OnePlus 3

The OnePlus 3 sports a 5.5-inch full HD display (401ppi) just like its predecessor, but the IPS panel has been swapped out for an Optic AMOLED display. There’s also a layer of Gorilla Glass 4 for protection, and it's worth noting that the retail unit comes pre-installed with a screen protector as well. The use of the AMOLED panel means you get the deep blacks and high contrast levels that make the screen look really rich. The display’s clarity is best in class, with icons and text sitting very close to the glass. Colours are vivid and flashy, making the screen great for watching videos and gaming. The screen is very smooth too, responding to swipes, taps and scrolls instantly. The brightness levels are decent, and while sunlight legibility is good, it isn’t as impressive as the Xiaomi Mi 5.

OnePlus hurriedly introduced OxygenOS after the whole Cyanogen OS fiasco, and the custom UI wasn't without its teething problems. But OxygenOS has come a long way over the past year, with frequent updates being rolled out to iron out bugs and issues.

The OnePlus 2’s 13MP/5MP cameras impressed us with their consistently good images, and with the OnePlus 3, the company is taking things up a notch. The primary camera has been upgraded to a 16MP Sony IMX 298 sensor with f/2.0 aperture, Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF) and dual image stabilisation, which uses a combination of Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) and Electronic Image Stabilisation (EIS). The front camera has been bumped up to an 8MP unit, which uses a Sony IMX 179 sensor with f/2.0 aperture.

The quad-core Snapdragon 820 processor powering the OnePlus 3 consists of two cores clocked at 2.2GHz, and two cores clocked at 1.6GHz. Paired with 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM, you can probably guess the kind of performance to expect. We’re not entirely convinced why you’d need 6GB of RAM on a smartphone (especially when many PCs run just fine with 4GB of RAM), but we’re not complaining here because multi-tasking was a real breeze on the OnePlus 3. Even with 15-20 apps running in the background, there wasn’t any sign of slowdown or lag on the smartphone, with less than 50 percent of the available RAM being used on average. The device is smooth and responsive, and able to tackle mundane tasks like opening apps and multitasking, and even more intensive ones like playing Dead Trigger 2 for a 30-minute stretch without breaking a sweat. Another positive about the device is that it doesn’t heat up, while gaming or even when we used the camera for extended periods of time.