There was never any question that phone with specs like this would run well, but the OnePlus 5's performance took even me by surprise. I spent the past week as I always do — using the phone as my daily work multitasking machine, and then mixing things up with shootouts in Afterpulse or agonizing decisions in Telltale Games' Guardians of the Galaxy. Not once did I see the phone flinch, stutter or even drop a frame — it was almost weird how effortlessly the OnePlus 5 seemed to handle everything I threw at it. Based on my experience and the big, big numbers the phone put up in our suite of synthetic benchmarks, I have no doubt that this more expensive version of the OnePlus 5 will be overkill for most people.

Don't get me wrong: Other flagship phones look and feel better, and pack so many exciting-sounding features that I'm surprised their marketing teams can keep up. Few other phones to date have felt this smooth, and hardly any have been able to offer up this level of performance. This, in short, is wild stuff for $540.

OnePlus 5 Galaxy S8 Plus LG G6 Google Pixel XL OnePlus 3T AndEBench Pro 17,456 16,064 10,322 16,164 14,399 3DMark IS Unlimited 40,081 35,626 30,346 29,360 31,691 GFXBench 1080p Manhattan Offscreen (fps) 60 55 42 48 50 CF-Bench 78,935 64,441 29,748 39,918 51,262

The flip side to all this is that the OnePlus 5 actually has a slightly smaller battery than the model it replaces. OnePlus says that the sealed 3,300mAh battery is capable of lasting around 20 percent longer than last year's 3T, but I wasn't able to replicate those claims. That doesn't mean the battery sucks. In our standard rundown test, where we loop an HD video with Wi-Fi on and screen brightness set to half, the OnePlus 5 stuck around for fifteen hours and three minutes — that's better than any other flagship phone I've tested this year, but roughly an hour short of the bar set by the 3T in 2016.

The OP5 fares better in daily use, though: while the OnePlus 3T generally lasted for just over a day on a single charge, the 5 routinely withstood a day and a half of mixed use. It doesn't take much to get that up to two days — the battery saver mode is off by default, after all — but the included Dash charger means you can go a long way on a momentary recharge. When I forgot to plug in the phone overnight, a 15-minute top-up was enough to last me most of a day. Just try (hard) not to lose the cable or the charger, because you'll need both to charge as quickly as possible.

The competition