The OnePlus 3 is Here! Brings a Snapdragon 820, 6GB of RAM and more!

After the OnePlus One, 2, and X, OnePlus is back with a new flagship, the OnePlus 3. OnePlus is going for the “bang for your buck” market here with a Snapdragon 820, a whopping 6GB of RAM, and a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED display for just $399

The device ships with 64GB of storage, but unlike the OnePlus X, there is no expandable storage option. The battery is also a tad smaller than previous models: 3000mAh. All the other extras are here: you get NFC, a dual SIM slot, fingerprint reader, and a USB Type-C plug. The camera is 16MP with optical image stabilization, RAW support, and manual controls.

The biggest lesson OnePlus learned and has finally done away with is its invite-to-buy system. Like Xiaomi, OnePlus rose to the global stage selling phones with competitive specs at a fraction of the cost of premium devices. The OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 were successes driven by their low pricing as much as they were for their excellent build quality.

The OnePlus 3’s smooth unibody metal design borrows from the HTC One M8, iPhone 6S and Samsung Galaxy S7 that all came before it. The glass on the 5.5-inch display melts right into a thin chamfer before spilling into the metal body. The cutouts for all the ports are all located on the bottom. The fingerprint sensor is rounder this time and still unlocks the phone quickly with just a touch of the finger. It’s faster than the iPhone 6S’s Touch ID sensor, too.

OnePlus advertises that the OnePlus 3 is 35% faster with CPU tasks and 40% faster with graphics tasks. We’ve seen that Snapdragon 820 provides significant improvements in performance over Snapdragon 810, especially with Snapdragon 810’s throttling problems. The highlight of the smartphone is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC (two cores clocked at 2.2GHz, and two cores clocked at 1.6GHz) with Adreno 530 GPU on board, and 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

OnePlus 3 has OnePlus’s own skin, OxygenOS, Android remains fairly stock — there’s no bloatware anywhere in sight and no duplicate apps — and features like the Shelf notification board, gestures for activating features like the flashlight (draw a “v” on the screen) and camera (draw an “o”), dark mode and proximity sensor (wave hand over the screen or take phone out of your pocket) to check for the time and notifications are useful, but can be disabled at any time.

On top of all this power, you get battery life that lasts a day and half from its 3,000 mAh battery and Dash Charging, which charges up your phone from 0% to about 60% in 30 minutes.

The OnePlus 3’s 16-megapixel rear camera and 8-megapixel front-facing camera won’t topple any of its Android rivals if you compare their apertures.

It has a 16-megapixel rear camera with a Sony IMX298 sensor, an f/2.0 aperture, OIS and EIS, and PDAF autofocus, apart from RAW image support, 4K video recording support, and a Smile Capture mode. The front camera bears a Sony IMX179 sensor, an f/2.0 aperture on the fixed focus lens, and benefits from EIS. It can also handle 1080p video recording.

Including a microSD card slot for adding more storage would have made the OnePlus 3 even closer to perfect.

The OnePlus 3 is practically perfect, save for expandable storage, waterproofing, fast wireless charging and a QuadHD display. I honestly am okay with all these missing features.

The OnePlus 3 runs $399 for 64GB — that’s $70 more than the similarly configured OnePlus 2. More to the point, it’s significantly less expensive than the $800 and $749 asking prices for the 64GB editions of the Galaxy Note 5 and iPhone 6s Plus, respectively.

Buyers in India will get a free 12-month subscription to Saavn Pro, and can avail of a ‘double data’ offer from Idea Cellular for 12 months. They can also avail of 12 months accidental damage coverage through the ‘OnePlus Care app’ powered by Servify.