Nexus 5 to Oneplus 5
26 Jun 2017I’ve moved from Nexus 5 to One Plus 5. OP5 was shipped to me today and I have used N5 for the past 3.5 years.
I have followed technology closely since the beginning of Android phones. My first decent phone was an LG phone called Optimus One. It was one of the first well recieved models with a then active user/developer base with a lot of experiments. I learnt the basics of Android, rooting and everthing I had to learn to make my life easier using a smartphone. My motto being “To use a smartphone to it’s full extent the user has to be smarter”. I pursued to customize my phone to no end, rooting, flashing, bricking, repairing and redoing. I was an avid follower of Cyanogen’s and Paranoid Android’s developments. At the height of my tweaks was a custom ROM which made the notification bar invisible and 2 pixels tall but still respond to the swipe down gesture as if it was still there, all to make room by a few tens of pixels and less distraction. Android has come up with this feature in their Lollipop release I think. This was during the days of froyo and gingerbread when Android was still evolving.
There was no reason for me to upgrade my phone until an accident befell my phone and it damaged the motherboard’s interface with the screen. I still have the phone after 4 years, that switches on and can receive and respond to calls with all it’s capabilities intact except for it’s screen which stares me with a blank and a disappointed reflection of mine. I had to move on and Nexus 5 was the latest and greatest piece of hardware at the time. I chose it despite it’s price (it is not cheap by any standards of mine. While optimus was 10k, N5 is 32k). I knew I will use it to the fullest. Yet the new UX features were bearable enough that my brain wouldn’t go into a fit of rage over how appaling an app’s font size choice is. I was a satisfied user with only a few tweaks on the rooted device like the screen density and such. Most (read, almost all) of the gripes of Android platform were fixable, thanks to a software called xposed and it’s dependent called GravityBox. Like I said I was a happy man.
The phone started to show its wear and tear after 2 years of usage. The switch off button started to give up, the camera had a grey translucent botch at the middle of the screen, the screen guards scratches were very visible, I felt my acclimatization to it’s slowness (it is slow even now but not unbearable by any standard). I decided to stop updating apps and OS fully resigning to the feeling that I’m contended and there’s nothing more I can do to better my phone. And that is how I used my N5 for the next 1.5 years. Finding interesting tweaks every couple of months, like pie controls, background youtube, adblock, simulating paid subscriptions etc., and adding them to the roster. Customized to the extent that it is completely unusable by anyone but me - like a custom VIM environment where all the shortcuts have been changed.
New phones came and went. Some friend would buy it, or I would stumble into a digital store and see it. New operating systems were released and the updates were all incremental and risk-free. None of them make my eyes go wide in surprise. I have thought of all of them and whatever is useful would already be in the phone I have. I was neither the teenager who craved for the new car model nor the middle aged who uses her phone ignorant of the intimacy between the used and the user.
Only two phones made me want to part from N5. Nexus 5X and the Google Pixel. Both were promises of stock android and the latest and greatest hardware. I definitely felt the need to move on from N5 because of the finger print scanner. There is no way N5 can emulate that without affecting the battery performance. While 5X was quite similar to N5 I had no reason to shed another 35k for the same phone (not to mention the months of custom shortcuts that I built into N5 that I would lose). Google Pixel on the other hand is asking me too much. 55k is the equivalent of 5 decent phones and I have never imagined myself desperate to spend 50k on anything so tiny as a phone. My scooter costs 60k for a perspective.
Oneplus was a company that shook the news with its first release and I couldn’t give a damn about their second phone. I knew that Oneplus 3 (and 3T) are great successes. Two of my best friends use them. More than anything, I was impressed by the Oxygen OS. It had the right tweaks that keeps UX miles ahead of the stock version. And the only reason I was tempted to buy Oneplus 5 is - get this - my brother (going to college soon) refused to buy any phone because he wants to use my. He knows my N5 and can use it with all its tweaks as better as me. He didn’t want to start with a low end product and showed complete confindence in N5 that it shall tick for another 2 years, at least.
