Oneplus 3

Oneplus 3 Review

Design And Display

OnePlus has been slowly improving the quality of its materials, and this year it's went to an all-aluminum unibody design. it shows a bit of oil from your skin after being handled for a while, but it doesn't collect fingerprints. Near the top and bottom of the metal rear housing are dark antenna lines, the positioning and shape of which are extremely reminiscent of the HTC One M7. The overall device is less angular than that phone, though.

The edges are slightly curved so as not to be sharp or uncomfortable to hold, although they are quite slim. The phone is 7.35mm thick in the middle, but it tapers down near the edges. This is a much more svelte phone than the OnePlus 2, which was 9.9mm thick. Of course, that phone and the One had the distinctive sandstone material on the back. I actually think I miss that—I get that aluminum is a more "premium" material, but the sandstone was distinctive. The OnePlus 3 looks rather generic by comparison. There's nothing wrong with the way it looks; it's just safe and understated.

By making the device thinner this year, OnePlus actually scaled back the battery capacity from 3300mAh in the OP2 to just 3000mAh. I'll get into the battery life alter, but I feel like this was an all-around bad idea. By contrast, Samsung made the Galaxy S7 a little thicker this year and added a larger battery. This has the happy upshot of making the back panel flush with the camera sensor. The OnePlus 3, however, has a camera hump.

The "Optic AMOLED" is apparently a Samsung panel, but it doesn't stand up to Samsung's own phones. The white balance looks too cool at the default calibration. Luckily, there are controls to tweak that in the settings. Not so luckily, you have to push it almost all the way to the warm side to make it look acceptable. In general, I feel like the color calibration is off with lots of inaccurate, overly saturated colors. And for the record, I consider Samsung's current generation panels to be a good approximation of "accurate," so that's what I'm comparing to. Viewing angles are excellent, though, with no substantial dimming or color cast at off angles.

This is "only" 1080p, and it's a PenTile array. That means there are fewer subpixels than a standard RGB matrix, but all modern AMOLEDs do this. It's just harder to tell at 1440p. You can definitely see that crosshatch PenTile pattern on the 1080p OP3 if you know what to look for. The slight fringing is particularly evident around text and rounded icons.

The outdoor brightness is good enough—the display is readable, but it doesn't seem very smart about ramping the brightness up to maximum. It's also not as bright as the OnePlus 2 or any 2016 flagship phone. If you manually push it up, you can read the phone outside, but it's not pleasant. Likewise, the low end of the brightness scale is too bright. I still prefer to use a screen filter app in a dark room to push the brightness down lower. Switching to AMOLED does mean the blacks are perfect and contrast is fantastic. The dark UI mode really pops.

Charging And Battery

So, OnePlus thought dropping some battery capacity was a good idea this year. Spoiler alert: that's never a good idea. The smaller battery doesn't make it a terrible device, but I think it does weaken it in some interesting ways. Before we get into all that, let's talk about the basics. This phone has a 3,000mAh battery with Dash Charge via the USB Type-C port. Dash charge is roughly as fast as Quick Charge 3.0, but it requires different hardware in the adapter and cable (it's a licensed form of Oppo's VOOC).

The phone comes with one adapter/cable combo that supports Dash Charge. They have power management and heat dispersal hardware in them, which should keep the phone cooler and allow charging and processing to continue at full speed even if you use when it's plugged in... or so they say. Below I have some thermal images of the OnePlus 3 and Nexus 6P, both of which were charging from 30-40% battery for 20 minutes with their stock fast chargers. The temperatures of the hottest areas of the phone are virtually the same. The internal battery temperature was within a few degrees at any given time, but there neither was consistently cooler than the other.

With Dash Charge, you can get a full battery (0-100) in slightly over an hour based on my testing. OP claims it's a bit faster than that. Either way, it's incredibly fast. When connected to a different charger, the phone still charges, but at slower speeds. On a Quick Charge 3.0 adapter, you're looking at roughly 2.5 hours for a full charge. The Nexus Type-C chargers use higher current (not as high as VOOC, though), so these are a bit faster. These chargers can do a full charge in a little under two hours.

There won't be any third-party Dash Charge accessories, and OP hasn't released the necessary files for ROM builders to support the technology. It's sub-optimal, but at least OnePlus has some form of fast charging this year.

Camera

The camera sensor on the OnePlus 3 is in a more sane spot this year, rather than exactly where I want to rest my finger on the back of the phone like the OP2. The sensor and pixel size is also a little smaller this year compared to the OP2. As I mentioned above, it sticks out of the phone a bit, which I'm not crazy about, but how does it do? It's a solid performer most of the time, but it won't blow you away with image quality.

OnePlus has improved dramatically compared to the OP2 when it comes to indoor photos. There's very little noise with medium and low light. It's not as good as the Galaxy S7, but it's close to what the Nexus 6P can do. Although, white balance in most indoor situations tends to be too warm. I think this is probably the most noticeable problem. I'm also not completely happy with the autofocus. It's phase detection this year instead of laser-assisted, and it's a bit on the sluggish side.

Performance

The Snapdragon 820 SoC has been covered before at great length, so you probably know what to expect. It's an improvement over the Snapdragon 810 from last year's OP phone, which could get quite toasty. The OnePlus 3 seems to remain faster for longer, and it's at least as fast in general for basic tasks as sending like the Galaxy S7. I've seen a few minor performance hiccups, but nothing dramatic. There are some benchmarks below for your perusal.

Conclusion

While OnePlus has never talked specifics, I suspect the OnePlus 2 was a bit of a flop. OP had to turn things around in 2016 to stay afloat, and I think it's done that with the OnePlus 3. It's not a perfect phone—corners have been cut, and some of them really annoy me. However, there's more right with this phone than wrong with it. OnePlus has learned to cut the right corners to avoid most big deal breakers.

The metal design of the OnePlus 3 is subdued, but I can't really call that a bad thing. It looks like a mature and understated smartphone. The fingerprint sensor is fantastic, and the camera is surprisingly capable. It's a very fast phone in general use too. I also really like having the option to fast charge this phone, but the hardware limitation is annoying. If you don't mind losing downtime and Android Wear control, the alert slider is neat—OP is the only OEM to offer it.

I think OnePlus could have done better balancing the battery, display, and RAM. The 1080p AMOLED panel (supposedly chosen for better battery life) has strange calibration and you can see the PenTile fringe. It's not like phones with 1440p displays can't have excellent battery life anyway. The smaller battery is good enough for a day, but apparently that's only because the 6GB of RAM is not being put to proper use. The OP3 kills apps much faster than I expected, making the RAM little more than a bullet point on the spec sheet.

I have no real objection to Oxygen OS except to say it's not advancing much over time. The real test is going to be updates. If it takes OnePlus ages to update this phone to N, you might regret buying it. That said, you would not be crazy to pick up the OnePlus 3 right now, especially if you've been looking for a OnePlus One replacement. And hey, you don't need an invite.