Rave reviews have greeted the OnePlus 3 recently launched in India. On the outside, it looks like a few other flagship phones we know —notably the iPhone and an HTC device. On the inside, it’s packed with powerful specs for which you normally pay twice the price. It’s a winning formula.
This time, you don’t need to go about working hard to ask people for an invite to buy this OnePlus phone. If you have Rs 27,999, get on to Amazon and buy it. A few people here and there express their displeasure about the price not being as low as the previous versions, but for the most part users are only too happy at what they’re getting for the price.
But there are a few murmurs of discontent over the design of the OnePlus 3. Users feel it should have been wholly new rather than being that close to other familiar phones and perhaps they’re right there. On the other hand, OnePlus seems to have decided to play it safe and stick with a look that everyone already loves. In any case, what’s desirable about this device is not its design, but what’s inside.
In fact, whatever design it’s chosen to go with, OnePlus certainly has made sure the handset is light, thin and invites a nice snug grip in the hand. It’s an all-metal unibody device with curves in the right places so that one’s hand curls around it. And thankfully, the really convenient button unique to the OnePlus 3 is still there — it switches off notifications or turns them back on again. There’s a fingerprint sensor, housed on the phone’s Home button, which works pretty well. And fast.
The OnePlus 3 is the first phone in India, and nearly the first phone in the world, to come out with 6GB RAM. What on earth do we need that much for? Gaming, for one. The device is likely to attract the tech savvy more than any other group and it’s they who are avid gamers as well. The RAM will also help the experience with virtual reality. Without a doubt the OnePlus 3 works smoothly and fast but those who push a device to its limits have figured that the RAM management on the device favours saving the battery consumption and doesn’t allow for intense multitasking. Loading a few apps resulted in a white screen with a nice X in the centre until it recovered. This, OnePlus says in reports, will be fixed with a future update, allowing a user to control how the RAM is to be used.
The RAM pairs with the powerful Snapdragon 820 and OnePlus’ clean lean operating system, OxygenOS. This is not just an interface that adds a few useful features without getting in the way of Android, but leaves room for the tech savvy to customise the phone to suit themselves.
OnePlus 3’s 16MP camera with an f2.0 aperture gets mixed reviews. It’s not very consistent, so while I’ve sometimes got surprisingly good images indoors —with some natural light coming in — outdoors I’ve got blurred images on occasion even when taking care to be quite still. While some of the other specs on the OnePlus 3 match up to top-tier phones, the camera doesn’t.
One of the new features on the OnePlus 3 is DASH charging, a fast charging that takes the phone’s 3,000mAh battery (that is thought to be a bit inadequate for its specs) from 0 to 60 per cent in just 30 minutes. And that’s enough for the day.
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
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