OnePlus 3 review: Soon to be outpaced by the OnePlus 5

The OnePlus 3 is only 19-months old, and it has already been superceded three times. The OnePlus 3T stole its thunder just five months after release before the OnePlus 5 and 5T appeared to truly bury it. The OnePlus 3 would still be worth buying today at the right price – but it’s something of a moot point given nobody sells it anymore.

You could buy one pre-owned of course, but there’s not too much point when it’s been improved upon in every way by its most recent successor the OnePlus 5T. You can read our full review here, but suffice it to say that not only is the 5T a lot faster, it’s also quite the looker with its edge-to-edge display. Still no expandable storage, mind, and it’s also considerably more expensive, coming in at £450 – a steep £121 increase on the 3T. To be frank, that’s kind of the way all smartphones have gone in the last year, and even at that price, the OnePlus 5T is our pick of the mid-to-high end phones.

Jon’s original review continues below.

The OnePlus 3: At a glance

Not sure if the OnePlus 3 is the right phone for you? Then here’s a quick summary of all the OnePlus 3’s key features, and the major things to look out for. You’ll find Alphr’s full in-depth review below, and if you have any burning questions that aren’t answered in the review, then let us know in the Disqus comments at the bottom of the page. 

• The OnePlus 3 is a smartphone with a flagship specification, but only costs £329.
• It’s powered by the same core hardware as many, far pricier high-end phones – the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820.
• The high-end hardware means apps and games are super-responsive, but battery life is also amazing. Only the Samsung Galaxy S7 is better.
• The 5.5in Full HD screen uses AMOLED tech, but isn’t quite as bright or colour-accurate as other flagship rivals.
• The 13-megapixel rear camera and 8-megapixel front camera are up with the best.

OnePlus 3 review: In full

The OnePlus 3 is one of the most highly anticipated smartphones of 2016 so far, and it has a lot to live up to. Its predecessor, the OnePlus 2, has been my pick of the sub-£300 smartphones ever since it launched last year, and is still on sale at £249. The new model is £60 more expensive, so is the OnePlus 3 worth the price hike?

Immediate impressions are positive. Although the phone has the same 5.5in-sized screen as the OnePlus 2, elsewhere, it’s all change. The headline specifications see the new phone move to the faster, more efficient Snapdragon 820 processor, with twice the amount of RAM. The OnePlus 3 has NFC in addition to a front-mounted fingerprint reader, allowing it to be used for contactless payments via Android Pay. Although the screen is the same size, OnePlus now employs AMOLED tech where its predecessor had an IPS display. And the camera sees an upgrade in resolution and features.

I wasn’t quite as bowled over with the design when I first clapped eyes on it. It looks bland from a distance; a design that’s indistinct, that looks eerily like the long-lost love child of the HTC One M9 and Honor 5X, that simply doesn’t make a statement.

Get it in your hand, however, and it’s a different story. The OnePlus feels robust and refined in all the right ways. In fact, you know what? It’s great. Really great. Forget about the bland looks – the OnePlus 3 is fabulous value.

In fact, if you gave this to me and blanked out the logo, I’d guess it was a far more expensive handset, closer to £600 than £329. It’s lighter and slimmer than the OnePlus 2, shaving 17g off that phone’s weight and 1.5mm off its thickness, despite having the same-sized screen, and it’s packed with lovely little details. The edges of the screen are slightly rounded, the buttons have a solid, positive click, and the do-not-disturb slider on the left edge has a lovely mechanical snick to it.

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That slider was one of my favourite features on the OnePlus 2, and it’s great to see it here as well. Being able to put the phone into silent mode at the flick of a switch is so useful you have to wonder why more Android manufacturers haven’t done it.

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And it’s combined here with other practical features. The fingerprint reader sits below the screen in the middle, and it’s as responsive and reliable as you’d hope it to be. There’s also a dual-SIM slot on the left-hand edge, although you don’t get a microSD slot to expand the phone’s 64GB of internal storage.

One thing that fans of the OnePlus 2 might bemoan is the fact you can no longer remove the backplate and replace it with a finish of your choosing. OnePlus’ selection of official cases makes up for this, however, with a choice of five different options, and a mixture of natural and man-made materials to choose from.

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The “black apricot” wood case is my favourite (pictured above on the far left), but if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can have bamboo, black “sandstone”, carbon fibre and rosewood as well. The cases cost £20 each and you can order them on the OnePlus website.

If one of them takes your fancy at all, it’s well worth ordering when you buy your phone, as OnePlus doesn’t offer free shipping below £60. Alternatively, there’s already a good selection of third-party cases you can buy through retailers such as Amazon.