Naturally the only choice I had was to buy something that doesn’t suck. Of all the phones IMO OP5 is the only phone in India that doesn’t suck. It’s doesn’t suck that it’s price is under 40k, it doesn’t suck with its OS and performance, it doesn’t suck with it’s camera either. My usage with the phone so far has just been that. Not Sucking.
I remembered the time when I was unboxing my Nexus5 and the glee I had seeing it for the first time. Yes, I was younger but the feeling of owning it was something out of the world. The improvement from a decent to Optimus One to latest and greatest Nexus 5 was overwhelming in everyway I could imagine.
I think that feeling is largly because of three things. 1) The phone size: Holding a N5 felt like holding the future 2) The screen: Nothing beats that feeling of seeing a 1080p screen after you’ve seen a tiny 480p screen all your life. 3) The OS: Something that is not laggy and which was paid attention to for a user is heartening.
But now, despite its accliam to be the fastest phone (on par with Apple, Samsung and Pixel), I didn’t expect anything that would overwhelm me. I am not wrong. Nothing is revolutionary. Just a bigger screen (which I’m still getting used to) and a better one (I read books on my phone and OLED means better black backgrounds for me). I don’t need to take the pains of customizing a phone to make the apps open 10 seconds faster than otherwise. To be frank, though, the amount of apps this phone can keep in RAM is quite surreal. 8GB is a big number and OP5 uses it well.
I guess I don’t need to talk about the benefits of a good battery, so I won’t talk about it’s battery much. I’d like to say I’ve been listening to soundcloud for the past one hour and the battery went down by like 8%. I guess the dash charging is cool.
The camera on the other hand, I have come to think of it as a really nice way to store memories, and that’s all. The whole camera experience is fast and the color reproduction is accurate enough. There is weird portrait mode which is probably the only justification for having 2 cameras. On a scale of “this sucks” to an “I don’t see a difference with this feature”, I rated it as “I couldn’t care enough about it”. On the other hand one thing that did raise my eyebrow is the manual (aka Pro) mode which lets the user set the focus, white balance, exposure and others that I didn’t play with yet. It definitely brings out the casual photographer who wants to learn more. I recollect the days when I had to go into the depths of XDAdevelopers to find that one app that could output raw images with a scrollable focus and exposure. IMO this is a piece of software that every smartphone user deserves. Due to a lot of software limitations such an app was not avaliable even in the app store. Even the one which did give half of the good features costed like crazy. It sucks hard that there is Optical Image Stabilizing without which videos would become puke inducing (go to youtube and see OP5 4k video output and you’ll understand). However due to it’s hardware it has Electronic Image Stabilization which works okay (but is quite a bad substitute).
What is actually overwhelming using this phone is the audio output. I have heard iPhone with crystal clear audio and envied that N5’s speakers were maybe half as good as they high end ones were. The bottom mono speaker on this gave me that output. A pin drop, actually sounds like a pin drop and not some sound from speakers that is try to resemble a pin drop. I was quite surprised that a mono unit can do such a good job. But I really want to talk about the audio from the speakers. In one word, it is - STUNNING - in its literal sense. I was quite stunned at how good my (so called med-high end) ear phones sounded. For a small background I use Sony XBR50 model which is known for its sweet bass output. I have used them almost everyday since a couple of years and they always sounded better than many of my friends’ Sennheisers and Philips. To make it clear, I am an audiophile and I take my listening skills very sincerely. The moment I put my ‘old’ earphones and started a familiar song, it felt new. I could hear the strings like they really were being plucked in the room. I found a level of awesomeness that I just didn’t know and that which a Nexus phone never deliverd. I’m now talking about my own earphones stunning me in my tracks with their clarity. The bottom line is, as an audiophile I AM BLOWN AWAY BY HOW GOOD THE EARPHONES SOUND. Too bad they don’t ship decent earphones in the box. In fact they don’t ship any earphones in the box.
It’s not water resistant, but I can’t comprehend how anyone even thinks that electronics and water go well. If there’s a pool I don’t go dipping with my phone in my pockets. But yeah I have to be more careful, like I always was.
Overall, my brother stole my Nexus 5 so I didn’t have a choice but to buy the current best phone out there.