Review: OnePlus Open

There I was in the second row at the Google Pixel 8 launch event. The keynote was about to start, and while other journalists pulled out their laptops and started typing away, I whipped out the OnePlus Open, the new folding phone from the Chinese company that makes good mid-priced Android devices.

Usually, at these kinds of bustling live events, I have my laptop in front of me to take notes and write tweets, with Slack in the background to monitor chats with my team members. But with the OnePlus Open and its snazzy multitasking features, I was able to see three apps at the same time on the large 7.82-inch screen—Slack and Chrome sat next to each other, and I placed X along the bottom. I was able to post a stream of tweets (Xs?) containing photos pretty easily while moving back to the other apps to respond to my colleagues in Slack and grab URLs from Chrome.

OnePlus, to me, always plays third fiddle to Samsung and Google in the broader Android ecosystem, at least in the US. Both Samsung and Google also make very good foldables. But with the Open, OnePlus makes a compelling case that this is the book-like foldable to buy—as long as you can stomach spending $1,700 on a smartphone.

Samsung is on its fifth generation of Galaxy Fold phones, and while it has continued to refine the experience with every iteration, it has largely stuck with the same size and shape. This year, companies like Google and OnePlus are entering the fray with fresher designs that, in my opinion, offer a better folding phone experience.

The OnePlus Open has a 6.31-inch front screen that's practically normal looking. It's not awkwardly narrow like the front screen on Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold5, and it's not short and wide like the outer face of the Google Pixel Fold. This, coupled with the surprisingly svelte body that measures 11.7 millimeters thick when folded, makes the Open feel closer to a normal phone and not some chunky device. For reference, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is 8.25 mm, the Pixel Fold is 12.1 mm, and the Fold5 is 13.4 mm. The Open is also one of the lightest folding phones in its class at just 239 grams. (The Fold5 is 253 grams, and the Pixel Fold is 283 grams.)

In the first few days of using the phone, I often forgot I could crack it open and make use of the much larger internal display. That's not a bad thing—in reality, with booklike foldables, you're going to be using the exterior screen most of the time, switching to the larger display when you want to multitask, play a game, or watch a video. An exterior screen that feels like the screen of a normal phone is exactly what we want.

The only hardware gripe I have is with the massive camera module on the back. My hands are big, and my index finger frequently sits over the bump. That doesn't feel great, and I'm constantly smudging the camera glass. This might not be much of a problem if you have smaller paws. At least the whole thing looks gorgeous, especially in the Emerald Dusk color.

OnePlus achieved the Open's impressive design with a unique blend of metals like titanium and cobalt molybdenum alloys. The company claims to use far fewer parts in its “Flexion” hinge mechanism, which has been tested to withstand 1 million folds, much higher than the 200,000-fold claim from Samsung and Google. OnePlus also says the Ceramic Guard glass on the phone's front is 20 percent tougher than the Gorilla Glass Victus on the Pixel Fold.

I didn't bust out my hammer and pliers to test these claims, and it's hard to say how this OnePlus will fare over time. But overall, the shape of the front screen paired with the thinness and lighter weight of the phone make it remarkably nice to use, almost like a normal phone. The hinge is really responsive, and the main display of the Open does have one of the least noticeable creases in the foldable world. It's a shame the device's water resistance rating is limited to IPX4—it'll be fine in the rain, but its peers can withstand water submersion. (It's also worth considering that Samsung has an extensive repair network around the US, so fixing a OnePlus Open might not be as easy.)

Photograph: OnePlus

As you first start turning the OnePlus Open over in your hands, it feels like the company spared no expense in its construction. It feels luxe, and OnePlus even brought back the multi-position Alert Slider on the side of the phone, which lets you to switch between silent, vibrate, and ring with a satisfying flick.

The AMOLED screens on the front and on the inside have sharp 2K resolutions and 120-Hz refresh rates with low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) 3.0 tech, allowing them to dial the refresh rate up or down based on what's happening on the screen. This makes them more battery-efficient, since they can conserve cycles when they're not needed. The displays get plenty bright too; I never had any issues reading either screen on sunny days.

The phone is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset with 16 gigabytes of RAM and 512 GB of internal storage (Samsung and Google's folding phones start at 256 GB). Performance was buttery smooth, but I was more impressed with the 4,805-mAh battery. With average use, I eked out a day and a half—if not more—of battery life. If you use the main screen all the time, that will naturally drop, but the battery still feels more than adequate.

The sacrifice? No wireless charging. I prefer the convenience of charging without a cable. But you might prefer the fast-charging speed OnePlus offers here—I recharged the Open from 5 to 100 percent in less than 40 minutes. Too bad you can only achieve this with OnePlus' bulky USB-A charger and cable. But hey, maybe you'll appreciate actually getting a charger in the box.