Buy OnePlus 3 cases now from Amazon

^ Rosewood

^ Carbon Fibre

^ Black apricot

^ Bamboo

Continues on page 2

OnePlus 3 review: Performance and battery life

Enough of the shallow frippery, however, and onto the meat of the subject. How does the OnePlus 3 compare with its rivals when it comes to raw performance?

First of all, let’s pick out those rivals. At £329 SIM-free (and remember, there’s no invite system this year, so you can buy one outright now), it’s up against a number of strong alternatives. There’s the Nexus 5X, which retails at £299; the pricier, but incredibly good-value Nexus 6P, currently on sale for £379; the cheaper Motorola Moto G4, which at £169 gives many a more expensive smartphone a run for its money; and the OnePlus 3’s own stablemate the OnePlus 2, which is down to £249.

That’s a pretty strong selection of smartphones, and yet the OnePlus 3 batters them all on the performance front. Just check out these graphs:

The OnePlus 3 gains average frame rates double that of its nearest competitors in the graphics-heavy GFXBench GL tests. (Its native resolution is 1080p, which explains why the frame rate is the same for both tests.)

The Geekbench results are equally impressive, with the OnePlus 3 holding a huge advantage over the rest of the pack. Its Snapdragon 820 processor, backed here by an enormous 6GB of RAM, is a beast and kills the competition stone-dead. In fact, you have to move up to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6s Plus before you find a smartphone that can compete.

As you might expect, the phone feels ultra-responsive, and there’s pretty much nothing I’ve found that fazes it. The big question is, how does all this power affect battery life? The answer is, as long as you’re not playing hardcore 3D games all day, not at all.

In our video-rundown battery-life tests, the OnePlus 3 outlasted every one of its mid-price rivals once again, sailing on past the Moto G4’s time of 13hrs 39mins by an impressive margin of 3hrs 17mins, even challenging the all-conquering Samsung Galaxy S7 for stamina. For reference, the Samsung lasted 17hrs 48mins in this test.

After a month of day-to-day use, I can confirm that the OnePlus 3’s battery is comfortably up to a day of moderate use. It will stretch even further if you’re careful, but don’t be encouraged to neglect your overnight charging routine. I haven’t had the phone last anywhere close to two days yet. It’s good, but not that good.

It’s quick to charge, though. The OnePlus 3 doesn’t support Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3, instead preferring its own “Dash Charge” technology, which is new to the OnePlus range with the OnePlus 3. I tested it out using the charger supplied in the box, and found that the OnePlus 3 reached 50% in 23 minutes, 75% in 35 minutes and 100% in 1hr 14mins.

That’s impressive, but not significantly faster than other phones I’ve tested that use Qualcomm’s open-standard Quick Charge tech. So why has OnePlus opted for something different? The answer is that there’s another, less well publicised benefit to the technology aside from the speed of charging: it doesn’t overheat as readily while connected to the mains, which means if you want to use it to play demanding games while charging it’s less likely to throttle and slow down – and it’ll be more comfortable to hold.

The caveat is that you need to use OnePlus’ own adapter (supplied in the box, fortunately) to get the full benefit, and with replacements costing north of £25, you don’t want to be losing it. OnePlus isn’t opening up Dash Charge to third parties, either, so don’t expect to see cheap alternatives on ebay any time soon.

OnePlus 3 review: How good is the Optic AMOLED screen?

So far, so amazing. In order to gain an Alphr recommendation and the full five stars, however, a smartphone has to do everything well, not just one or two things. So is the screen up to scratch?

Alas, not quite. First, the positives: it’s big, at 5.5in, and although its 1080p resolution doesn’t look as impressive on paper as, say, the Nexus 6P’s 1,440 x 2,560 resolution, it’s still pretty sharp.

In fact, at a viewing distance of 38cm from your eye, the angular resolution delivered to your eye is only just below the level at which those with 20/20 vision would be able to see it, at 45.6ppd (pixels per degree). For reference, those with 20/20 vision are able to discern details at 60ppd and below. Those with 20/10 vision – the generally accepted upper limit of visual accuity – can see details at 120ppd and below.

Also, it uses an AMOLED panel, so the black level and contrast are perfect. The specific type of AMOLED in use, however, isn’t immediately clear. OnePlus calls its technology, rather mysteriously, Optic AMOLED, but as part of a recent Ask Me Anything on Reddit, OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei revealed that it was nothing more than a Samsung Super AMOLED panel with a bunch of software and colour “optimisations”.

“We’ve taken Super AMOLED and added our take on contrast and colour temperature, to try and bring it more true to life. In addition, we’ve designed its performance profile to work well when outdoors in bright conditions,” said Pei.

