[OnePlus 3 Guides, News, & Discussion] Mostafa Wael:
Unboxing experience and Build Quality​

Coming from an HTC One M9 device, a luxurious phone with gold rails on the sides at a hefty $650 price tag at launch, I was too skeptical about what can a $400 offer to me, especially when considering the fact that OnePlus is not that known in the region; it was quite a risk for me, a big gamble. But it was a complete flip after all. Pulling up that white top of the box greeted me immediately with the device, a letter from Carl Pei thanking me for my choice, some manuals and some OnePlus Never Settle stickers and the SIM ejection tool. Popping in my SIM card, I was then caught by a nice gesture from the company – a preinstalled screen protector. It might be just a simple plastic based screen protector and not a fancy glass one, but still definitely a nice touch from them, considering that it will be extremely hard to find any OnePlus accessories around here. It does not stop at that, the build quality of the phone feels like a premium one. This aluminum graphite-grey chassis with its 7.35 mm thin profile and the dark grey antenna lines, the phone looks and feels very nice in your hands. Bezels on the front of the phone are crazy thin on the sides, and are reasonably thin on the top and the bottom, complimented by that ceramic capacitive fingerprint scanner and two subtly lit capacitive buttons sitting on the sides of that fingerprint scanner, with the latter doubling up as a capacitive home button. On the bottom side of the phone, you have a bottom firing mono speaker, a USB type-C port and – thankfully – a 3.5 mm headphone jack. On the right side you have a very tactile power button, with the volume rocker and their priceless 'alert slider', continuing the trend set by the OnePlus 2 and the OnePlus X, on the left side. The top is left clean with no further features like an IR blaster for example, possibly following the trend of newer phones ditching it. Build quality is very nice, especially when considering the price tag this phone carries, though there is no fancy sandstone material used there, and the company chose to leave it for the cases to remind you where they stopped last year. There has been a lot of attention paid to details as far as I can tell, volume buttons are neither wobbly nor tight to click on, and their position is optimal in my opinion; never felt that power button is too high or too low as well as the volume rocker. And that alert slider is textured quite well too. However it is not all dandy, there is a very noticeable protrusion of the back camera that may be annoying for some and worrying for the other, but during my usage without any cases applied to cover that protrusion, that camera hump survived well with no cracks or major scratches. Some may argue that OnePlus played it too safe with the design, with an unimaginative rectangular metal slab with some subtle curves at the corner and ditching their sandstone fanciness, but that phone is a beauty to hold and a pleasure to be held naked. Holding the phone with one hand is manageable, but may not be that comfortable for those with smaller hands. Even me with my medium-sized hands can be exposed to some thumb gymnastics when pulling down the notifications shade or tapping on that settings icon at the top, or reaching the left side of the screen, since there is no curving to the phone's back or anything like that, which make it quite risky when doing so without two hands since it may be a bit slippery. But that is fine for phones in such a size. However, the phone is not extremely big when holding it one-handed, thanks to that tiny bezels that continue to grow as a trend in modern flagships to maximize the screen-to-body ratio. Ultimately, holding that phone is a pleasure, it never felt too cheap or anything like that. All my boxes are ticked with that design save for that comically protruding camera hump at the back, though it is protected well at the sides.

Performance​

For a $400 phone, you shouldn't expect much in this area, but the OnePlus 3 raised the bar too high. Being equipped with all the top notch hardware you would expect from a $600+ phone, namely the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and the UFS 2.0 storage, with the latter being missed out in some flagships like the HTC 10 for instance, coupled with a lightweight Oxygen OS with minimal additions over stock android, this phone swears to be a premium flagship phone worth a lot more than its price. Not to mention that whopping 6 GB LPDDR4 RAM, which has its potential fully unlocked with the recent software updates, this phone handles everything with no hassle. Opening the apps is a breeze. Loading a web-page is ridiculously fast. Launching the camera cannot be faster. Everything is handled in a spectacularly quick manner. It even outclasses its UFS 2.0 comrades; the Galaxy S7 duo.