Open the Open and you'll find some unique software that makes the user experience singular. OnePlus has developed a layer over Android called Open Canvas that allows apps to exist in various sizes without having to conform to the shape of the screen. Apps like Instagram no longer feel like blown-up rectangles that poorly mimic the normal smartphone experience. Instead, Instagram on the Open's screen has a sidebar on the left with tabs to access DMs, likes, and the search page, just like the desktop experience.

The star of the show is Triple Splits, which sounds like a ballet move, but is a software trick that allows three apps to be launched side by side on the main screen. I've found it really handy to have a messaging app all the way on the right, slightly out of frame but always there so I can monitor an ongoing conversation. Two other apps can then take up the main part of the screen.

What's really cool is if you “expand” one of these apps, it slides down below the two split-screen apps. You can scroll down to access this third app in its full-size window, and then swipe back up to get back to the other two apps. It's an ingenious multitasking system, and it's what allowed me to get work done at the Google event. (Pro tip: You can save up to nine of these multi-app presets so you can totally launch TikTok, Instagram, and X at the same time if you want to make your eyes bleed.)

Like on other booklike folding phones, there's a persistent taskbar that lets you drag and drop apps to any part of the screen; this taskbar has an app tray you can open to add any other app that's not saved in the taskbar too. There's a Recents folder here as well, which lets you quickly access recent documents and photos to drag and drop them into select apps. Nifty! Oh, and if you close the Open, you get the choice to swipe up and continue the app you were last looking at on the front screen. (It's not quite the all-or-nothing option on other folding phones.)

I also noticed that the slightly wider main screen enabled more desktop-grade web-browsing experiences in Chrome. For example, pull up WIRED.com on the Galaxy Z Fold5 and you get the normal, skinny mobile browsing experience. On the OnePlus Open, you can see a design that's more space-optimized and just looks plain nicer. However, some apps like Gmail still require you to turn the phone into landscape mode to access the two-pane view.

I want to note that I did run into some apps that just didn't play well with the Open Canvas system, plus some other optimization bugs in the software as a whole. OnePlus says my software isn't the final version, so you can hopefully expect some tweaks before the phone launches. I'm still not a huge fan of OnePlus' OxygenOS operating system as a whole. (The way it handles notifications is clunky.) But these new multitasking features are impressive, and I'm glad to see OnePlus committing to four Android OS upgrades and five years of security updates.

Photograph: OnePlus

I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on the rotund camera module on the back. Yes, OnePlus is continuing its partnership with camera maker Hasselblad, so you get its enhancements to the image processing software, including its color science knowledge and other fine-tuning smarts. More impressive is the hardware itself: a 48-megapixel main camera, 64-megapixel 3X optical zoom camera, and a 48-megapixel ultrawide. There's a 20-megapixel camera for when you're using the main display and a 32-megapixel selfie camera on the front. It's not all those numbers that impress, but the fact that these cameras all have larger sensors than what you'll find in the rest of the folding phone competition.

I compared the camera against the Pixel Fold and the Galaxy Z Fold5, and in a nutshell, the larger sensors are able to pull sharper details across the board. Whether it's with the 3X optical zoom or the ultrawide, there's a strong chance the OnePlus will always deliver a sharper image. It also captures some wonderfully nuanced low-light images that aren't over-brightened by the software.

It doesn't win in every scenario. There are times when the Pixel and Samsung pull ahead, particularly when capturing photos of subjects in motion. I also noticed the Open has trouble autofocusing in some scenes. The biggest downside is that the OnePlus does oversaturate its images, and it doesn't do a great job with skin tones. (It made my wife look like she was wearing makeup when she wasn't.) The Open's HDR capabilities within complex scenes with bright brights and dark shadows are also not as good as the Pixel Fold's.

Still, this is an impressive showing from OnePlus. I especially like that you get an extra 6X zoom option—like the 2X zoom on most new phones, the 6X comes from cropping the telephoto camera's sensor, producing optical-like quality that's better than plain-old digital zoom. I've just had a pretty good time using these versatile cameras.

If you're in the market for a folding phone, it's a nice time to buy one. You have options! You should know that OnePlus is offering $200 off if you trade in any phone in any condition. That's not a preorder offer, either, it will exist for the lifecycle of the device, bringing the price down to $1,500. The Open works on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon too, 5G and all, which wasn't always the case on older OnePlus models.

I'd likely still gravitate toward the Pixel Fold (I like the short and wide screen and all of Google's smart software features), but despite Samsung's years of refining its Galaxy Folds, I just might pick the OnePlus Open over one of those.