 The original OnePlus One was incredibly disruptive, we thought. This is the phone for the people, we thought. That's going to explode onto the scene and force the industry giants to lower their prices and abandon consumer unfriendly practices like preloading bloated Android skins and carrier locking their devices. But three years later, nothing has actually really blown up. And it appears to be OnePlus who is slowly caving to the business realities of competing in the smartphone market. The OnePlus 5 is still cheaper than competing flagships, but the decision to buy one is getting less and less obvious. Let's take a closer look at it. CyberPowerPC's lineup of gaming desktops feature Intel 7th generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link in the video description. Let's get this out of the way first. I am not a huge fan of the slipperiness of the new curved shape and fine blasted aluminum finish on the OnePlus 5, but that's nothing a dbrand skin can't fix and their material choices including 2.5D Gorilla Glass 5 for the 5.5 inch 1080p AMOLED display and ceramic for the lightning quick fingerprint sensor are difficult to question. Internal highlights include a 10 nanometer Snapdragon 835 processor, 64 or 128 gigs of non-expandable dual lane UFS 2.1 storage, 6 or 8 gigs of shiny new LPDDR4X RAM, lightning fast wave 2 AC Wi-Fi and dual SIM support with very broad mobile network compatibility. Thanks to the process node shrink on the CPU and GPU, the lower power consumption of this cutting edge memory and some software tweaks, performance is better than ever across the board and the 5 comfortably lasts me through the day without delaying notifications from any of my key apps. And software overall continues to be a strong point in general for OnePlus. Oxygen OS is lightweight, responsive and almost as clean as bone stock Android. And where they add things, it makes sense. Navigation buttons can be repositioned and remapped at will and even moved on screen if you prefer. My mobile carrier's preference that mobile hotspot not be possible to add to the quick settings was rightfully ignored. And swiping to the right reveals weather, a notepad, recent contacts and recent apps instead of some bloated digital assistant. But the big highlight for me this time around is really the upgrade to gestures. Flip to mute is for idiots, unless you've got a screen protector, though thankfully OnePlus seems to be aware of this and included one. But three finger screenshots with a single button to press to auto scroll the rest of the page, I'm not sure how I lived without that. And the ability to map some canned functions and any application launch I want to five different drawing gestures? I have never launched Angry Birds on the can so fast in my life. The double click camera launch too is among the fastest I've ever seen. And on that subject, rightfully, OnePlus is really proud of their first ever dual camera solution. In general, dual cameras can be used to capture sharper images or more data, like if they had separate sensors for black and white and color. But OnePlus is going after a shallow depth of field effect for portraits and this one made more of a difference to me, a built-in 2x optical zoom. Overall, I would never know that this was a first attempt at anything. The 16 megapixel selfie camera is pretty good, but has a very similar field of view compared to the iPhone. So I do wish it was a little wider for group shots, but I really loved using the 5's rear cameras. And unlike some other devices I've reviewed in the past, I didn't feel for a moment, like switching to it during my review period was causing me to miss out on properly capturing precious moments with my family. The only reason that I personally even care about having a high quality cell phone camera. And all the manual dials and switches, including RAW capture, are there for the photography nerds in the native app too. Video recording is a bit more of a mixed bag for me. The capture modes are limited compared to other flagships, so no 240fps slo-mo. There's no optical image stabilization, so 4K video isn't stabilized, and 1080p video has this weird FPS character effect that some people seem to really like, but I don't, and there's no obvious way to disable it. And from a usability standpoint, I hate being forced to switch to video mode when I open the app before pressing the record button, rather than just having both buttons ready for me on screen. Okay, so Linus, it sounds pretty good, but there's no modular upgrades, taller aspect ratio screen, retina scanner, waterproof housing, stereo speakers, pressure sensitive display, or any other new standout feature. Why is this thing more expensive again? Well, as I alluded to before, OnePlus has grown as a company, solving some of their initial problems, like their reliance on third-party software, and their limited product availability, though their customer service could probably still use some work, and they've incurred the costs that go along with this development. So instead of coming in at less than half the price of a competing flagship, they're now closer to 70% compared to the latest iPhone. What that means is that the OnePlus 5 might not be the clear and obvious flagship killer choice for budget consumers, but we're also giving up less than ever before, which makes it a great choice for a broader range of Android smartphone buyers. How does dbrand do it? Every time there's a hot new device, dbrand's got a hot new skin. Like all dbrand skins, it features high quality, authentic, true textured 3M vinyl, and is cut with the utmost of precision. If you think it looks great and you want one just like it for your laptop, phone, tablet, console, controller, or more, check out the link in the video description. And if you don't think it looks great, check out the link anyway, because their configurator allows you to skin your device exactly the way you want it. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where the buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.