Something to note here as well, the Oxygen OS now will not get in the way while using the phone. This time, the company took their ample time to optimize their Oxygen OS to be staggeringly fast and buttery smooth. Gone are the days where you would face an ugly uncharacterized layer which stands in the way that struggles to operate the phone the way it should with its specs with some weird bugs in even weirder places. The latest iteration of Oxygen OS is a lot more mature than what you can experience with that of last year's flagship killer – which actually did not kill any phone last year. There may be some strange decisions in the OS though that may not utilize the hardware under the hood fully, like limiting the background opened apps to conserve battery life, which is not 100% true, and some minor bugs, which wasn't anything extreme to ruin your experience as you would experience from last year's OS version. But I believe it is much nearer to the other refined UI you can find from HTC and Nexus phones. The core experience of this year's Oxygen OS feels a lot better and smoother than before. Last but not the least, OnePlus' has provided numerous updates to that phone to cure it from any reported bugs on their forums. I have been receiving updates from Oxygen OS 3.1.2 to 3.1.3 to 3.2.1 to 3.2.2 with a lot of bug fixes and optimizations, as well as solving critical conflicts like the needless background apps capping for a device with an edge above a lot of the contenders in the flagship arena when having 6 GB of RAM, even the latest and the greatest of Samsung's Note line still has 4 gigs of RAM. Some may argue that this staggeringly smooth experience may be due to the GPU pushing only a 1080p screen, so it has less overhead work, but we all know that the 1080p screen can be easily managed even with the last gen Adreno 430 and even the older Adreno 420. Thankfully OnePlus took their sweet time when it comes to software optimization, and we must applaud them for that.

If you are looking for some synthetic benchmarks, then go search for them, they barely say the whole story and just bloat the reviews with some barely relevant indicators of how smooth and fast the phone feels and behaves in real life, and we all know how it is fairly easy to fake benchmark scores and cheat those apps to fool you with synthetic numbers and dazzling scores. Let's keep it to that.

Gaming on this device was a pleasure to say the least, buttery smooth and loading times were spectacularly low and thermals were kept in check. The device remained just warm with no major concerns. Temperature readings remained sub-40c, which is just lukewarm and did not feel uncomfortably hot like other devices. The heat is majorly felt at the top third of the device from the back and slightly felt at the glass. I am not that of a gamer, but I was having my medium-load games, like Marvel Future Fight for instance, running perfectly fine. Even games like Real Racing 3, one of the biggest melons for almost any android phone, ran very smooth. Loading the levels was quick enough and the race itself never felt too jiggery or stuttered. Sadly though, that bottom mounted mono speaker is easily muffled, though that large form factor helped me evade blocking the grille partially.

Camera​

Stills​

I am not that into photography, but good camera performance on my mobile is definitely appreciated to keep your memorial shots perfect. And with more recent flagships, the bar was raised too high in the camera department. Now we can see some awesome still shots captured by a phone camera; there is a remarkable jump in the camera performance in the last 2 years, with OEMs paying more details to more than just the MP count, like the aperture and the pixel size, stabilization techniques, Autofocus speed and accuracy, and probably more that I may not know about. Premium flagships are nailing it when it comes to pics this year, and the OnePlus 3 is no exception.

Normally when looking at phones in this $400 price tag, the camera performance usually take a hit to cut down the corners and justify the price. But OnePlus never settles with that, continuing their trend they started with their previous phone, packing very decent camera hardware, particularly a 16 MP sensor IMX 298, which has a respectable 1.12-micron pixel size, coupled with both OIS and PDAF system, leaving the Laser Assisted AF system in the shadows of last year, and an aperture size of f/2.0 to capture more light. This set of hardware on paper sounds good yet not exceptional when compared to the competition, but in real life, the OnePlus 3 continues to deliver surprisingly nice results in that area as well. Post processing is not harsh and the noise is sanely reduced without being overdone and smudging the photos resulting in loss of details. Compression ratio is quite adequate as well. Dynamic Range is also high enough and Auto-HDR kicks in the right time to ensure the right exposure is always in place. In daylight, photos came up quite colorful and crispy, albeit not oversaturated like what the S7 favors to do. The phone tends to overexpose a little bit like all other phones, but nothing extreme that can blow the highlights and ruin your photos. Daylight photos have never been that challenging to phones since last year actually, and that was kind of expected. Nevertheless, this phone still performs better than previous flagships like the HTC One M9 for instance.

