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Let's start off with the unbox and accessories: The phone is packaged very well. I received mine directly from Oneplus and it came in the coolest little contraption. They essentially made a canister of air tubes that has a matching cap which is attached by plastic on one side. It's hard to explain, but you'll get it if you see the picture in this album http://imgur.com/a/mKZHt . This protected the package very well and allowed it to be shipped in just a plain plastic bag type parcel without damaged the phone or contents. The edges of the phone's box were ever so slightly dented, but the air cannister really did it's job well. The unboxing itself is very very clean, which is unexpected for such a budget phone. The box from the outside reminds me of an Apple device, and it certainly has the same unbox experience. They pack a silicone case, sim card remover, the phone, and a charger. The charger is very well designed and the plastic has this soft matte texture to it which I like a lot, and the micro usb cable is very good quality and has a flat noodle design instead of a wire type design. The cable also comes with a white rubber adjustable band like thing on it, that allows you to keep the cable organized when you fold it up. This is a godsend to me, because I don't have to keep track of any rubber bands. It's all themed white and red, and does its job quite well. It's worth noting that my previous Nexus 4 charger made some whine while unplugged from the phone which tended to keep me up at night sometimes, but I can't only very faintly hear this one's. The cable is long enough at three feet, and for some this may be too short, but I think it's just right. The full-size usb end of the cable is a neat half design, and it really sets it apart from other cables while still functioning perfectly. The micro-usb end is actually upside down, and you'll see in photos online that the charging port on the Oneplus X is also upside down for god knows why. It's not a big deal, but it ties in to my next point: the micro usb end is quite annoyingly designed. Imagine a normal micro usb sized rectangle, and all these rectangles have their edges chamfered or filleted, but the thing about the bundled cable is that it is actually only filleted on one side. This means that if you want to use your phone with one hand while charging, you may find the sharp edge of the cable cutting into your pinky. It makes no sense not to at least round those edges a little but but they're not. It annoys me a bit using my phone at night at bedtime. In any other phone this isn't an issue because the sharp edges face up since the cable is upside down, but on the original it proves a minor annoyance. It seems a bit lazy, but with how good the cable is overall I don't mind that much. I might just lightly file if it becomes an issue, but for now it's not that bad. The phone also comes with a silicone case. The case is not perfectly clear, but it fits very snugly with a nice little lip on the screen side, and I'm happy with it. In fact, all cases I've tried and from what I've seen/heard, all the cases available fit the phone very snugly, which is both a pro and a con because they're a little difficult to apply and remove, but they also stick to it like neodimum magnets. The loosest of the cases in my opinion was definitely the flip case, which is confirmed by and Indian reviewer I watched online. The phone also includes a screen protector preapplied. It's nothing special, but it is nice to have protection out of the box. The sim card remover is nothing special, but it definitely feels nice in the hand. I didn't bother with the quickstart guide.
Phone Build: The pictures really don't do it justice. This phone is probably one of the best looking (if not THE best looking) phones on the market. I've shown it to a couple friends who have never heard of Oneplus and there's a resounding "It looks like an iPhone ... but better." The glass on the back and front are curved, which really make it feel nice to hold. But with all glass backed phones it is quite slippery. A case solves this problem, or simply a skin from my favorite skin company dbrand will do it too. But the glass on the front and back is gorilla glass 3 which means you do get some scratch resistance. The metal around the frame feels awesome to hold, and the little grooves are far less noticeable in the hand than in the pictures. They give the phone a nice grip while not giving that weird feeling you get when you run your finger along a grooved surface like a record. The button are also pretty well placed, but the power button feels too low for me because I'm used to the higher one most phones have. The buttons work well and are quite clicky, and my absolute favorite part is the notification slider. Why has no one else thought to put one on an android phone?! It quite resistive which helps make sure you don't slide it on accident, but the metal on the slider is knurled which makes it very easy to grip. Slipping past the middle setting may be a problem for some, but I found using the three different settings just fine. The headphone jack is also nice, as well as the speaker grills. I am a bit worried though because all the metal is aluminum, and aluminum is soft. I'm not sure if Oneplus used any special grade, but I didn't notice bands of different metal used to seperate the long pieces of aluminum, as well as around the ports which I think are there to prevent scuffing of the grooving. I'm not sure this will help, as they're quite thin, and if you're plugging in the micro usb or headphones in the dark I think it might scratch it. I haven't got any scuffs so far but I've also been careful everytime to avoid this. The capacitive buttons are lowered than I'm used to, and they don't light up, but this can also be considered a pro because they are low profile and after a while we all get used to the positions. The phone's weight is perfect for its size, and feels good to hold. The phone is definitely like an iPhone hybrid in the sense if feels taller than normal, but not so tall that it's annoying like I feel the iPhones are. Otherwise you have your standard front facing camera, speaker, earspeaker, and a not so standard proximity sensor.
