiting for those of us who want to put more icons on our home screen. I’m not sure why they have this limitation, but I hope they increase the choices in future updates.
A Quick Sidestep
At this point, I want to sidestep a little. On our weekly podcast, I mentioned that the OnePlus Open has some hidden, unwanted (by me) apps from Meta (Facebook). If you aren’t using any apps from Meta (like Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp), they can be removed using Android Development tools (specifically ADB), but it’s a nuisance. At a minimum, though, you should be able to go into your settings, and the Apps area, App Management, Show System, and see them and disable them. Again, this is only if you aren’t using any apps from Meta, and if they annoy you (as they did me). There’s information out on the Internet for what this is all about and how to deal with it, but, as always, don’t do this unless you really understand what you are doing.
Once I got through the setup process and I got the phone laid out the way I like, I started to actually use the apps on this device. The experience is similar to that on other large-format Android devices. Some apps (especially Google apps) behave very well, and some less so (especially social media apps). In my case, most apps behaved as expected, but there were a couple of exceptions that bugged me. The Amazon Kindle app has a mode where you can choose to display things in two columns rather than one. I’m sure this was originally developed for tablets and it works very well on them, but on mid-size devices, like folding phones, the rules are still being figured out so it gets a little weird. In this particular case, you don’t have the option for two columns unless you turn the device sideways (into “landscape” mode. The problem is that on many of these foldables, the aspect ratio is almost square so should it really matter? Even if two columns would display badly, you should give me that option! Amazon Kindle doesn’t. It decides when its available and when not and that’s based on some parameter somewhere that I can’t access or change. So on the Galaxy Z Fold and on the OnePlus Open, I have to turn the device to have dual column mode available. On the Pixel Fold it works as is. It may be that this works because the Pixel device tells the app it’s already in landscape. I suspect that’s what’s happening since I lose the 2-column mode if I turn the Pixel sideways. In any case, I want Amazon to allow it no matter what direction the app is turned in, and let me decide for myself whether or not it’s what I want.
So also in the app appearance category is games. Those often have challenges on these devices. I often rely on the aspect ratio options or display expansion options offered in each device to find what works for each game. For a while, the Pixel Fold had very few choices, so it was hard to make games work well, but those choices have expanded now and all three of these devices have choices for how an app can spread out to take advantage of the real estate. The Open’s choices are unusual in that they offer options to “hide” the camera – although really it doesn’t hide it, it just makes the screen band, in which the camera lives, black and unusable by the app. That works out just fine in most cases.
One more note on resizing/expanding apps: There are several places in the Apps settings and Display setting to do this and it’s a little confusing – that’s true of a lot of the choices OnePlus made about where settings for things live in the Settings menus. Under Displays & Brightness, there is a section for “Full Screen for Apps” that I am not fully understanding yet. Most of it makes sense enough (like the options to “hide” the camera as I just mentioned, but at the bottom of this settings page, there is an option called Full Screen Display. It seems to want you to add apps to it, but I have no idea where that would be done or what this has to do with anything else. I’m sure it’s all in there somewhere, and I just haven’t discovered it yet, but it’s yet another example of the somewhat confusing way the Settings menus are set up on this phone. To me, the menus are non-intuitive, but to other folks, they may make perfect sense. If you’ve run into this or have ideas about how it’s supposed to work, please feel free to leave a comment. I’m sure I’m just missing something that will eventually become clear to me!
Multitasking Made Easy
I did want to touch on one of the big features of this device that everyone is talking about. That’s it’s “Open Canvas” multitasking. A lot of bloggers were commenting on how intuitive it is. I didn’t find it particularly intuitive, but I didn’t find it terrible either. It’s just a little different approach. Once you get over the learning curve (which isn’t that bad), it really is a good and flexible system. It makes me WANT to use multitasking more, because, again, once you learn the approach, it really does makes sense. The multitasking is one of the best features of this phone and is the reason many people will buy it.
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Bottom to Top: Samsung Fold 4, OnePlus Open, Google Pixel Fold
Another fairly big thing for me so far has been a combination of things I already mentioned. The fact that some apps require or force me to use them with the device rotated, annoys me (especially on a basically square screen), but couple that with the fact that you don’t really see the crease much on this device means that I have tried to re-fold the device along the wrong axis a couple of times now. Fortunately, I have not done this aggressively which could have lead to possibly damaging something. So, if you get one of these, take a lesson from my experience here and close the device very gently until you get used to it and stop doing it incorrectly!
There are some things I haven’t looked heavily into yet. I haven’t talked about them much here. And I may look into some of these in the future. But some other topics to consider are the cameras/photography – it’s good but it depends on the conditions (lighting, etc.) and your ability to play/tweak things in the camera’s Pro mode. The camera hardware itself is top notch though. It’s just a matter of learning the tricks of the software to get the shots you want/need.
This phone has a lot of “clever” tricks up its sleeves which kind of make up for some of the challenges of using it. For example, if you take the phone when it it off and draw a “V” on the screen with your finger, you can turn on/off the flashlight. You can turn on/off the camera by drawing the letter “O”. There are other characters/letters that can trigger other apps (it’s actually somewhat programmable). That’s a very clever addition. Another clever thing that used to be on phones but disappeared a few years back that is now on the Open again is the inclusion of an IR blaster (for controlling TVs, etc.) that is in this device. I haven’t spent much time with it yet, but I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Another thing that got my attention is that coming soon to this device will be Android 14/Oxygen OS 14 that should had some more features to the mix including MS Phone Link integration. Most Android devices can connect using this Windows app already, but it’s with a limited set of features. Samsung is a big exception and gets a full feature set – including app streaming. It appears that OnePlus will now have all that for their devices in Oxygen OS 14. So yeah, I’m looking forward to trying that when it’s available.
I really like this device, despite some of its quirks. I’d like to see a better settings menu layout/options, I’d like to see better options/controls for how an app displays and when/how it thinks it’s in portrait vs landscape mode, and things like that. But let me be clear when I say that those things don’t stop me from enjoying using this foldable smartphone.
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OnePlus Open, folded
Conclusion
So yes, these are a few first impressions I have after receiving and setting up this foldable smartphone. And while I don’t agree with the people who say “it’s the best device ever” (I think those people need to get a reality check and stop ignoring the quirks/issues), I do think this is a really, really good device that is on its way to being great if it just gets a few software improvements and tweaks. Either way, it’s definitely worth a look!
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