OnePlus kicked off its ambitious smart TV journey with the debut of premium QLED smart TVs earlier last year. However, as my colleague Rupesh puts it, India is a price-conscious market and OnePlus seems to have finally understood this. Thus, OnePlus has decided to take the fight to Xiaomi, Vu, and others in the budget market with the launch of its U- and Y-series smart TVs in India today.
The Chinese giant may be looking to price its smart TVs more aggressively but it’s not losing out on the premium factor. You have a bezel-less LED panel on the front with a thicker bottom bezel to accommodate the OnePlus branding. The rear looks similar to the Q1 series TVs, with a brushed metal finish up-top and a carbon fiber cover at the bottom.
Display Specs
Turning our attention back to the front, the OnePlus TV U1 includes a 55-inch 4K LED panel (VA panel) with a 3840 x 2160 resolution, 95% screen-to-body ratio, and 93% DCI-P3 color gamut support. It also has HDR10+ and Dolby Vision certification. That’s not all though.
OnePlus has also included the same Gamma Engine found aboard the Q1 series to offer features like MEMC, dynamic contrast, Super Resolution, noise reduction, and more. I bet you already know about MEMC (Motion Estimation, Motion Compensation). It’s a feature that helps smoothen out frames and comes in super handy for viewing cricket matches and other sports.
Internals & Software
Under the hood, the 55-inch OnePlus TV U1 is powered by a quad-core Cortex A53 MediaTek MT5887 processor clocked up to 1.5GHz and Mali-G51 MP4 GPU. You will also find 3GB RAM and 16GB onboard storage, along with Android TV 9.0 out-of-the-box. It’s the stock Android TV UI that we’ve seen with the Q1 series, with Oxygen Play, a new Data Saver Plus feature, and a slew of pre-installed media streaming apps such as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, MX Player, Jio Cinema, and more.
OnePlus Connect
Last year, we called ‘OnePlus Connect’ as one of the best features of the OnePlus TV Q1 series, and well, it is here to stay. You can connect the TV to the OnePlus Connect app, which then enables features like Quick App Switch (multi-tasking, a feature missing in Android TV), TypeSync (using phone’s keyboard to input text on TV), trackpad, smart volume control, and more. There are some features such as turning on TV via the app, multi-device control (enables 5 users to link the OnePlus TV to the app on their phone including the iPhone), and auto-hotspot sharing.
Connectivity
You still won’t find a dedicated power button on the remote and have to long-press the ‘OnePlus’ button to switch on/ off the TV. As for the ports, the company has included 3x HDMI, 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, RF port, optical port, Ethernet, and AV port. The 55-inch OnePlus TV supports dual-band WiFi 802.11 ac (2.4GHz & 5GHz) and Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless connectivity purposes.
Moving to the Y-series, this is an even affordable smart TV lineup that includes a 32-inch HD-ready (1366 x 768) variant and 43-inch Full-HD (1920 x 1080) variant – but with the same LED panel (VA) as the 55-inch variant. This means it is pretty much the same as other popular offerings from Realme, Xiaomi, and others.
While the design is similar to OnePlus TV U55, there’s some key differences here and there. Both of these smart TVs feature a bezel-less design and 93% DCI-P3 wide color gamut for enhanced colors and contrast settings. Even the Gamma Engine is available aboard both the TVs. The screen-to-body ratio, however, varies with the 32-inch and 43-inch variants offering 88.5% and 91.2% SBR respectively as compared to the 95% SBR of the 55-inch variant.
OnePlus had been teasing the prices for all of the three variants for a couple of weeks and today, it has made things official. The 32-inch HD-ready OnePlus TV will retail at Rs. 12,999 (around $175), the 43-inch Full-HD variant will retail at Rs. 22,999 (around $308) and the highest-end 55-inch 4K U-series OnePlus TV will retail at Rs. 49,999 (around $670) in India.
