Specs at a glance: OnePlus X Screen 5-inch, 1080p AMOLED, Gorilla Glass 3 OS OxygenOS (Android 5.1 Lollipop) CPU Snapdragon 801, 32-bit quad-core Krait 400 CPU running at 2.3GHz RAM 3GB LPDDR3 GPU Qualcomm Adreno 330 Storage 16GB, plus micro SD expansion up to 128GB Networking Dual-band 802.11 Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports Micro USB, headphone jack Camera 13MP f/2.2 rear camera, 8MP f/2.4 selfie camera Size 140mm length, 69mm width, 6.9mm depth Weight 138g Battery 2525mAh Network Bands GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz; WCDMA (EU): bands 1/2/5/8; LTE bands: 1/2/4/5/8/38/40; WCDMA (US): bands 1/3/5/7/8/20; FDD-LTE: bands 1/2/4/5/7/8 Other perks Phase detection autofocus, FM radio Price £199 (€269, $249) for black Onyx version, £269 (€369) for Ceramic version

Until now OnePlus’s strategy has been all about disruption. The OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 were built to show up Samsung and its rivals, offering what they’d charge upwards of £400 for at a significant discount. The OnePlus X is a little different, though. Rather than set out to be a cutting-edge handset, the OnePlus has assembled mid-range components, or those that were high-end just a year ago, to put together what could prove to be the best £200 (€269, $249) phone on the market, and one that's a pocketable size to boot.

The perennial OnePlus question remains, though: how much of it is hype?

Design

Right from the off, the OnePlus X looks a cut above other phones in its price range. The standard version uses a sleek glass back, where the trend for sub-£200 phones is to use glossy plastic that looks a bit like glass. The slightly cheaper Sony Xperia M2 Aqua and Honor 6 are obvious examples. As usual, OnePlus is pushing the limits of what’s possible at the price. The OnePlus X's sides are metal too, not a plastic impersonation. Combined with an iPhone-like 6.9mm thickness, these expensive materials make the phone feel much more luxurious than its price tag might otherwise suggest.

Ever one to milk the exclusivity angle, OnePlus X is also making a ceramic version of the phone—but as it’s limited to 10,000 units, only arch chancellors of the OnePlus fan club are likely to get a look in. A reminder: The OnePlus One sold over a million units, and was only readily available to buy a year after launch. For those that actually want to buy the OnePlus X, the best policy is to forget the ceramic version even exists. OnePlus boasts that the rear plates take 25 days to produce, with a yield rate of just 20 per cent. Even the normal OnePlus X is subject to the company's invite system, which many find infuriating.

Back to reality, the OnePlus X features a tray that lets you pick between using two nano SIMs or one SIM and a microSD card slot. It has 16GB of storage, which is as much as you'd expect from a £200 phone. As with every other part of the OnePlus X, it's actually quite generous.

Coming from using the far more expensive HTC One A9, the OnePlus X doesn't suddenly feel like a drastic drop in build quality. Side-by-side, I preferred the look of the standard "Onyx" glassy OnePlus X to the Ceramic one, which has a more distracting mirror-like finish that suffers even more from fingerprint smudges. The one design oddity is that the OnePlus X uses very subtly-marked, non-lit hardware soft keys, demanding that muscle memory be built up before the phone feels 100 percent intuitive. As with the OnePlus 2, though, you can switch to software keys if you prefer.

Screen

Other than costing £100 less than the OnePlus 2, the main appeal of the OnePlus X is that it's smaller. This is all down to the 5-inch screen, a half-inch less than the other OnePlus phones. It’s a good display, too. The AMOLED panel lets blacks melt into the bezel—something shown off by the wallpaper OnePlus cleverly decided to jam into the demo units. Contrast is great, viewing angles are excellent, and there’s no serious blue shift at any angle. It's highly likely the OnePlus X uses one of the latest generation of Samsung OLED screen panels.

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

OLED pixel density isn't usually as high as LCD counterparts, but spreading 1080p resolution across a 5-inch screen, resulting in a 440 PPI density, makes everything very sharp. Colour reproduction is good, too. Unlike the HTC One A9 and Samsung Galaxy S6, there are no options in the settings menu to tone down the colours to neutral-looking rRGB-like levels for ultimate accuracy, but I don't think it needs it. There's a pleasant degree of oversaturation, so the reds don't look toxic, and greens aren't overly bright.

The big win for OnePlus is squeezing this screen in at just £200. While the 720p LCD Motorola Moto G can be found for significantly under £200 these days, that these two phones are remotely close in price shows what an achievement the OnePlus X really is.

There are some obvious missing elements, though. The OnePlus X does not have a fingerprint scanner. Like the OnePlus 2, it doesn’t have NFC either, barring any buyers from making contactless payments. OnePlus just doesn't appear to think NFC is all that important.

Instead of NFC, the phone launches with a bunch of official cases, including ones made of wood. These are alternatives to the custom back covers available for the OnePlus 2. I tried one of the "real wood" ones. It gives the phone a nice tactile finish, although it's also very tricky to remove.

Software

In this second (and a half) wave of phones, OnePlus does not simply use vanilla Android or the CyanogenMod software it leaned on with the OnePlus One. Instead it has Oxygen UI. This is OnePlus’s custom skin, which at heart is comparable to what Samsung and HTC use in their phones. However, its approach is a little different. On the surface the interface is much the same as the Google Now design used in vanilla Android phones. The version we saw hasn’t yet skipped over to Android Marshmallow, though. Right now it's still Android 5.1 Lollipop, using a horizontally scrolling app menu rather than a vertical one.

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams

The benefit of Oxygen UI is that it offers scores of little customisations, all hidden in Settings menus so that they don’t interfere with how the phone feels day-to-day for those not interested in such tweaks. One of the tweaks can be seen in the gallery above: notice how the background to the apps menu is black rather than white, as it would be in a vanilla Android device. Once again, this is clearly done to show off the OnePlus X's deep OLED screen blacks.

Other little software extras include a custom home screen that offers shortcuts to your favourite contacts and apps, in a more static-feeling arrangement than is found on most home screens. New for the OnePlus X, OnePlus also played up its new FM radio app. As appreciative as we are of Radio 4, I don't think this will act as a key OnePlus X selling point.

Specs and performance

While I only had a brief play with the OnePlus X, it's very quick. Loading up apps is nippy and I encountered no obvious lag while flicking through apps. I did stumble over the odd glitch in the camera app, but this is recognised as one of the weaker bits of the Oxygen UI, and should hopefully be fixed soon, particularly as the demo units were all running pre-release software.

One of the most interesting hardware choices is that the OnePlus X uses an old high-end processor rather than a new mid-range one, such as the Snapdragon 617 of the HTC One A9. The Snapdragon 801 was used in many phones from the last generation of devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8. A core improvement we’ve seen in CPUs since then is a switch to 64-bit architecture, now supported natively by Android. The Snapdragon 801's Krait CPU cores are 32-bit, but they're certainly not slow.

I managed to squeeze in a quick Geekbench 3 benchmark of the OnePlus X and it scored 2504 points. That’s comparable with today’s mid-range Snapdragon 600-series chipsets, although there's still a big benefit to the Snapdragon 801: it uses the Adreno 330 GPU, which is much more powerful than the Adreno 405 units seen in Snapdragon's mid-tier CPUs. The reality is that either the Snapdragon 801 or a Snapdragon 617 would serve the OnePlus X just fine, though.