OnePlus Open Apex Edition unboxing and hands-on | Infinium-tech

Special edition smartphones are pretty cool and it gets even cooler when we are talking about a special edition of one of the best foldable phones ever – the OnePlus Open. Meet the OnePlus Open Apex Edition – a killer version of the fan-favourite foldable with a custom alert slider that opens up VIP mode for privacy champions. Oh, and it comes in this stunning crimson shadow colour with its classy vegan leather finish.

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

For example, the Apex Edition doesn’t have the high-clocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (or Gen 3), but it does offer the top-of-the-range memory configuration with 16 gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of storage. However, you’re paying $1,900 for it (EU pricing arrives on August 27).

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

Perhaps the biggest change coming to the OnePlus Open Apex Edition is the new alert slider. It’s prettier than the regular model, with orange accents in the textured body of the slider. Instead of the regular phone’s ring-vibrate-silent action, 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 camera, microphone and location. OnePlus says this is done at the “chip level” to ensure ultimate privacy.

VIP Mode on OnePlus Open Apex Edition

The phone will work normally, but you will get the VIP mode notice when you try to use any disabled feature. This is a great thing, putting a private mode on a hardware switch that is always accessible at your fingertips and is something that only OnePlus does on mainstream phones.

The OnePlus Open is still a great device 10 months after its release. Its dual 120Hz displays are excellent, and its seamless multitasking is still as useful now as it was in late 2023. The only thing people might argue is the older generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 weakness, but it still lags behind the newer chips by about 15%-20% in terms of processing and less than 10% in terms of graphics, and will remain fast enough for years to come.

Then, why not save a few hundred dollars or € and opt for the more or less identical OnePlus Open instead of the Apex Edition? Or wait a few months for the OnePlus Open 2 to arrive? We believe that exclusivity always comes with a price and the Apex Edition is clearly not an ordinary phone.