I’ve written before that for the OnePlus 5, the official protector is what I recommend. And for the Sony XZP, Banana’s soft film. Problem with soft film is it deforms easily and gets dirty fast — you’re basically replacing it every month. Which is when you start missing glass film. Shame that glass film on this thing always leaves a white edge. Sure, there’s white-edge oil, but it doesn’t last — two weeks tops and it’s gone, time to re-oil. And the stuff in those bottles really does seem to be just plain oil. Completely unreliable. Then I saw someone on XDA post a video of a fully transparent, fully laminated glass protector for the Sony XZP. And that’s when I noticed: the lamination process uses “optical adhesive” as the filler. It’s liquid going on, and sets into a semi-solid — way more trustworthy than oil. So I went looking for someone on eBay selling it, and what do you know, I found a seller offering liquid optical gel for white-edge repair. Tried it right away. Works well. Thicker than your average white-edge oil, but it still seeps into the edge just fine — a little pressure with your finger is enough.

I have two phones. Before, it was a Nexus 6P and a Nexus 5X—one on China Mobile, one on China Unicom. Right now the Unicom one is Sony’s XZP, so for the Mobile line I picked the OnePlus 5. OnePlus 5: OxygenOS leans stock. Snapdragon 835—honestly, at this point if it’s not a Snapdragon 835 I don’t even want to use it. Chinese full-network support, plus warranty. Supposedly the warranty service is good. Build quality is solid. I watched that foreigner’s bend test video—the OnePlus 5’s materials are impressive. Then again, OnePlus has always been a spec-stacking factory. The OnePlus 5 still meets my few requirements for a phone—except the screen… but since it’s a secondary phone I don’t care about the screen. So I bought it.

Honestly, the OnePlus 3 doesn’t interest me much, even though foreigners keep hyping it up overseas like it’s the best thing ever—to the point where I wonder if they’re all getting paid. Fortunately, there’s still one Korean who keeps trashing the OnePlus 3, saying it doesn’t deserve the flagship title at all, and that he wouldn’t recommend buying it unless your budget is really tight. That guy raised my opinion of Koreans quite a bit. But this isn’t about the OnePlus 3 phone—it’s about the OnePlus sling bag. Some of you might know that when the OnePlus 3 launched, they also released a OnePlus sling bag. It looked pretty nice, but the price was a bit steep. What’s even dumber is that the first batch apparently required an invite code. I heard the OnePlus backpack was impossible to buy before too… I wasn’t planning to buy this thing originally. It’s just that a classmate wanted one, said he was a OnePlus fan, had two codes, and asked if I wanted one… After much deliberation, I still ended up chopping off my hand.