OnePlus' smartphone journey has been an interesting one, to say the least. To the point where if you told anyone right when the super-affordable 'flagship killer' OnePlus One was announced that in a few years, the company would have a $1500 folding smartphone, they'd have laughed in your face.

Now officially a sub-brand of Oppo, the smartphone maker has serious ambitions with its first folding smartphones, and it's all built around the idea of not only being fast and smooth but more useful, too. I've had my hands on it for a while, and my initial impressions are that the Galaxy Z Fold needed competition.

Specs, price and availability

OnePlus Open is available to pre-order from 20-25 October, and general sale will be available from 27 October with a price set at $1699 in the US and £1599 in the UK.

Slim, premium, but not compact

When Oppo first launched its foldable Find N series (and the subsequent Find N2), I was really into the smaller, passport-shaped design. Rather than having a long, skinny display like the Galaxy Z Fold series, it had a short, wide display with a more typical aspect ratio.

That made the Find N and Find N2 really compact, easy to fit in the pocket, and - crucially - meant the outer screen was easier to use. It did, however, mean the internal display was quite small. With the OnePlus Open, the company has gone in a different direction, somewhere between the Find N2 and the Z Fold, perhaps more like the Pixel Fold in terms of that outer display.

It's almost as tall as the Samsung, but it's wider, making it far less cramped on the front, giving you a display on the front that's as useful as a traditional smartphone display would be. It is taller than the Pixel Fold, though, so it's got more screen real estate.

What that means in my initial time testing it, is that I've found it far better for doing things on the fly than Samsung's. Whether it's replying to messages and emails or just playing a casual game.

Pocket-lint

It's a convenient display without much compromise, measuring 6.31 inches diagonally and with a 20:9 aspect ratio. It's even got adaptive refresh rates that can move between 10Hz and 120Hz to ensure that it's smooth and sharp when animations are fast, but conserves battery when it's not moving much.

OnePlus has put some time and effort into making that front display durable by introducing what it calls Ceramic Guard. It's a glass that's supposedly 20 percent more durable than Gorilla Glass Victus.

This is sitting at the front of a device that weighs less than either Samsung or Google's phones and is thinner when shut too (if you ignore the chunky round camera protrusion on the back). As large, book-style foldable go, it's pretty nimble.

The premium feel extends to the hinge, which - on first impressions - seems really smooth when opening and shutting. It's not loose or wobbly either, but it tends to snap back, so the display is flat, which means it's not as useful for resting at different angles to watch videos, although it will hold pretty sturdily at around the 90-degree mark.

Pocket-lint

Read through OnePlus' marketing or official release materials, and you'll see lots of references to different materials used in the phone (like titanium and cobalt-based alloys) and the reduced complexity of the hinge mechanism, but the long and short of it is that this phone has been designed to be lightweight, strong and durable. Just as important: it shuts without a gap in the hinge, and when open, the crease in the display is almost invisible.

As for waterproofing, it's rated IPX4, which means it has splash resistance, but you probably shouldn't submerge it. It has - however - had its core internal components coated with a special water-dispersing treatment and has drainage holes in the hinge to help any water that does make its way inside to find its way out again.

OnePlus Open

$1699 at OnePlus

Multitasking reimagined

It's not just the front screen that's been giving some impressive capabilities. The internal display has drool-worthy specs, too. In fact, OnePlus says the two are identical in terms of visual performance, even if the exact resolution and size are different.

Pocket-lint

The internal panel is a 7.82-inch flexible display that's almost exactly square, can reach a huge 2,600 nits peak brightness, has 10-bit colour depth, refresh rates up to 120Hz and an impressive 426 pixels-per-inch sharpness.

To put that into context, it's a display with more than 1000 nits more potential brightness in HDR content than the Pixel Fold and around 800 nits more than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5. It's got 50 more pixels per inch than either of them.

Having great displays is one thing, but building a user interface that makes the most of it is arguably more important. Even here, OnePlus has shown some of its innovative nous. It's developed an interesting multitasking system called Open Canvas, which doesn't limit the multitasking to the display area.

