‘Never settle’ goes the OnePlus tagline and in many ways, OnePlus Open lives up to it and you can feel this as soon as you open the box. First, you get a charging brick in the box and that too an 80W SUPERVOOC power brick (low voltage charging at 67W). These days, that’s gold! OnePlus’ debut foldable phone does a good job and it will only make the market more competitive.

The design works

The camera module is large and may not be everyone’s cup of tea. It does make for a helpful little ledge to rest your fingers on but it’s a good camera, especially for a foldable phone. There are five cameras — three on the back and then one selfie for each screen. Except for making video calls, most of the time you’re going to be using the main cameras with the cover screen as a viewfinder.

The phone unfolds fully flat as you would expect. It’s slightly lighter than Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5, and thinner, we’re talking 5.8 mm when it’s unfolded or 11.7mm when it’s folded. The back has a vegan leather material (on the Voyager Black edition) which I am not a big fan of.

Even under direct sunlight, it's easy to read the main display

There is a tougher glass, including a ceramic guard for the cover screen but this shouldn’t be confused with Apple’s ceramic shield. The main screen uses Ultra Thin Glass layer. I appreciate that OnePlus has added an anti-reflective coating for the main screen, which is very helpful if you are watching videos and movies on this big screen because the roughly square aspect ratio means you’re going to get some black bars when videos play. Working against all folding phone (main) screens (and not just that of OnePlus Open) is the amount of fingerprint it can collect.

On the side is the alert slider, which is always helpful, and I hope OnePlus continues to have it. The power button doubles as a fingerprint reader plus, of course, there is facial unlocking.

There is a triple speaker setup designed for spatial audio and it adapts based on what orientation you’re using it and these sound pretty good but at high volumes, I prefer the Galaxy Z Fold5.

You want to know about the crease, which is there on the Z Fold5 as well as on OnePlus Open. On the latter, it’s slightly less but it’s a matter of time before Samsung fixes that problem. As far as flexibility goes, it’s the same as what Samsung offers. It feels good in the hand and it closes with a satisfying sound.

Another aspect of the phone I like is the cover screen. OnePlus Open has gone with a normal 20:9 aspect ratio, which is the same as most traditional smartphones. I am sure users will be using the cover screen most of the time and only when required, will they unfold the phone to use a couple of apps side by side or maybe read an article or a book or play a game.

The cover screen (Super Fluid AMOLED) is 6.31 inches with 10 to 120Hz dynamic refresh rate. And opening the phone up, we get a 7.82-inch tablet-like screen. This is a slightly higher-end screen. It’s Flexi-fluid AMOLED with LTPO 3.0 and can go from 1Hz to 120Hz and there is a touch response rate of 240Hz. Plus, you get Dolby Vision HDR and it is very bright; we’re talking 1,400 nits with regular use and up to 2,800 nits outdoor peak brightness. Although after a few minutes it will start to dim but that brightness comes in handy when looking at photos in your gallery.

When the phone is shut, there is no gap between the two halves

Snappy performance

Running the show is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Though phones with 8 Gen 3 are coming in a few weeks but this remains a nimble processor. As one would expect, this is incredibly fast and it runs every game as flawlessly as possible on Android. But I don’t see serious gamers taking to foldable phones at the moment to play for hours.

For the first foldable phone from OnePlus, it does a good job in the software department. There is a feature called Open Canvas, which takes the regular split-screen view mode to the next level. You can still have two apps side by side with a third floating window on top but in Open Canvas you’ve got your main active window front and centre which can be moved around and resized so you can create a sort of workspace and then quickly switch between them. Giving the phone a feel of the desktop is the taskbar but that’s not exclusive to OnePlus Open. When you close the phone, the app that you were working on transfers to the cover screen, which is a neat feature.

OnePlus is promising at least four generations of Android OS upgrades and five years of security updates from the launch date. The phone ships with OxygenOS 13.2 based on Android 13.

We haven’t spoken about the camera. There is a 48MP main camera, a 48MP ultra-wide camera and a 64MP telephoto, which is surprisingly good. The main front camera captures at 20MP (primary display) while the front camera (cover screen) captures at 32MP. OnePlus has once again partnered with Hasselblad, so the colour science is slightly different.

Overall, the camera colours are natural, there is good dynamic range and I’m really impressed with the zoom. Under low-light conditions, you may struggle a bit with moving objects.

When shut, the cover screen is of a similar size as that of any conventional smartphone

Should you buy it?

Impressive is the battery. You get a 4,805mAh battery. Like on the Fold5, you will get a day out of it and maybe come away with 20 per cent battery left. What I miss is stylus support, which helps with productivity tools. Second, the absence of wireless charging and that’s a miss for an expensive phone. Apart from that, it’s a great start for OnePlus and its foldable phone journey. What’s now required is a drop in pricing across all foldables to make it easily accessible. OnePlus Open has joined the foldable phone evolution spectrum at the right moment.

At a glance

Device: OnePlus Open

Price: Rs 139,999 (16 GB RAM + 512 GB storage)

High notes

Light and slim

The crease can hardly be seen on the main screen

Good ratio for the cover screen

Excellent set of cameras

Muffled notes

No wireless charging

No stylus support