Weeks after the announcement of the OnePlus One and with still weeks to go until its release the OnePlus One is still generating enough news to keep us busy. With invites still not released to the public to purchase the device many of us are clamouring for any information at all we can find about the OnePlus One. Today it passed through the FCC, bringing its User Manual with it.
The User Manual has all the usual information in it as well as a couple of tidbits either mistakenly left out previously, or kept secret for future surprises. This is also assuming that the user manual is the final product and everything mentioned in it is what ships with the device.
The first piece of information that caught my eye was in the Optional Contents list where the list includes a Quick Charge+, Charger. Early on OnePlus promised a “mystery battery technology” would be included with the OnePlus. Then the Oppo Find7 was announced and everyone assumed the mystery technology would be the quick charge that comes with that. OnePlus have since removed the mystery technology promise saying that it is software but unfortunately wasn’t ready in time for the release. If that is the case, what is the Quick Charge+ doing listed as in the optional contents list? Are OnePlus going to include that now but you just have to pay extra for it? I hope so.
The second interesting slipup in the manual is the mention of SD card support. Both Cyanogen Inc and OnePlus has both repeatedly said that the OnePlus would not include SD card support (and I agree with them that it shouldn’t be used in Android anymore). Flip to page 24 of the user manual and it is right there in black and white:
Micro SD card extension support: The maximum Micro SD card memory supported by this device is 32G, allowing great promotion of storage. To prevent harm to your device, please use an authentic SD card.
Personally I don’t think you need sd card support if you provide enough storage in a phone. The OnePlus One comes in a 64GB variety so I doubt this is real. In saying that there have been a lot of complaints about it lacking sd card support and OnePlus have acted upon complaints before (the CPU was upgraded from a Snapdragon 800 to an 801).
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I’ll leave the last comment on sd card in Android to well-known developer and former member of CyanogenInc, Koushik “Koush” Dutta:
The SD card needs to go away. It’s a nightmare for developers. There’s too much variability here. SD Cards can be slow, resulting in poor app performance. They can come and go, or be swapped, and that results in unpredictable behavior if an app was expecting an SD card. One contiguous block of data needs to become the standard here (with different OEM SKUs for more/less storage), as it has been on iOS since the first iPhone.
All this is based on this manual being the final product which may or may not be the case. Time will tell. In other news it passed all tests thrown at it, including for all the required LTE bands for full LTE functionality here in Australia.
Does this change your opinion of the OnePlus One? Do you think this is the final device specifications? Stay tuned for some exciting news in the next few days regarding OnePlus and Ausdroid.
I have ordered the Black 64GB version from Liaow in China. http://liaow.com/onepluslist.php They are more expensive but saves the whole jumping through hoops, begging for invites aspect of buying the phone. They will flash Cyanogen for me if it’s not already on the phone and say they will receive their stock on May 30 so I can expect an early June delivery on my phone. Fingers crossed.
I personally would go with the iPhone on this one, if SD cards can make something go wrong then don’t use them. Make a smartphone with enough storage and ask for more money. Not for everyone but a good working and pricey handset is much better than a headache.
SD cards can “go away” when devices come with decent storage. a serious music collection will not come close to fitting on 64gb. that’s before videos, apps, photos… 64gb of storage as a MAXIMUM in 2014 is a joke.
At no point in time, have Android devices come with enough internal storage capacity to fully render the use of external storage unwarranted and unnecessary. And that is merely dealing with apps and games. Add user media content into the mix, and the too small internal storage capacity of Android devices becomes a sick joke. And what does Google do, in regards to solving the storage capacity problem? It tried to shove everyone into using ‘The Cloud’. This despite unlimited data access phone accounts not being remotely anywhere near globally available. And when that failed, because manufacturers would not copy… Read more »
when sandisk can fit 128gb on a micro sd card it baffles me why phones are still shipping with 16gb internal storage. i get the cost is a factor but really? 16gb?
as for the cloud, i’m sure it’ll be totally plausible in five years, but using google music daily with even vodafone’s 3gb plan would have me running out of data in two weeks or so.
so yep. android 4.3 and a total of 96gb storage (32 phone + 64 sd) is getting me by ok. not great, but ok.
#firstworldproblems #whineandcheese
meanwhile i would TOTALLY buy a oneplus one with a card slot 😀 😀
Wow! You must have a lot of movies? But you are right. There is no excuse for manufacturers shortchanging us wrt storage. Oneplus said that 64gb cost them the same as 32gb. And yet many manufacturers do 16gb… Just give me 64gb to start with….
i’ve got about 155gb of music, which i don’t think is an insanely huge library. and the increasing popularity of lossless audio means audio file sizes will continue to blow out like video files are. so yeah, i can keep about half of my library on hand to leave space for everything else.
One word to kill storage “4K.”
4K video, renders even 64Gb microSD cards as being restrictive in storage quantity.
wow, i have learnt a thing today.
By ‘quantity’ I was referring to the number of videos you could store in a given storage capacity.
Back on April 12, Geoff did a first impressions review on the Galaxy S5. In that review, he included a 4K test video. I pulled it down from YouTube, as an MP4, in 730p, 1080p, and 4k.
720p – 11.6Mb
1080p – 15.4Mb
4K – 87.7Mb
Now that test vid was only 31 seconds. Scale that up to an average 1 hour 20minute movie… 13579.355Mb