OnePlus Cheats Again – Fake Benchmarks on OnePlus 5, Broken Promises & more

OnePlus just launched their new smartphone i.e their flagship for this year, the OnePlus 5. While it is yet to be officially launched in India and we don’t know the exact pricing, you can read everything about the smartphone here. By now you might have read a ton of reviews of the device, in order to know how it performs and how good it is, in comparison to other competitions. But if you are benchmark person and if you judge a phone entirely based on its benchmark results, then you might to sit back and read this for a minute before making a purchase decision.

According to the new reports which we have from the source, it looks like OnePlus has been manipulating its benchmark scores of the OnePlus 5. Well, if you have been following the news, then you already know that we had reported about something similar for the OnePlus 3T as well. Unfortunately, we have to touch base on this again, since it looks like OnePlus is still on the same page. The folks over at XDA developers who happened to have the review unit of the smartphone did a bunch of benchmark tests and analyzed them only to find out they were not real numbers.

Apparently, when a user enters a benchmark, the minimum frequency of the little cluster jumps to the maximum frequency as seen under performance governors. Due to this, all the cores are affected and are clocked at 1.9GHz. This allows the OnePlus 5 to put out one of the best scores on GeekBench 4 of Snapdragon 835 which we have seen to date. And what the source points out is that the same set of applications are affected this time around as well which we had experience last time OnePlus 3T. This clearly indicates that OnePlus is targeting the same set of packages.

In order to prove this, the folks over at XDA developers decided to run the test on a GeekBench 4 app which they stripped down of all the identifiers that were able to fool OnePlus’s cheating mechanism. They also ran the same test on the GeekBench 4 which is available in the Play Store and the results speak for itself. You can check out the screenshot above for more details on that.

Upon reaching out to OnePlus, they responded back saying that this was done in order to show the users the true performance capabilities of the OnePlus 5. You can head over to the source link down below to read the complete statement. This clearly indicates that OnePlus did this knowingly. Now one might argue saying that it makes sense, however, we believe that the Benchmark results should reflect the device’s day-to-day performance and not some manipulated results. All these inappropriate actions from OnePlus are doing nothing but breaking the customer’s trust. Over the past couple of days, we have been seeing a lot of incidents like this which makes as well as the users feel that OnePlus not the same community-centric brand anymore.

No Nougat Update for OnePlus 2
OnePlus 2 was launched in 2015 and despite the fact that it is eligible to receive the Nougat update, the company has abandoned it. They officially confirmed that the smartphone will not be updated to Nougat which is a major disappointment. You can read the full story on this which we covered in detail.
Service Issue
This was one of those instances which we did not expect from OnePlus. Quoting a reasonable price is one thing, however, charging double the cost of the actual smartphone itself is insane to even think about. The affected user, in this case, had no choice but to opt out of the option and buy a new smartphone or look somewhere else for a solution. You can check out the quote given the company below –

Once we covered the story and this turned into a chaotic situation for the company, they contact the affected user offering a 50-percent discount as well. This clearly indicates that the company is at fault here which they are trying to cover.

All these inappropriate practices which the company has been following is immensely disappointing. We hope OnePlus comes out with a better explanation to all of this in a timely manner. Let us know your thoughts on this.

Source – XDA Developers