 So as some, nay, many of you noticed, I never covered the OnePlus One. Was it because I thought their offer to lend it to me for less than a week while one of their employees happened to be on vacation in Vancouver was insulting and ridiculous? Was it their offensive and irresponsible advertising campaigns? Was it their trying-so-hard-to-be-viral invite system for ordering? Maybe a little bit of all three. But, Dbrandskins, a great partner of ours, threw a phone in the mail to me and basically said, You haaaaaaaave to do the OnePlus 2. So I figured, alright. Let's see what the fuss is about. Let's see if it lives up to the hype. Oh wait, hold on. On the subject of Dbrand and hype, they're the presenting sponsor for Scrapyard Wars 3 and the production schedule is locked in. It's gonna be a three-way between me, Luke, and Austin Evans. So slam that like button if you're amped and you think Austin is gonna be an awesome guest star. Okay, now you can roll the intro. Intel brings DDR4 to the mainstream with their new Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K processors. Click on the link in the video description to learn more. OnePlus comes right out of the gate, boldly declaring their second generation device to be a 2016 flagship killer. And obviously, if they're gonna run around and say things like that, it better have the horses to back it up. So CPU-wise, the OnePlus 2 sports the controversial Snapdragon 810 1.8GHz octa-core processor paired with an Adreno 430 GPU, which should handle the phone's 1080p display with relative ease. RAM and storage specs aren't that clear-cut with the 16GB storage model being paired with 3GB of system memory and the 64GB version getting a 1GB bump to 4GB. The display is a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD covered with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 and features an LTPS glass substrate, which is more expensive than both silicon and IGZO, and is accompanied on the top by a 5-megapixel selfie camera and on the bottom by a row of capacitive touch-sensitive buttons, with the center being used as a home button, camera launch button, and fingerprint sensor for quick authentication. Cool beans. I love this feature, as long as it works. It seems that some units, mine being among them, may suffer from non-responsive home buttons, maybe something to do with chassis grounding or something like that. Fortunately, you can use on-screen buttons by flipping one switch in the settings menu. Neat. Physically, I really have started just glossing over most phones these days, because aren't they all just basically rip-offs of the original iPhone? Actually, in this case, no. For starters, the notification modifier button on the left side has not two but three positions to allow audible sounds for all notifications, priority notifications only, and alarms only, a nifty little inclusion. The right side lock and volume adjust buttons are flipping awesome, protruding just enough to be easily felt without looking at the phone, and with enough resistance that I didn't accidentally mash them all the time while trying to hold the phone. And hold the phone, indeed! Is this what it looks like at the bottom? Yes, on the bottom are the regrettably, well, bottom-mounted, but surprisingly loud and clear speakers, and a reversible USB Type-C port for charging. If you want to know all about the benefits of USB Type-C, we've got a video about it, which you can check out here. But in a nutshell, it's reversible, along with the cable OnePlus includes, which is freaking awesome, it's more durable, and it can both handle more power and transfer data faster than previous slim standards like Micro B. But that's the first in a series of gotchas with the OnePlus 2. Thanks to the USB 2 backbone, the Type-C port only operates at USB 2 power and speeds, and for whatever reason, Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0 technology is not supported in this config, so you'll have to wait three hours or more for a full charge. Not a big deal to me, since the included 3,300 mAh non-removable battery was enough for me to get through all but the most intense days, but it might be a factor for you. Gotcha number two. OnePlus may be billing this phone as a flagship killer from a performance standpoint, but it's not like with more premium devices you aren't getting anything for your extra money either, and the 2 fails to deliver really any cool standout features beyond its charging port. No water resistance to speak of, no SD expansion, although it does have dual SIM slots under the removable back cover, which is still quite unusual in North American models, and no NFC support to name a few. This last one is particularly perplexing as, while I've never been a regular user of NFC, its ubiquity among Android phones has made Google even go as far as to integrate it into their new phone migration wizard, with who knows what else depending on the technology in the future. And on the subject of the future and improvement, OnePlus really does seem to be banking on that to sell these phones. The software is refreshingly unbloated and has some great inclusions, like a system-wide dark theme, gestures for like double tap to wake, double home for camera, and Swift keys, fantastic third-party keyboard app included, but it just isn't completely polished in a way that's sort of hard to quantify. Like reconnecting to Wi-Fi automatically was really hit or miss for me. Auto brightness adjustments were very sudden and jarring, which hasn't been an issue for me with other phones for a couple of years. A voice over LTE on Band 12, a must for T-Mobile customers, is coming according to a Reddit post somewhere, and the camera is getting more capabilities at some undisclosed time, which I guess leads us pretty well into the main pillar of a smartphone video these days, the camera. It's pretty darn good. The main camera sports optical image stabilization, laser autofocus, and a dual LED flash, and captures 13 megapixel images and up to 4K 30fps videos. It handles low light reasonably well, and if we ignore the pretty rubbish viewfinder responsiveness and some stupidity in the app, like that swiping in from the left to try to change camera mode sometimes pulls down the notification tray, the two gets great marks here. Not because OnePlus has dethroned the LG G4, Samsung Galaxy S6, or the iPhone 6, all of which have excellent cameras, but because the two costs half as much as those other flagship devices, which I think leads us pretty well into the conclusion. I still think the invite system is complete bullsh**, but the OnePlus 2 is still a winner in my book. I love the price, and I agree with most, if not all, of the ways that OnePlus has skimped on the two. The build quality feels great, with a reassuringly premium weight, and with the gently curved back and extraordinarily slim bezels making it feel more like a phone a quarter of an inch smaller diagonally. A 1080p display makes a ton of sense to me at this screen size, and I will trade both wireless charging and quick charging for a more robust connector on a device that I plan to use over the long term. But the lack of NFC baffles me, and the inclusion of a second SIM slot instead of expandable storage is a trade-off that in my mind doesn't work well, especially for owners of the 16GB model. You know what else is likely to work well for owners of the OnePlus 2? A dbrand skin. You guys may or may not have noticed this, but throughout the B-roll of this video, you have been looking at one of their precision cut vinyl wraps that serve a couple of purposes. Number one is it protects the phone from incidental scratches. No, not the screen surface itself, but all of the parts that you would actually want to cover with a vinyl wrap. And number two is it allows you to personalize the phone. They've actually got a wide variety of mix and match different combinations that you can play around with on their site. They've got a configuration tool so you can be like, yeah, what would my phone look like with the wood grain on the front and like bright orange on the back? And they've actually got the logo even cut out on the OnePlus 2, which is pretty darn spiffy looking. And then another additional white sort of leather grain vinyl wrap over top of the camera in the flash area. Really, really awesome stuff. And like I said actually earlier in this video, they've been a long time supporter of the show and just generally good guys. So check them out over at dbrand.com. They've got all kinds of great stuff for phones, tablets, gaming consoles, controllers, all kinds of good stuff over there. So that's pretty much it guys. If you disliked this video, hit that dislike button. I'm not afraid of it. If you liked it though, do please hit the like button, get subscribed, or even consider supporting us by buying a cool t-shirt like this one, supporting us directly through our community forum with a little supporter badge, or even just changing your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, the instructions for which you can find there. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. Um, when is this coming out? Okay. So I think in theory, my desk PC build log should be out by the time you're watching this. So hopefully we can link to that. Otherwise, maybe we'll just put something else there.