Did you pick up a OnePlus 5 only to find yourself so sorely disappointed when the company followed up with the OnePlus 5T such a short time afterward? There really isn’t all that much that’s different between the two phones aesthetically (or anything at all, really), but one feature that you didn’t have up until now is Face Unlock. As promised, that has now changed for the new year.

A new open beta of the company’s OxygenOS is now available for owners of the OnePlus 5, effectively adding Face Unlock to the marginally older smartphone. It’s important to note that this is just a beta, though, so it’s not a fully stable release just yet.

If you’d rather not deal with potential glitches, hiccups and random reboots, it’s probably best to wait until they push out the non-beta official update to OxygenOS. For everyone else with a OnePlus 5, you can have Face Unlock now.

It’s also very important to note that this mechanism for unlocking your phone isn’t as secure as other seemingly similar solutions from other companies. It doesn’t use the advanced depth sensors of the iPhone X and it’s not an iris scanner like the Galaxy Note8. It’s literally just looking at your face, a method for unlocking that was originally baked into Android years ago… just better now. And faster. So much faster.

So if you’re willing to sacrifice some security for added convenience on your five-month-old phone, go ahead and rock that new beta. Never settle?

Share This With The World!