Moving on to some backlit scenarios, the phone still continues to deliver. Dynamic range was very good, and when Auto-HDR kicked in, it never took so long to process the image either, which is nice to see. Details were not compromised with some oversharpening or any extra compression as well, thanks to sane post-processing.

As the sun goes down, it starts to show some of its shortcomings. That relatively small pixel size collects less light in the picture, and therefore the pictures can get a bit darker than other phones, though the pics are still pleasing to look at. Thanks to its sane post-processing and color production, the pics are still nice and better than almost all the phones at that price range. Impressive enough, the phones are not ruined by oversaturated color production or aggressive sharpening and noise canceling techniques like what the S7 camera does, and the photos are much brighter than the iPhone 6s camera for instance. Despite the challenging light conditions, the phone was able to focus well, albeit not crazy fast like the Galaxy S7's Dual-pixel AF tech for example, however there were no photos coming up out of focus or blurred foreground. In very low light conditions, the photos may possess some graininess, and here where HQ mode comes handy. Briefly said, it is a post processing algorithm that eliminates that graininess and tries to boost the highlights in the pics in an attempt to retrieve more obvious details generally in the pics. It is nothing ground-breaking, but it can be quite a good tool to have sometimes. Flipping the phone to the selfie cam, photos were good enough and my face was not comically smudged. Wasn't fond of selfies so couldn't tell how good it fares when compared to the other phones out there.

Where does that put it in the competition? Well it is quite good I have to say, for 400 bucks, you are having more than what you get from any phone at that price range. Even when compared to the premium flagships, it is very respectable. Excellent daylight performance and very solid low light performance leave it in the upper part of the spectrum within the likes of the LG G5, HTC 10 and the iPhone 6s, beating some phones like the Galaxy S7 and probably much more others.

Here is a link to some photos I have captured, maybe they can make it easier for you to judge how that camera performs.

https://www.google.com/url?q=https:...sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHS1JNDhuAmgDd4eLXqzxGvSI_DJw

Video recording
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Stills were generally amazing on that phone, but sadly videos lacked a bit. Starting first with the fact that this phone does not offer you a 1080p 60 fps option, it may be quite a bummer for some people, leaving you only with the 1080p 30 fps option and the 4K 30 fps option, though the hardware possessed is never lacking at all, leaving us scratching our heads why such an option is not available. However, thankfully it supports 4K recording, unlike its comrade, namely the Xperia X Performance.

I was never into video recording, I usually use a video recorder or a digital camera when recording videos, and most people will be as well I guess. But there was some slight wobbling when recording the video, even when the phone is at steady position; the video wobbles at the corners weirdly. OIS performance is a little bit poor when compared to other phones, though the phone never develops some weird continuous hunting for focus or major shakes, just this wobbling that is more noticeable at the sides of the video, especially the corners. It is more like a rotary motion around the center of the viewfinder back and forth alternatively on the sides for those who cannot imagine it, though it is a minor one. 1080p videos were fine generally, but 4K videos had some strange compression artifacts when recording that could not be justified since we are talking about 4K recording. Sound recording was not that good; noise cancelation was overly used. However, OnePlus was responsive enough to provide a quick hefty update with a lot of hot fixes, including an upgrade to the codec to decrease the compression ratio to tame those strange artifacts and improve the noise cancelation algorithm, making a dramatic improvement in sound recording, especially when voice recording, but still needs some work to be done there, and that wobbling has been reduced as well.

