The first foldable from OnePlus has arrived in the “OnePlus Open.” The $1,700 foldable doesn’t bring the lower price we were expecting, but it has absolutely stellar hardware and a multitasking system that’s unique and powerful.
Launching this week, the OnePlus Open is the brand’s first foldable and the third book-style foldable to join the US market this year. It has a powerful spec sheet with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 16 GB of RAM, and more, but there are two elements I want to focus on in this initial look.
The OnePlus Open is the best foldable hardware
Not to beat around the bush, I really think OnePlus (thanks to Oppo) has nailed foldable hardware to an extent that no other brand has thus far. The hinge is strong, opens completely flat, and is said to be ridiculously durable. OnePlus rates it for 1,000,000 folds, five times as many as the Galaxy Z Fold 5. It’s an insane figure but one I’d readily believe after spending some time with the device.
In use, this hinge and the surrounding hardware just feel drastically better than the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and especially the Google Pixel Fold. Oppo’s first few foldables already felt great, but this design just takes it to new heights. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the display crease, which is practically non-existent. It’s there if you look for it, but the combination of Oppo’s wide-radius hinge and a new matte screen protector really go a long way to hiding the crease both when viewing straight on and even at an angle. Unless you’re in direct sunlight, the crease is almost always invisible.
It was worth the wait.
Beyond the somewhat subjective feeling of using the hardware, there are the cold hard facts of how the hardware here is superior.
That starts with the displays, which are two OLED panels that are just stunning. Each display is capable of hitting a massive 2,800 nits, immediately making these the brightest displays on any smartphone sold in North America. Backing up that brightness – which is indeed impressive, especially for a foldable – is that these displays just look really good. Colors are stunning, and there’s plenty of contrast. This comes as no surprise, though, as OnePlus has excelled here for a while.
Other hardware advantages on paper for OnePlus include features like the Alert Slider, faster charging over USB-C at 67 W, and a good-sized battery at 4,805 mAh.
It’s also a rather thin foldable, coming in at 5.8 mm when unfolded, and still quite thin when folded. That is, as long as you ignore the giant camera bump, which is so thick it honestly makes the device a bit uncomfortable to hold at times. I find myself constantly smudging up the lens because it’s nearly impossible to hold the device otherwise.
However, that camera bump is packing some impressive hardware – a triple camera array and OnePlus’ first periscope lens. The main camera uses the new 48 MP Sony LYTIA-T808 sensor and is backed up by a 48 MP telephoto at 3x optical zoom and a 64 MP ultrawide. I’ll be sharing more about the camera later this week, but the short version is that this is easily the best camera OnePlus has ever shipped, and it’s not even close.
OnePlus has an absolutely wild new multitasking tool
What’s perhaps more impressive to me is the new multitasking UI that the OnePlus Open is debuting.
“Open Canvas” allows you to have three apps in split-screen mode and do so in a way that’s actually useful. Samsung, for instance, allows three apps on screen at once, but it splits the UI with one app taking up half of the display and two others splitting the remaining half. It’s nice to have in a pinch but is ultimately too tight to be useful.
OxygenOS (also known as ColorOS) takes a different approach. You can put two apps side by side and then add a third that sits just offscreen. Tapping the edge of the app moves it back into view, whether to put it side-by-side with another app or take up the full display.
In action, “Open Canvas” on the OnePlus Open is the most fluid and useful multitasking I’ve experienced on a smartphone or tablet. It’s seriously that good.
So, where’s our OnePlus Open review?
We’ve had our hands on the device since late September, but Google’s launch of the Pixel 8 series had to take priority. On top of that, OnePlus delivered a crucial software update – one that was supposed to fix a lot of the bugs and issues we’ve been facing on the device – only this week, three days prior to today’s review embargo. So any review we could have published today really wouldn’t have been of much value.
We’ll be back soon with our final verdict, but first impressions here are strong. In the meantime, feel free to sound off in the comments below with any questions you might have.
Pre-orders for the OnePlus Open are now available at OnePlus.com.
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