So how does the screen perform? Not bad, but not great. First, brightness is respectable. In fact, it goes brighter than most AMOLED screens, reaching an impressively high 415cd/m² with the brightness slider adjusted all the way to the right. I’ve only seen Samsung’s AMOLED-equipped phones reach a higher brightness than this, and they hit peak brightness of above 500cd/m² only when the auto-brightness setting is enabled.

Put simply, you should be able to read the screen comfortably in all but the sunniest of conditions, and because it’s AMOLED and has perfect contrast, colours stand out strongly.

The negatives – and there are some – principally surround colour balance and colour accuracy. In short, OnePlus hasn’t been able to tame the tendencies of AMOLED to oversaturate colours. Photos and videos look great, and the screen covers 100% of the sRGB colour gamut, ensuring vivid tones and lots of subtle variations – but colour accuracy is way off beam, and that translates into certain graphics and icons taking on a strangely candy-colour, neon quality.

The red segment of the Chrome logo, for instance, is much paler and more orangey than I’d expect it to be, and the blue of the Facebook logo has a weird purple tinge. It all just looks a little odd.

This isn’t the huge problem some have made it out to be, and it’s certainly an issue I’d be prepared to live with, but while good, it’s clear that the OnePlus 3’s screen doesn’t reach the same heights as the best smartphone displays on the market.

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The good news is that OnePlus is on the case. Since launch, the OnePlus 3’s software has been updated, and if your firmware is current, you’ll find a special colour mode in the phone’s developer options that largely rectifies the colour-accuracy problems outlined above.

You can turn on developer options pretty easily. Go to Settings | About phone and then tap the “Build number” item at the very bottom of the list seven times. This will introduce a new item in the main Settings screen called Developer Options. Come out of the About Phone menu and select it. Next, you’ll need to enable developer options by flicking the switch in the top-right corner of the screen, and finally you’ll find the sRGB option six rows down, under Picture Colour Mode.

With this done, you’ll notice that colours are instantly more muted and white might look oddly yellow as well. Don’t worry: this is just your eyes adjusting. As my measurements demonstrate, the colour accuracy and white point are much closer to ideal than they were previously, with an average Delta E down from 5.39 to 1.84, and the previous maximum of 16.24 on primary red reduced to 4.41.

As well as the added sRGB mode, the software updates have fixed a number of other problems and improved certain aspects of the OnePlus 3’s performance. You might not have not have noticed these since they’re far from critical issues, but it’s good to see OnePlus staying on top of things.

In the list of improvements is an issue with notifications, improved RAM management and GPS performance, although I hadn’t noticed a particular problem on the latter front. The OnePlus 3 also has enhanced audio playback.

OnePlus 3 review: Camera quality

Camera quality is just as important as screen quality, and it’s good to see that OnePlus hasn’t skimped on the specifications here. The OnePlus 3 has a 16-megapixel camera at the back and an 8-megapixel one at the front, but it’s the rear camera I’m most interested in here.

In terms of resolution, it’s an upgrade on the OnePlus 2’s 13-megapixel unit, and it also beats the Nexus 6P and 5X, which have 12.3-megapixel sensors. However, quality is affected not solely by the number of pixels a camera has, but also how good the autofocus is, how much light the optics let in, and how well the software exposes the image in the first place.

On the hardware front, the OnePlus 3 has all the right elements in place. It has a fast phase-detect autofocus system that locks onto subjects in a jiffy, without hunting back and forth. It has a nice, bright aperture of f/2, and there’s also optical image stabilisation (OIS) to help keep images captured in low light nice and crisp.

The Nexus 6P can’t beat this set of features. It has an equally bright aperture of f/2, plus fast laser-assisted autofocus, but no OIS. On the other hand, the 6P’s 1/2.3in sensor is larger than the OnePlus 3’s 1/2.8in sensor.

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^ Click on any of the above images to get a closer look

In practice, this means the Nexus 6P’s camera holds the edge in outright quality, with slightly less noise marring the fine details and more refined colour reproduction, but the OnePlus 3’s camera wins in terms of reliability. When you hit the shutter button on the OnePlus 3, it’s less likely to come out blurry.

Either way, the OnePlus 3’s camera is seriously impressive, as is its high-resolution, 8-megapixel front-facing camera, which captures a truly scary level of facial detail in selfies.

OnePlus 3 review: Software

Also impressive, but in a much more understated way, is OnePlus’ software. I say understated, because its Oxygen OS (version 3.1.2) is so similar to stock Android that, to the uninitiated, it’s tough to tell the difference.