Battery life and Thermals

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One of the most impressive things in this phone is the battery life and the thermals. I have been having this phone for over a week, with different usage patterns, from as light as reading to as heavy as converting video podcasts to mp3 file on that phone, and I am really struggling to find anything to complain about in that area. Thermal wise, it is the coolest phone I have ever held in my hands; it barely gets too warm to touch, even in the toughest circumstances like being directly exposed to the sun. Battery readings has been mostly around 32-33c with bumps to 34c when browsing the internet or having my usual fare of time spent on the social media. Even if you brutally use this whopping 6-gigs RAM, it rarely hits the 35c. This is one of the coolest phones I have ever held up till that moment, nothing comes close to its spectacular thermals, thanks to the internal design of the phone, where the SoC resides away from the battery in the upper third of the phone, sandwiched between the aluminum back of the phone and the screen, though not as near to the screen as the positioning of the SoC in last year's OnePlus 2, with the battery oppositely placed in the lower third of the phone, not to mention the massive contribution of the large form factor of the phone which allows way more heat dissipation, especially with that aluminum stylish sturdy build. Of course we have got improved thermal performance with that new custom core design of the new Snapdragon 820's Kryo cores and the more efficient 14 nm FinFet manufacturing node process.

What makes it even more compelling is the fact that the phone is not throttling at all, even during my favorite sustainable 100% CPU load test, which is converting a 1-hour video podcast to mp3, a scenario where it requires every bit of horsepower from those big Kryos, it just raised the temps from a relatively warm 33c to 37c, which is very impressive indeed. Bear in mind, ambient was not that cool, and the phone was put on a glass table, so there is a possibility that the phone could have performed even better thermal-wise! The rate at which the phone kept converting the file was consistently at its maximum rate of 1900 KB/s. and looking at the Trepn graph of the CPU, the big cluster was at its max frequency the whole time and the device did not throttle the big cluster at all, while the little cluster was ready to take other tasks! So that indicates that even in the most challenging CPU tasks, where the big cluster keeps holding on its max achievable frequency, the device does not become uncomfortably warm or too hot to touch.

Moving away from those theoretical tests and measurements, and more towards the regular end customers, this phone is a killer. No words can describe how amazed I am from the phone thermal wise. Battery life was very nice as well, leaving me most of the time with 5+ hrs of screen-on time over more than 24 hrs of total usage, and my usual fare of off-screen music playback. I can even reach 6 hrs of screen-on time with some conservation like using Dark Mode, which is awesome on that screen to be honest, and lowering the adaptive brightness level to favor lower brightness levels. Even when having some gaming included, you can make it through the day comfortably, though some may miss the last few midnight hours when back home. That is a B+ or even an A- in my book. Some may be left annoyed though with its decreased battery capacity when compared to its predecessor, and the fact that they favored a thin profile with a comically protruding camera hump over filling the rest of the phone with battery, but that 3000 mAh is not tiny and you won't have any problem in making it through the day.

Even those who can't make it to midnight without ample charge, plug it in the Dash charger for 30 minutes while having a long bath, and enjoy more than 60% of juice, and if you waited longer than an hour by a little bit, you have your adorable toy fully charged. Rest assured, your phone won't explode or burn your hands while being topped up, but the brick might be a bit warmer than what you would expect, but that is natural, considering the fact that all the temperature and current regulation is done in the charging brick itself, and the fact that this brick can pump up to 4 amps to your phone, but that is nothing to worry about, and I am sure that this exquisitely fast charging will be very much appreciated by a lot. It is not only about how quick it can top up my phone's battery, but the confidence it gives to you that you can make it through the day, even if you plugged your phone for less than an hour or even if you gave it a small 10-minute rest. It has changed my charging habits of leaving the phone in the charger overnight, since plugging in the phone for 30 minutes while having my breakfast and taking a quick shower will certainly give my phone battery ample battery to last through the day, and if I waited till getting dressed up, I can have it fully charged.

