OnePlus 3 first impressions: Promise of the flagship killer

The phone has a 360-degree fingerprint sensor in the front, an alert slider button on the side just like an iPhone and the usual volume rocker and power buttons.

The phone has a 360-degree fingerprint sensor in the front, an alert slider button on the side just like an iPhone and the usual volume rocker and power buttons. (Photo by Sonu Mehta/ Hindustan Times)

If you were waiting for the latest smartphone from OnePlus' stable (and quite a few were), then let me tell you that it was worth the wait. Finally when OnePlus delivered the box to me for review, I and quite a few colleagues were a little surprised as the box was huge.

To my delight, it contained the Loop VR headset, five different phone covers, a car dash charger and the phone box which contains the charging adapter and the USB cable. And all of this for ₹27,999 although this just might be the reviewer's kit which will be available to fast movers.

After dealing with the surprise, I fished out the phone and the first look was impressive. The OnePlus 3 is sleek, stylish and feels great in your palms. There can be no complains about design except for the protruding rear camera module. The phone has a 360-degree fingerprint sensor in the front, an alert slider button on the side just like an iPhone and the usual volume rocker and power buttons.

With urgent and excited requests from my colleagues, I fired up the device and quickly went ahead setting it up. While doing so I realised that the display was really good and had already started trying to imagine how videos will look on the screen. The 3 packs a 5.5-inch full HD (1920x1080) AMOLED display at 401ppi with Corning Gorilla Glass 4.

And then it was time to test the camera. I was little hesistant as the stock Android camera comes with very few modes and effects which could be a problem for the user. But to my surprise, the OIS and the camera's ability to capture distinguished colours was a big plus. However, the 3's camera cannot be compared to the Samsung S7 or the HTC 10 or the iPhone 6S. The front camera also works fairly well but doesn't offer a wide view.

Coming to the core performance of the OnePlus 3, the phone runs on proprietary Oxygen OS with Android Marshmallow at the base. The Oxygen OS interface is clean and doesn't use up much physical memory. The Snapdragon 820 SoC and 6GB RAM unit makes the phone very fast. However, everyone has been worried about heating issues of the device which they saw in most of OnePlus devices. Well, there are none on this one. In order to check out the actual power of the device, I downloaded six heavy games and tried switching between them. There was no heating for nearly an hour but the battery was draining (obviously). The OnePlus 3 packs in a 3,000 mAh battery, which lasts a day under heavy use, and a day and a half with moderate use.

Another good thing about the phone is that the 360-degree fingerprint scanner is also blazing fast and it has dual 4G-SIM slots.