There won’t be a red OnePlus 3, but there will be a Gold OnePlus 3, the company has said in a statement. Carl Pei confirmed it too, and with July here and almost gone, it’s time for us to see the Gold OnePlus 3 up-close and personal. According to the manufacturer, OnePlus, the gold OnePlus 3 will be released this month, to add to the current graphite silver color variant of the device that’s already available.
The OP3 is OnePlus’s first smartphone on the market to feature an aluminum metal unibody design. With the company’s first-generation smartphone two years ago, OnePlus attempted to budget as much as possible to bring its smartphone to market, but the initial and second-generation devices featured removable backs that, despite their customization choices (such as ebony, sandstone, etc.) still felt cheap and flimsy. The company kept that removable back for the sake of maintaining the removable battery. In the OP2, the company tried to create another failed flagship killer that lacked Near Field Communication (NFC) for Android Pay mobile payments.
The gold OnePlus 3 will feature the same 5.5-inch, Optic AMOLED display with 1080p Full HD resolution, a quad-core, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC, 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 64GB of minimum storage, an 8MP front/16MP back camera combo, and 3,000mAh battery (non-removable) that exists in the graphite model. The Snapdragon 820 processor is what consumers expect out of all high-end Android smartphones on the market, but OnePlus has placed itself on the map with 6GB of RAM (though it’s not the first company to go with 6GB in its flagship smartphone; Chinese OEMs have been doing this for a little while, anyway).
The Full HD resolution is the same resolution used on last year’s model, but seems to be oversaturated as compared to last year’s model (which had washed-out colors that made the display very unappealing). Tech site AnandTech stated in its OP3 review that the company’s AMOLED display (“Optic” is nothing more here than a brand marketing term) is a “2010 Samsung panel on budget,” to which OnePlus Co-Founder Carl Pei responded at Reddit (Reddit username Carpe02) to attacks by showing his own frustration with harsh criticisms.
The OnePlus 3 is perfect, minus the bad RAM management initially, but a new update has fixed the issue and given the OP3 an edge over the Exynos-powered Galaxy S7 and S7 edge. It turns out that, contrary to the company’s own claim, the RAM management issue wasn’t necessary after all.
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