Software: Oxygen OS is great. I think it's a perfect example of what an OS customized from the manufacturer should be: it adds a little features, some specific to the phone, but keeps the same base feeling. Overall you'll find OOS feeling a lot like stock android but a little better. OOS allows you to change the system wide theme to black or white, as well as letting you change accent colors from the default cyan to 8 different colors. I would have preffered an RGB selector, but honestly it's far better than nothing and helps personalize your phone. OOS includes gestures like double tap to wake, two finger straight swipe to pause, v sign for flashingt, o for camera, < for previous track and > for next track. They're all disabled by default but I think they're a great addition and are quite useful. They could use some improvement in recognition, but it's something new and useful. OOS also includes settings for buttons to change how the capacitive buttons work (swapped back and multitask, long presses activate custom functions, or disabling of capacitive and enabling of software). I do wish the buttons menu would also let you customize how the notification slider works, because I have one main request with it: have different volume profiles for different settings. Obviously silent is completely silent, but I want priority to ring if a priority caller or apps notifies, but vibrate of the notification is non-priority. Or set the media volume to zero for silent and priority, and crank it up for all notifications. This really annoys me because if you switch from all to priority, and watch a youtube video at work/class/wherever, you still get the same loud volume from all notifications, and you don't get any notification if a non-priority calls. Obviously this is different from person to person, and some find this perfect, but I'd really love the option. Also, another gripe with the sound options: there's no pulldown menu. I think this will be fixed in OOS based on Marshmallow, but you can only control contextual volume. I can't change media volume while in the clock app, or change notification volume in the youtube app. I've been spoiled by Marshmallow and I require it now. Get on it Oneplus. OOS also comes with its own launcher that supports "shelf" which is a Google Now standin, as well as custom icons and some other stuff I didn't bother to look at. It works, it has a few extra features, but I didn't bother with it since I already have a sick Nova Launcher layout. Another annoyance with OOS is the inability to disable to customize the quick settings toggle. By default swiping on the right of the notification bar opens quick settings, but for right handed people like me it's annoying to try to open notifications and get quick settings instead. Overall OOS is snappy and it really does add the right things in the right places. There's still room for improvement but it's quite good.
Battery: OOS optimizes well and battery life is great (disclaimer, I have the custom blu_spark kernel installed which some say increases battery life (I can't provide any definite numbers for this right now, but I just used my phone for 2 hours of screen on time, watching probably 30-40 minutes of youtube and redditing fo the rest. I only got down to 82%.)) Everyday I've used this phone I've ended the day with my battery above 45%, usually at mid 60s (even without the blu_spark kernel), using it semi-sparingly at about 3-ish hours of screen on time, but it appears to be great. Better than my Nexus 4 at least. The small battery helps with charging quickly, and although the phone lacks quick charge, I've found it to charge quick fast (don't have any numbers for this at the moment, but if I remember I'll see how long it takes from 50% to 100%, and 0% to 100%.) especially using the wall charger (your best bet). The blu_spark kernel also enables quicker charging from computers at 900mah instead of the default 500mah which should help as well. Some complain about bad battery life, but my personal experience has been very very very good battery life. Some say OOS gives best battery life, others say custom kernels give better. But one thing's for sure, that AMOLED screen helps a lot.
THE SCREEN: The is one of the highlights of the phone, right next to build quality and right above the notification slider. The screen is absolutely amazing. The blacks are completely black, the whites are bright, and overall the screen is bright. So bright that, I keep it anywhere from 0 - 1/3 brightness on the slider at pretty much all times. In direct sunlight I'll crank it up to 2/3 to full, but that's expected with all phones, and you can still see very well in the sunlight at high brightness. The colors all pop, but aren't over saturated and the color accuracy is not signifigantly off. Others have attested to this, and I remember seeing in the XDA forums some praising it for how well is reproduces colors. I love the screen: it's big but not Nexus 6P or iPhone 6+ big. It doesn't waste battery with a 2k or 4k screen, and for the next 2-3 years 1080p is great, and is the best option in terms of content available, efficiency, and beauty. Case closed.
