How to avoid the £1,000 phone: The OnePlus 5 is as good as Google Pixel and the iPhone but is half the price
OnePlus 5
£449, oneplus.net
There’s a mesmerising clip of then-Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer overcome with mirth in 2007 as he describes the first iPhone as ‘the most expensive phone in the world’.
It’s one of those classic, 24-carat errors – like the moment Gerald Ratner said an item of his own jewellery was ‘crap’. Over the next ten years, the iPhone shifted more than a billion units, becoming arguably the most successful product in human history.
But one of the cleverest bits of Apple’s magic slab wasn’t the phone – it was the way we all paid for it, with the alarmingly vast price broken down into monthly payments. Ten years on, we’re still doing it – and the phones are now edging inexorably towards the thousand-pound mark.
Looks-wise there’s not a massive difference between the last OnePlus 3T and the 5
Chinese firm OnePlus swims against the tide – with high-end phones for a price that doesn’t make you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach by a horse.
The new OnePlus 5 is pricier than its predecessors, at £449. But it’s still far, far cheaper than the iPhones 7 and Samsung S8 – and offers a serious amount of geek appeal.
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Basically, if you’re the sort of stick-in-the-mud who delights in buying supermarket own-brand because ‘it’s just the same as the branded stuff’, you’re going to love this.
Looks-wise there’s not a massive difference between the last OnePlus 3T and the 5 (there’s no 4, as the number’s bad luck in China), but the phone’s slim, sleek and ludicrously fast, thanks to 8GB of RAM under the bonnet. And the 5.7in HD screen is sharp and colourful.
The camera’s genuinely great, with dual lenses creating colourful, vibrant snaps as good as iPhone or Google’s Pixel – and you can top up the battery at speed courtesy of ‘Dash Charge’, which will half-fill your phone in 30 minutes.
But by far the best bit is how you can chew people’s ears off endlessly about how good value it is. Basically it’s like being one of those bores who rattles on about Apple all day long – but on the cheap…
