The quick take
OnePlus is finally ready to join the big leagues with the OnePlus 3.
Gone are the days of justifying missing features with a cheap price,
and no longer can we give it a pass for its upstart-style of operation.
The OnePlus 3 is the real deal,
ready to be compared and evaluated as the flagship phone that it is.
It isn't going to wow you with oodles of new features or headline-grabbing,
never-before-seen experiences — it's just a downright great smartphone,
and that's precisely what most people are looking for.
In a marketplace flooded with great, affordable, high-end Android phones,
it's easy to scoff at the disproportionate amount of attention that
OnePlus has commanded for the past couple of years.
Invite-only sales, questionable quality control, weak customer support and
marketing blunders galore have gotten in the way of presenting the company's
phones for what they were — really good hardware, backed up by solid software
and prices that almost seemed too low.
After the breakout hit of the OnePlus One, the somewhat-forgettable OnePlus 2 was
affected most by the company's predisposition for shenanigans, quickly falling off the radar;
and the mid-cycle affordable OnePlus X was almost forgotten altogether, even though it was
a great phone for the money.
Whether you believe OnePlus has gotten its house in order, you can't deny that the company is
no longer a fad nor a flash in the pan ... it's the real deal,
and the best example of that is sitting
right here in my hand: the OnePlus 3. No longer are we looking at
a phone that's "good for the money"
or downplaying shortcomings in light of the phone as a whole — the OnePlus 3 is aiming to just be
a top-end phone, before you discuss the price or the company behind it.
Does it succeed in that quest? We answer that question here in our complete OnePlus 3 review.
Looking at the full history of OnePlus phones, you see a very nice progression of materials.
After the plastic OnePlus One, there was a metal-framed swappable-back OnePlus 2,
which really stepped up the game, followed by the solid metal-and-glass OnePlus X.
Now, we've gone full aluminum with the OnePlus 3.
With its fourth phone, OnePlus has chosen what has become a very popular design —
a minimalist lightly textured silver all-aluminum body, broken only as necessary by solid
antenna lines across the top and bottom. Viewed from the back, it's pure minimalism,
things aren't much different on the other side. A sheet of Gorilla Glass 4 covers the entire
front, save for a small speaker at the top and fingerprint sensor below, curving subtly down
to the sides. If you look close you'll see ever-so-subtle shiny chamfers along the edge of
the screen, fingerprint sensor, and camera protrusion around back.
The theme continues along the sides — nothing will particularly catch your eye. A standard
oblong power button sits below a SIM card tray on the right side, with a volume rocker on
the left accompanied by the OnePlus standard textured three-stage Alert Slider. The bottom
has six nicely-drilled holes for the loudspeaker, along with a USB-C port and headphone jack.
It's understandably difficult to get excited about a phone with a design and materials that
we've seen used a countless number of times in the past two years (the HTC One M8 and
iPhone 6 perhaps kicking that off). The OnePlus 3 isn't breaking any barriers in design,
or trying anything that's particularly new — but the one thing you can say about the way
OnePlus has done it is just how precisely it nailed the manufacturing.
You can't pick out a single place where it isn't absolutely spot on. Every edge,
every join of materials, every cutout, every transition from curve to flat — every placement
is perfect. This precision is hardly exclusive to OnePlus nowadays, as just about any
manufacturer can now do things with metal and glass that were previously reserved
to multi-billion-dollar companies just a few years ago. But just because you can do it
now doesn't mean every phone is built as well as the OnePlus 3.
That precise manufacturing comes across in how the phone feels when you pick it
up every single time. With a 5.5-inch display the OnePlus 3 is hardly small,
but it nestles into the crook of your palm and the flat sides give you just enough
to wrap your fingers around to get a sense that the phone isn't going to slide around much.
The smooth and gently curved back, which maxes out at 7.35 mm in thickness,
isn't ever going to be as easy to grip as the Sandstone-backed OnePlus 2,
but this phone in return isn't nearly as harsh on your hand.
It's a pleasure to hold, look at and use.
In a continuing theme, for the third straight year OnePlus has stuck with
a 5.5-inch 1920x1080 display. But as is often the case, the numbers don't really tell
the story — we're now looking at an AMOLED panel as a successor to the washed-out
and lackluster IPS panel used last year, and the benefits are immediately apparent.
Even without increasing the resolution, OnePlus has dramatically improved things by
going with a nicer panel this time around. Gone are the washed-out colors and poor visibility
in sunlight, and while the panel isn't quite up to the quality of those selected by Samsung for
its own phones — particularly in direct sunlight visibility, because Samsung is tops there —
this is a display anyone would be happy to have. It offers good viewing angles and great colors
right out of the box, but if you'd like to tweak a little bit OnePlus offers a color balance
slider in the settings as well.
And before you try and argue that 1080p isn't high enough of resolution, let's be real —
400 pixels per inch on a screen is plenty; and as I'll get into in further detail in this review,
it definitely has benefits when it comes to performance and battery life.
At some point you have to consider all aspects of the display,
not just focus on resolution, when evaluating it.
The AMOLED screen also plays into the aesthetic of OxygenOS, which has lots of dark colors
that really look great on this type of the screen — something anyone who has a
OnePlus X can tell you. That goes a step further if you choose to enable the dark mode
in the settings and turn on the ambient display mode (familiar to Nexus users) to glance
at notifications when they arrive on your sleeping phone.