This is undeniably a good thing, but there are some things Oxygen does that Android 6 Marshmallow doesn’t. The most obvious feature is the Shelf. Found to the left of the main home screen, this comes pre-configured with a list of frequently accessed apps, gives you a tool for jotting down quick notes, which can be used as reminders, and can be customised with various widgets – anything from frequent contacts to Google Play Music.

I’ve never been completely convinced by the Shelf. It first appeared on the OnePlus 2, and I used it infrequently on that phone – because it’s tucked away to the left, I rarely look at it, and when I do it’s usually by accident. I’d far rather simply access apps by tapping shortcuts on the homescreen or in the app drawer. Adding yet another way to do this isn’t necessary.

The only unique thing Shelf does is to provide quick access to memos and reminders, but once jotted down, there’s no easy way of removing memos (or widgets for that matter) from the list. Fortunately, it is easy to disable the Shelf if you don’t need it or want to use it. Simply long press any blank area of any home screen, select Customise and tap the switch next to Enable Shelf.

Delve into the settings, meanwhile, and you’ll see a number of options revealing Oxygen’s extra functions and customisation opportunities. You can tweak the slider switch settings, for instance, and change what the capacitive buttons that sit either side of the fingerprint reader do. I prefer my back key to be on the right and the recent apps key on the left, and this is easy to change from the stock setup, which sees the functions reversed.

To save battery life, you can switch the OS to dark mode, a technique that works because of the way AMOLED screens light their pixels. Unlike IPS panels, which use a backlight that shines through the pixels, the pixels on AMOLED displays each create their own source of light. This means that when a pixel is told to be black it simply switches off, saving power, whereas an IPS pixel simply blocks the light, which remains on in the background. In other words, it’s definitely a feature worth having and should come in useful if you find you need to eke out your battery life a little longer.

Elsewhere, it’s possible to customise the colour of the notification LED. And you can also set up a series of gestures to which the phone will respond when it’s in standby. A double-tap the screen to wake the phone, draw a “V” to toggle the flashlight on and off, draw an “O” to launch straight into the camera app, and drag two fingers down the screen to pause or play media. Each and every one of these gestures can be disabled or enabled in Oxygen’s settings.

One thing that OnePlus has been criticised for in the past is its lack of frequent software updates. So far, though, with the OnePlus 3, things are looking up. Since I first reviewed the phone, it has received multiple updates aimed at either fixing small bugs or adding new features, like the new sRGB colour mode described above.

OnePlus 3 owners keen to get updates more frequently, however, should check out OnePlus’ “community builds”, which deliver new features early via a download from the company’s website. Note, though, that these bleeding edge updates are quite tricky to install, requiring you to flash your phone via ADB sideload. If this means nothing to you, I’d recommend waiting until the new features roll in via the official over the air update.

It’s also worth noting that, being beta releases, the community builds will have bugs, sometimes quite serious ones. All that considered it’s good to see a smartphone manufacturer adopting a flexible approach, and giving those who what it early access.

OnePlus 3 review: Verdict

The OnePlus 3 is a cracking handset at an almost unbelievable price, but in order to keep the cost to such a reasonable level, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has to keep margins to an absolute minimum. And after warning recently that the Brexit vote could cause UK prices to rise, it has now confirmed that fact, adding £20 to the price.

In a post on the company’s public-facing blog, OnePlus said: “As we outlined in our heads-up post a few days ago, we’ve seen a downward trend for the Pound against the USD over the past two years. While we’ve held off action for as long as we can, the sharp drop witnessed in the currency markets following the Brexit decision has forced us to re-evaluate the OnePlus 3’s pricing in the UK at a time of significant demand.

“Given the effects of the unstable markets on our extremely thin margins, we’re reluctantly going to have make some small changes to our pricing structure for the device. In practical terms for our customers, this means that from July 11, 2016 (that’s next Monday), the OnePlus 3 will be £329 in the UK.”

Don’t worry, though, £329 is still an incredible price for a smartphone of this calibre, and it doesn’t change my opinion of the phone one jot. Add everything together and there’s no doubt that the OnePlus 3 is a superb smartphone. It marries top-level performance, an excellent camera, decent display quality and great design with a refreshingly simple Android skin to deliver a true flagship smartphone for (still) silly money.

It’s not quite perfect. The colour balance of the screen is a little squiffy (although this can be fixed now), and there’s no way of replacing the battery or adding extra storage via microSD. But you get 64GB as standard here, so you can’t complain too much.

In fact, the biggest barrier to mass adoption of the OnePlus 3 will likely be the fact you can’t buy one on contract. At this price, however, you’d be mad to pass it up, especially now that its successor, the OnePlus 3T has been announced at a 21% higher price. The OnePlus 3 represents a killer combination of price, performance and design, and there’s no other phone that gets close. You should buy one. Now.

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