OnePlus 3 Review – Dashing Phone To Buy For Rs. 28,000

OnePlus 3 is the fourth phone from OnePlus and probably the most dashing phone for its look and features. Fortunately for the consumers, this phone is available without Invite System, which neither we nor majority of consumers like. If you have money in your pocket, you must get the device which you prefers to have. This time, you can buy OnePlus 3 at any time and that is also a plus point so to speak for the prospective buyers.

OnePlus 3 is priced Rs. 27,999 in India and available exclusively on Amazon.in We have used this phone for quite sometime and have reached at the conslusion that the company is more than justified to demand this much price from the buyers and you will be more than happy to possess this phone at this price. How and why? Just read on:

OnePlus has dispensed with its earlier design languages of plastic-clad, glass and opted to bring out sleek metal device to give it not only premium but refined and elegant look. This device looks glamorous to hold. It has robust construction as it is made of anodized aluminium which is of very refined quality. This phone is not heavy at all as it has thickness of 7.35mm and weighs just 158 grams. This phone gives the appearance of HTC 10 on the back but so long you get a device with premium features, the customers will be delighted to have this.

The OnePlus 3 has a 5.5-inch screen with minimal bezel on the screen’s long edges on the left and right. Surprisingly, the screen comes with installed screen protector and this is what we got in our review unit. We did not understand what is the need of this protector when the display is protected with Gorilla Glass 4. The screen protector is small and does not cover the whole screen and keeps few mm of display exposed on the left and right side. Moreover it attracts lot of smudges and has to be cleaned quite frequently.

This phone has power button and SIM slot on the right hand side. The volume rocker has been placed on the left. All the butons are quite firm and responds quickly. This phone also has Alert Slider on the left hand side for three modes of notifications – silent, priority and all notifications. The beauty of ths slider is that it is sturdy and can be moved with ease and their is no danger of making wrong selection. It will not move on its own because of its sturdiness even when the phone is tucked in your pocket. Moreover, you can switch between the modes with fair push even without taking out the phone from your pocket.

The home button beneath the screen is made of ceramic and also functions as a fingerprint reader. The home button is flanked by the capacitive navigation keys which comes in dots. The 3.5mm headset slot is given at the bottom edge instead of customary positioning on the top and the speaker is on the left hand side at the bottom. The USB Type-C port for charging battery is between the speaker and headset slot on the bottom.

Display – This phone has 5.5 inch full HD display (resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels at 401 ppi). Although it has become a trend now to equip preimum phone with quad HD display but still the display of this phone performs very well and its visibly in the sunlight is excellent. With AMOLED technology employed, the color reproduction is very good and you can enjoy watching movies and playing games. You can read crisp text on the screen and my overall experience of this screen, if was not of awe, but was certainly excellent.

Your overall experience of display would be nice and comparable to any premium device to larger extent.

Performance : This phone gets its power from the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor coupled with an Adreno 530 GPU. It comes with huge 6GB RAM and 64GB of internal storage, with no provision for further extension. This is probably one of the first few phones to be provided with 6GB RAM which is infact more than sufficient. With its massive RAM and the latest Snapdragon processor, the performance is bound to be silky smooth and you can play heavy graphics game without any lags or stutter. Browsing, media consumption and switching between the apps is a treat and all the functions flow very smoothly. Infact, whatever you want to do on this phone with the available apps and features, you will get satisfying experience in all respects.

This phone supports Dual-SIM with 4G connectivity. It supports both FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE: Bands. It also offers connectivity options of BT 4.2, Wi-Fi and NFC.

Battery : This phone gets its juice from 3000mAh battery which is average but still lasts easily for 8 to 10 hours for moderate usage. The saving grace here is that OnePlus has introduced proprietary Dash charging technology to charge the battery, which is take on fast charge technology. With Dash charger supplied with the box, the phone can be chareged from 0 to 100% in around 50 minutes and this has been our experience of few days. Moreover, you can charge from 0 to 60% in less than 30 minutes and this is great feature as it will eliminate the need of carrying the powerbank with you.

The other useful feature of Dash Charge is that it does not allow phone overheat when charging is in progress and you can continue fast charging even when streaming video or playing energy-intensive games or doing any other task on your phone.

Fingerprint reader : is given on the front on home button is very responsive and it reads your registered finger instantly and within split second it unlocks the phone. The fingerprint scanner is very easy to set-up. The fingerprint scanner has never failed me during my usage of the phone for the last 15 days.

Camera : This phone comes with 16MP rear camera equipped with f/2.0 aperture,  Optical Image stabilisation and Electronic Image Stabilization, laser autofocus and LED flash. It also has features of Smart Capture, which allows users to capture the ideal shot in any environment. Smart Capture functionalities include HD Mode, Auto HDR and Dynamic De-noise, which compares several frames of the same photo and blends them together in post-processing to reduce noise. This camera comes with various modes such as time lapse, slow motion, video, manual and panorama and you can reach to this when you press the small icon given on the top left hand side of the camera app.

On the paper, the specifications are quite brilliant but do they perform also when you capture the images. And answer is big Yes. In good light conditions, the camera reproduces bright and natural colors with lot of details. In this respect, you can easily compare the camera with flagship devices such as Galaxy S6, which I am using. Reproduced below are few images captured in daylight :

The low -light performance is not as good if you compare with very hig-end devices but that is quite understandable keeping in view of its price. Moreover, we have observed that even premium devices’s camera struggle a little bit when you click images in the night or in very low light. Some of the imags captured in the night with outdoor lights:

The primary camera is capable of shooting videos at upto 4K and slow motion and time lapse videos can also be shot with rear camea. With the front shooter, you can shoot videos upto 1080p. The rear camera can shoot video at up to 4K and can also shoot slow motion video at 120fps, while the front camera can shoot video at up to 1080p at 30fps.

This phone also houses an 8 MP front camera with f/2.0 aperture and also includes new Smile Capture feature which is ideal for selfies. The front shooter reproduces quite decent images for sharing on social media.

OS : The OnePlus 3 runs on OxygenOS 3.1.1, based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with some tweaks to make the overall experience better and smooth. Despite the fact that some additions have been added yet their are no unnecessary apps and bloatwares which are normally the bane of many customisations. The user expeirence of its software is very close to stock Android with few additinal features. Most of Marshmallow features have been kept intact in the tweaked OS which include Now On Tap and Doze Mode etc.

One of the interesting feature of tweaked OS is Shelf tool and by swiping it on the left from the right navigation button on the home screen, you get access to frequently used apps, contacts, widgets and weather information.

Ample options have been given to customise the display with little tweaks in the settings section. You can adjust color balance to set the white balance via a slider and also set night mode for easy visibilty in the dark conditions. Ambient display provides you basic information without waking the phone and with Proximity wake, you can wake device by waving your hand over display.

To be frank, the Oxygen OS can be described as stock Android with added minor features which enrich your Android experience.

Conclusion: OnePlus 3 has all the ingredients of a premium device such as powerful Snapdragon 820 processor, massive 6GB RAM, Dash Charging capability, fast fingerprint sensor, 16 MP rear camera for brighter images especially in good lighting and ofcourse sleek and very impresssive design. This runs on the latest Marshmallow OS with little Oxygen tweaks. For the sake of critising, I can say that internal storage of 64GB is not expandable and the quality of single speaker at the bottom is not upto the mark, the camera struggles in low-light and that is all. I could not find any other lower points in this phone.

At a price of Rs 27,999, it won’t be wrong to say that this is the best option at the moment in this price segment. It will also not be overstatement to say that this is the real dashing phone and is really a giant killer in true sense of the word.