Why pay more? The £309 OnePlus 3 is all the flagship phone you need

You can put your credit card away, step away from the iPhone or Galaxy S7. OnePlus has done it again.

The OnePlus 3 is official, and it’s an even bigger bargain than either of its predecessors. You really don’t need to spend top dollar to get a high-spec handset any more – this is half the price you’d be shelling out for a brand new Apple or Samsung.

Better yet, you don’t have to get in line to buy one. OnePlus has ditched its old invite system, so now anyone with the cash can pick up a handset – right now. It should be available on oneplus.net today, and will be showing up in pop-up stores across London, Paris, Berlin and New York later this week.

Here’s why the OnePlus 3 is worth getting excited for.

POWER MAD

Right off the bat, the OnePlus 3 is packing some serious power. It’s got a Snapdragon 820 CPU, pretty much the fastest mobile chip doing the rounds right now, and it’s paired with an incredible 6GB of RAM.

That’s more than any other flagship phone available right now, and should mean Android 6 absolutely flies – even when you’re switching between apps. 64GB of storage should keep you going, even if there’s no microSD card slot to add more later.

You won’t have to worry about draining the 3000mAh battery with too many games of Clash Royale, either. OnePlus says its custom-built Dash Charge power adaptor can top up 60% of a full charge in half an hour.

It’ll keep working when you’re streaming video or playing games when connected to the mains, unlike other fast charging tech, because all the clever high current power management is done inside the plug, rather than on the phone.

SNAP HAPPY

The 16MP rear camera should give the OnePlus 3 the edge over pretty much everything else in the same price bracket. It’s got optical and electronic image stabilisation working together to make sure you don’t end up with blurry snaps.

Throw in an f/2.0 aperture, 4K video recording, automatic de-noise for low-light shooting and HDR, and you’ve got a seriously capable camera.

There’s an 8MP snapper on the front too, with its own f/2.0 aperture lens and smile recognition for hands-free selfies. We all know you’ve done it, don’t pretend you haven’t.

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SCREEN TEST

It helps that the whole thing looks fantastic, whether you go for the Graphite or Soft Gold colours.

Each curved, all-metal body gets cut from a single slab of aluminium, and at only 7.3mm, it’ll slip in and out of a pocket smoother than butter.

The 5.5in screen might not have a pixel-popping 2K resolution, but 1080p means the CPU and GPU don’t have to work as hard, giving battery life a boost. The outer bezel is tiny, making the screen feel much bigger in your hand, and Gorilla Glass 4 should keep it free from scratches.

OnePlus has also switched to OLED tech, so colours should be vibrant and blacks incredibly deep and inky, for far more dynamic pics and videos. A polarising screen coating should stop things from turning into a washout in bright sunlight, too.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT

OnePlus reckons the new ceramic fingerprint sensor on the front will unlock the phone in a lightning-fast 0.3 seconds – whether the screen is on or not. There’s NFC (don’t panic, it’s not been ditched) and a 3.5mm jack, because apparently that’s not something to take for granted any more.

It’s network unlocked, so it doesn’t matter who supplies your SIM card, and it’s got two microSIM slots, so you can make it your phone and work phone at the same time. There’s even an unlocked boot loader, for those techie types that like to tinker with custom versions of Android.

At £309 here in the UK, €399 across Europe and US$399 in the States, we’re struggling to find any real downsides – especially now that you can buy one invite-free. Are you convinced? You can buy one today.

We’ll be giving the OnePlus 3 a full review next week, so make sure to check back for our final verdict.

About

A tech addict from about the age of three (seriously, he's got the VHS tapes to prove it), Tom's been writing about gadgets, games and everything in between for the past decade, with a slight diversion into the world of automotive in between. As Deputy Editor, Tom keeps the website ticking along, jam-packed with the hottest gadget news and reviews. When he's not on the road attending launch events, you can usually find him scouring the web for the latest news, to feed Stuff readers' insatiable appetite for tech.