Here are some stats I have collected:

Day 1 (46% used)

Screen-on time: 2 hrs 43 minutes // Total time: 16 hrs 20 minutes

Day 2 (75% used)

Screen-on time: 5 hrs 22 minutes // Total time: 15 hrs 19 minutes

Day 3 (90% used)

Screen-on time: 6 hrs 13 minutes // Total time: 16 hrs 35 minutes

Day 4 (88% used)

Screen-on time: 5 hrs 33 minutes // Total time: 20 hrs 54 minutes

Day 5 (93% used)

Screen-on time: 5 hrs 50 minutes // Total time: 22 hrs 35 minutes

Day 6 (53% used)

Screen-on time: 3 hrs 27 minutes // Total time: 12 hours 37 minutes

Audio​

Speakers

Coming from an M9, I was really worried about that move. It was so hard for me to leave those legendary one-of-a-kind dual front firing speakers with this 5.1 ch surround effect, courtesy of Dolby's technologies and HTC's killer hardware packed inside that aluminum chassis. So it took some time to cope with that weird placement of the speaker, though Apple is still convinced that this is the best place to put the speaker in, to the extent that they will build upon that placement with their dual yet bottom facing speakers dedicated for audiophiles ironically!

Moving on to the star of the show, the OnePlus 3, I moved my usual set of music sets, which involve some club, trap, EDM, PDB mixes and some trances, and fired up a club set. I was surprised it was able to push it that loud actually. The bass was fuller than expected and not that thin, however, just like every smartphone out there, the "boomy" part of the song was not that audible, and the lower mids were a tiny bit higher than my taste. Vocals were crystal clear though, and the trebles weren't muffled. Overall it was very balanced produced sound and a very enjoyable experience. Up till 13/15 of the volume and there is no distortion. Higher than that, you start to feel some little sharpness in the sound; it is a mobile small mono speaker after all and that is expected, we aren't having any kind of woofers here. With that being said, I really think that this mono speaker surpasses all its other comrades, including the so-called iPhone 6s', which we will get to in a minute. My recommendation will remain to be not bumping up the speakers any higher than 12/15, just like any other speaker in any android [/STIKE] phone out there, should you use the phone's speaker to listen to your podcasts and such mixes :P

Compared to the iPhone 6s, a very close contender with the same speaker setup, I think that the decibel output is much higher on the OnePlus 3 by a great extent. To match the iPhone 6s' volume, I had to tone down the OnePlus 3 to 11/15, since comparing those at max volume would be unfair and arguably inaccurate. But what differs is the way they are "calibrated" or tuned out of the box. The iPhone 6s may possess more oomph in the lower "boomy" part of the bass, though the mids lack quite a bit and sound muffled when compared to the OnePlus 3. And the highs were a little bit overstated. I guess that speaker tuning is more like Beats faulty calibration, while the OnePlus 3's speaker tuning is approaching more of a balanced sound, where there are some sense of "flatness" in the sound by its nature, which is the norm, since bass will always lack in such small speakers, and to me, this is much better than Apple's endeavors to artificially emulate a Woofer's bass pronunciation on such a mono speaker with small drivers, which is done by massively increasing the dynamic bass and the clarity, consequently muffling the rest of the frequencies, particularly the mids, where it sounds like a far-fetched voice. In such a dueling battle, I favor the speaker of the OnePlus 3 over the iPhone's, since it is much more accurate when playing the music and sounds a lot louder with no audible distortion that may ruin your experience. Of course, rest assured, you will hear your ringtone from that phone pretty well, you cannot go wrong with that. Comparing any of the OnePlus 3 or even the iPhone 6s to any of the HTC 10, M9 or even the M8, will be really unfair, as the experience is so much different in my opinion. However I might try my best to do such a detailed comparison, but even if I did, my perspective of such a comparison will remain the same.