Pocket-lint

It means you can have three side-by-side apps and swipe one of them off to the side of the screen, bringing it back when you want it, effectively expanding beyond the physical edges of the display.

They can be arranged in three side-by-side app windows, or you can have two side-by-side and one larger horizontal window taking up the bottom third. This can also be moved down, beyond the bottom edge, and brought back up again, or even expanded to push the two side-by-side apps out over the top edge of the screen and out of view.

Pocket-lint

Apps can also be floating windows on the screen, which you can then shove off to one side while you're working on something else, and there's a desktop-like taskbar to give you easy access to recently used or frequently used apps. All things considered, it's actually pretty clever.

These features are all part of Oxygen OS 13.2, built on top of Android 13. Again, to make it a phone that survives the tests of time, OnePlus promises four years of major software upgrades and five years of security patches.

Typical OnePlus speed

It wouldn't be a flagship OnePlus phone without a focus on speed, fluidity and performance. Part of that is - of course - the software optimisations and display refresh rates, and another part is the internal components.

The phone is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which we know is really powerful and energy efficient. This is joined by 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. And it's not just bottom-of-the-barrel memory and storage, either. It's LPDDR5X RAM - for really quick and efficient reading - and it's UFS 4.0 storage. Combined, it'll mean that running apps, downloading files, installing games, and everything you do with the phone will feel smooth, snappy and really fast (or should do).

Pocket-lint

Battery capacity is impressive for a foldable, too. At 4,805mAh, it's got about 400mAh more capacity than the Z Fold 5 and is very similar to the Pixel Fold. It's split into two cells - one is 3295mAh, the other 1510mAh.

Where OnePlus has the real advantage is in recharge speeds. Using the SuperVOOC adapter that comes in the box, you can make use of 67W charging speeds to refill that battery from empty in 42 minutes completely.

In real daily life - having experienced similar technology from OnePlus and Oppo before - where it really makes the difference is in that first 20-30 minutes of being plugged in. It's the type of speed that means you can forget to plug it in at night and just throw it on and connect it to the charger when it actually needs charging. You can usually get around 80 per cent topped up in that first half an hour. You do need to have the phone open to charge, though, to hold the hit dissipate from the two battery cells effectively.

Ambitious camera game

By their very nature, foldable phones typically have an extra camera lens or two compared to the standard, rigid smartphones. Particularly the larger horizontal-folding types. OnePlus Open has five cameras: three on the back, one punched through the front display, and an additional hole-punch selfie camera tucked away in the corner of the main internal display.

Pocket-lintAs systems go, the rear trio appears like it could enable a lot of versatility. There's a primary 48-megapixel Sony sensor described as a 'Pixel Stacked' camera. In basic terms, this changes the architecture of the pixel so that instead of putting the photodiode and transistor (which make up a pixel) on the same level, it puts one beneath the other, increasing the ability to draw in more light while also being able to decrease the surface area of the sensor to save space. It's equipped with OIS for reducing motion blur.

Two others join this innovative main camera in that mammoth circular island on the back of the phone. There's a 64-megapixel telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom (and 6x in-sensor zoom), which can reach the highest of 120x digital zoom thanks to its pixel-rich sensor and the OIS built in to even out any shakes during shooting. The third camera is an ultrawide equipped with a 48-megapixel sensor and a 114-degree field of view.

Altogether, the system gives you a lot of different focal lengths to play with and has Hasselblad's colour processing and image processing science behind the final results, just like most of OnePlus' and Oppo's recent flagship devices. I've only had a little play so far, and it seems a decent enough system, but I'll need more time to test it in different conditions to get a complete sense of what it's capable of.

Pocket-lint

It can shoot up to 4K/60fps on the video side, or - if you're happy with 4K/30 - you can shoot in Dolby Vision.

Verdict

OnePlus might have been late to the foldable game, but - on my initial impressions - it's been worth the wait. Instead of rushing to market with a half-baked product, OnePlus has delivered a slim, strong, lightweight foldable with two great screens, proper flagship power under the hood, and a promising camera system. It's pricey, but which big foldable isn't?