Audio: From the speaker? Lacklustre. Corner cut. It's a phone, it can't fit big speakers, that's how it is with all. All treble and no bass. Headphones are fine, nothing special. The audio does get quite loud though. It hurts my ears at full volume.
CPU and GPU: I don't know a lot about phone CPUs and GPUs, but it's done everything I've asked and I haven't had any stutter or lag. Here's and Antutu benchmark score: 44601.
Camera: Unfortunately (I can hear all your disappointment now), the camera isn't that good. It takes pictures, high resolution, but the overall quality is pretty bad when you zoom in. It's just an OK camera, and that's a little disappointing. With all these great cameras in flagship phones you expect the same from such a flagship phone device, but it's just not there. There's no OIS, the aperture is just OK, the quality is just OK, the low light is pretty eh, it's just...OK. Decent amount of noise. There's a camera driver thing on the XDA forums which allows 4K video recording, anti camera shake, more resolution options and such, and that helps some, but you can't change the hardware the phone was given. On the good side the saturation is good, and the focus has a pretty big range, and the shutter speed is damn fast, even in non-default camera apps. The resolution is good and in bright light the photos turn out pretty good. Low light tends to start having a lot of noise, but I guess it's still usable. In the end it's an OK camera, and it'll capture moments with pretty good color and detail, but it still doesn't beat a good point and shoot, or match one like the newer flagships do. Really, it's hard to give the camera justice with words (something something picture is worth something words) so check out photos here http://imgur.com/a/mKZHt and decide for yourself. I took them with the custom camera HAL mod for the best result available here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/oneplus-x/orig-development/mod-custom-camera-hal-4k-uhd-dci-30-fps-t3315382 . Here are the links to the video tests as well:
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. As always though, my standards are different from yours. You may find the camera awesome. I find it OK. Oh yeah and I never take selfies so you're on your own with the front facing.
Extras: FM Radio WHOOPEE! FM radio is awesome for when you're offline, or want to save on some of that mobile data. I love it. It seems to work pretty good, although since your headphones are the antenna the way you wear them, the length, and wear you are affect the signal strength. The app is minimalistic, and I like it. You may have noticed the wifi is only 2.4ghz despite the chip itself supporting 5ghz. This is true, only 2.4ghz is supported. Something about not being able to fit an antenna in. But realistically, when do you use 5ghz. I know I never use it, so it's definitely not a deal breaker. RGB Notification LED WHOOPEE! I love these guys because I use the app lightflow to control the LED to show me what notification is active. So I can tell when someone texts me or emails me, or if I got a snapchat so I can be bothered accordingly. It works great, but OOS doesn't allow customization of the LED very much beyond color for charged and charging, which is a huge waste. You also can't turn it off which means whenever the screen is turned on my lightflow settings are overridden. SD Card PRAISE THE HEAVENS! A feature that's missing from far too many phones nowadays. I love having an sd card, either to backup my stuff, store movies, games, etc etc. It a huge convinience and I don't have to get rid of things when I run out of storage. If you take photos a lot you can just store them on micro sd cards which are a dime a dozen now. Huge plus. USB OTG. It's pretty good but beyond gaming or masochists that like to type on their phones it's not that important. It's nice to be able to mount flash drives though. Just more removable storage, which the SD card takes care of but the more the merrier.
And now a special section dedicated to *GASP* LTE BANDS: It's not that big of a deal. Quit whining. Some have gone as far to say to not buy the phone because it doesn't support one low frequency LTE band. Now I'm not sure about AT&T, but T-Mobile has great LTE coverage in my experience, and everywhere I go I get LTE. I still get bands 2 and 4 and that's more than enough. Literally. I unlocked band 4 on my Nexus 4 and even then I got LTE practically everywhere. So here's one fact: T-Mobile is not going to get rid of band 2 and 4. Everyone keeps saying "It's fine now but in the coming months you may find yourself without LTE". No way in hell T-Mobile is going to alienate it's customer and get rid of 2 (!!!) LTE (!!!) bands just because they got one low frequency. So you won't get LTE in rural areas, and it won't go through the skyscraper you live in terribly well, but you're still getting HSPA and 3G, which is still enough to do most things and even stream at 720p. So quit whining you little babies: It's fine. It's not worth deciding to not buy the phone over band 12.