Of course the usual drawbacks of a mono speaker apply here; the separation between the lows and the highs will not be that great, though I still feel like all the frequency bands are produced correctly from that speaker, and you won't get any type of fancy immersive effects like the 5.1 ch surround effect of the M9 or an awesome Hi-Fi speaker experience like the HTC 10 with its woofer-tweeter setup, not to mention how easy it is to block that speaker grille and muffle it when gaming for instance, though that relatively larger form factor helps a bit, but not that much sadly. Of course it was too weird for me when watching YouTube to have that one-ear experience with no love for the other; it took me quite a bit to cope with that. Nevertheless, for a single mono speaker on a phone, this remains one of the best –if not the best- in that territory; the mono bottom facing speaker.

Plugged in HTC's earphones

Now it is no secret that OnePlus skips shipping a OnePlus branded pair of earphones, though I believe such a company can make some great earphones like HTC's from what I have been treated with from my experience with that phone. Ironically, they made a OnePlus branded VR headset, and skipped a pair of OnePlus headphones! I went ahead and plugged in my HTC in-ear buds, and went ahead. Max volume is very good actually; it actually exceeded my expectations for a $400 phone to be honest. It was surprising in the best way possible! It clearly hits the sweet spot for my ears when maxed out, more like a 13(.5)/15 of the M9's volume for those who are wondering. Those extra two volume steps on the M9 were useless for me when using the earbuds actually; they used to irritate my ear drums and it was too loud for me to enjoy the music, possibly due to the M9's noise levels, which continued to impress on the OnePlus 3 as well; noise levels were amazingly low when hearing my club mixes. There was very decent depth in the audio played, all the instruments were audible. The tracks also were correctly produced in terms of frequency response. Of course I have no technical data measured, but the default audio was very balanced. The bass was not that full by default, but with the aid of a simple EQ from Google's Play music app –something that we as HTC users dreamt to have on our $600+ phones, at least till the M9– I perfected the audio output in the headphones to my personal liking, and the audio experience was really enjoyable. That really impressed me, however, the surround virtualizer in that EQ was actually not that mind-blowing; it widened the soundstage and strangely the middle part of the bass low frequencies was bumped up, which was nice, but trebles started to lack, so I ditched it after all. But hey we have it at least; the M9 had that feature intentionally (or not? maybe they did not know it is there!) disabled in its config file! Now here is where the OnePlus 3 starts to lack a little tiny bit, stereo separation between the two channels. I can't say exactly how much it lacks exactly when compared to the M9, but in some instances when the drums hit quite frequently in the left ear after the right ear, or in some computer-done mixes and effects where it rapidly changes between the right and left ear, stereo crosstalk crept in little bit when compared to the M9. When compared to the iPhone 6s, it was almost the same. It is something to note, nothing deal breaking or anything that can stop you from enjoying your music. My recommendation is to remain sub 13/15 like any device as well.

Other than that I have nothing to complain about. Everything is perfected! Noise levels are extremely low, lower than the M9's - especially with BoomSound enabled. Max volume is loud enough and not that overpowered. Don't like the default sound? You have an EQ, with two bars for bass boosting and Surround sound emulating, and a 5-band simple yet effective EQ with some presets pre-installed if you would like to try. Very punchy crisp sound is produced, with nice depth, which brings all music to your ears. Just those coming from an M9 or any HTC device will notice that creepy stereo crosstalk, but it is still better than almost all the phones maybe. It is enough to say it still within the same level of the bitten fruit :D

Plugged in a 2.1 ch Subwoofer

Plugging in my AUX cable from the 2.1 ch Sub-Woofer set, I went ahead and fired up my favorite club mix, with high spirits as of what I have heard from the OnePlus 3 with the HTC Earbuds, and I was not let down at all. My amusement continued to grow on this device. I was treated with the same amazingly low noise levels and that zero distortion as well! The lower-part of the bass was blasting the Woofer, without being distorted or "overpowered". Treble was not lacking. And if you do not like how it sounds, Google Play Music's EQ is your friend. And with that being a Sub-Woofer set, that stereo crosstalk is not noticeable at all. Max volume was enough for me to fill the house with my music, just like what the M9 and the iPhone 6s used to do.