OnePlus Open Apex Edition unboxing and hands-on

07 August 2024

Special edition smartphones are cool and even more so when we're talking about a special edition of one of the best foldable phones around - the OnePlus Open. Meet the OnePlus Open Apex Edition - a maxed-out variant of the fan-favorite foldable with a custom alert slider that opens up a VIP Mode for the champions of privacy. Oh, and it comes in this rather exquisite Crimson Shadow color on top of its classy vegan leather finish.

The Crimson Shadow color extends to the two-piece case, which shares the leather texture of the phone's back panel even if it can't quite match its leather feel. You also get the 67W charger and a USB-C cable - standard Open stuff.

The Apex Edition doesn't have a higher-clocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (nor a Gen 3, for that matter), for instance, but it does offer the best possible memory config with 16 gigs of RAM and a whole terabyte of storage. You're paying for the perks, however, at $1,900 (EU price to come on August 27).

The OnePlus Open already offered 16GB of RAM as standard, but the added storage is always a welcome thing!

Probably the biggest change coming from the OnePlus Open Apex Edition is the new alert slider. It's prettier than the regular model with an orange accent dug into the textured body of the slider. Instead of the Ring-Vibrate-Silent action of the regular phone, it offers Ring-Vibrate - and a VIP Mode.

Flip the Open Apex Edition into VIP Mode and the phone goes incognito and turns off the cameras, microphone, and location. OnePlus says this is done on a "chip level" to ensure the ultimate privacy.

The phone will function as normal, but you'll get a VIP Mode notice when you try to use any of the disabled features. It's a neat thing, putting a private mode on a hardware switch that's always accessible at your fingertips and is something only OnePlus does on a mainstream phone.

The OnePlus Open is still a stellar device 10 months on from its release. Its dual 120Hz displays are excellent, and its intuitive multitasking is still as useful as it was in late 2023. The only thing people can argue is a weakness is the older-gen Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but it is still just around 15%-20% behind the new chip on processing and under 10% at graphics, and will be sufficiently fast for years to come.

Then again, why not save a few hundred $ or € and go for the more or less identical OnePlus Open over the Apex Edition? Or wait a few months for a the OnePlus Open 2 to drop? We guess exclusivity always comes with a price and the Apex Edition is clearly not an ordinary phone.