Cold. Gearbest!! (Absolutely terrible company) combined with mod abusing position to get onto Highlights page at 30 degrees heat. Seriously guys?

I very rarely comment on here but I felt I should on this deal. Absolutely agree with others in this thread - this post is absolutely endemic of a wider problem which is beginning to ruin this site which I've followed closely for about ten years. What made this community so great was the trust you could put in other users contributions, the impartially, where, on the whole, you didn't feel like the site was trying to sell to you. Sadly, that's disappearing more and more with blatantly promoted deals and vendors/mods pushing [email protected] like this on unsuspecting users. 

As for the offer itself: 

This is an absolutely garbage deal! You are buying a phone from a manufacturer who is widely known for their abysmal customer service and poor reliability. So getting it as a grey import is just a terrible start. This phone is not cheap enough to be disposable like some £25 earphones! 

As for the phone: 

It seems now that Oneplus has gone mainstream their visibility and marketing team are carrying them along nicely as opposed to their actual value for money proposition which attracted users in the company's infancy. 

They have taken advantage of a very techy initial userbase who told all their friends about this cool new company who made amazing phones which you had to be specially invited to buy and only cost a fraction of the brand names. 

I've owned the OPO (great phone at the time), the ill forgotten OPX (imo the best phone they made, really underrated) and the OP3T (also good but has its issues). 

Yes ALL the previous phones had their flaws, buggy software, TERRIBLE or non existent customer support, missing features and no updates, but they were half or third the price of comparative models! It was worth the minor headaches and risk! We put up with that because we knew the specs were good and we could root the phone and fix the problems. 

I was really looking forward to the release of this phone and held off upgrading, but I feel like myself and the majority of their user base were thoroughly disappointed as the leaks appeared on the run up to launch day. We held out hope that maybe, just maybe, they would undercut everyone on price making it great value. Sadly not.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would want to buy this over the multitude of better options in the market now. It's no longer a flagship killer. (Sticking the latest processor in it does not make it a flagship killer - especially when Oneplus have been called out multiple times for cheating on benchmark scores). 

This doesn't come close to competing with the flagships as a whole package. Not like their old models did. The paper based "specs war" ended ages ago - no one cares how much ram, GHz or megapixels you have anymore, it's irrelevant. Feature set, camera quality (hard and software wise), real life battery - thats the kind of thing that matters now.

This isn't the quirky oneplus you might have heard your "tech savvy" friends talking about a while ago. This is a totally different company now. A disappointing one. 

Sorry for the rant - TLDR: 

- Shame on HUKD for promoting this to people so blatantly. 

- Shame on Oneplus for this shambles of a release and for completely and systematically shafting the userbase which helped build their company. 

Buy at your own risk - you will need to send this back to China at some point. It WILL be a headache and you will be without a phone for 4-6 weeks if all goes well. 

Assuming they do it legit, you'll need to add 20% for VAT and 2.5% after that for customs charges. So this "deal" will work out £479.53 for the 64GB and £567.60 for the 128GB. And on top of that your 4G is gimped.

edit: ha, that's more expensive than just buying from OnePlus, this is a terrible deal.

Its because Gearbest pay money for advertising and making itself visible. Thanks to this, it will generate more traffic/sales/etc etc.

Remember the days when Chinese retailers were absolutely banned from here - not anymore...

Money will give you everything you want!

8GB RAM?!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This will go ice cold i guess... one it is oneplus 5 which has been thrashed over its seemingly less value for money proposition compared to previous oneplus phones.... other being it is gearbest .....

How did this make the Highlights list already? It's only just come on. What's the algorithm that determines the criteria as a highlight deal?

Ye as much as I like GearBest I would never buy a phone of this value from them... Where do you sit with the warranty for example because it won't be with OnePlus...

But it's still only on 74 degrees heat?? Hmm... Edit: 105 degrees heat.. still not near what the deals in the highlights are..

I'm in the market for a Oneplus 5. If I order from Gearbest, will I be stung by customs and duty? (in which case it will be better to buy from Oneplus direct).

iPhone knockoff by the looks of it

I've got this phone, really happy with it, hot