OnePlus 3: To be unveiled on 15 June

Last Modified: Mon, Jun 13 2016. 04 35 PM IST

The OnePlus 3 smartphone will be roll out on 15 June and this is what we think the phone will offer

Chinese phone maker OnePlus was one of the first brands to kick off the "flagship killer" mission, with the hope that it will be able to offer the specs and a user experience of the more expensive Android flagship phones at lower price points. Its OnePlus One smartphone got a lot of attention for its Cyanogen OS, a heavily customized software based on Google's Android. The company is now going to launch the OnePlus 3, the latest version of its smartphone, globally on 14 June and in India on 15 June, with the phone going on sale on Amazon.in from that day.

The new smartphone has already garnered a lot of interest on account of the invite-free availability announced by its CEO Carl Pei last week, the blind sale in China and the pre-release of the Loop VR headset, which was available on Amazon.in for Rs.1 as an introductory offer in India.

Interestingly enough, OnePlus has done away with the invite-only sale approach adopted for its OnePlus One, OnePlus 2 and OnePlus X smartphones.

The new smartphone doesn't have the Cyanogen OS, which made OnePlus so popular in the first place. Instead it runs on Oxygen OS, developed by OnePlus.

True to its tradition, OnePlus is likely to offer a few industry-firsts in the OnePlus 3. One of them is expected to be 6GB RAM, which is currently available only on the high-end variants of LeEco LeMax2 and in some countries in the Asus Zenfone 3. The OnePlus 3 is likely to run Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 820 chip, if it is to stay true on its promise of being a flagship killer.

What has often been missing in previous OnePlus devices is a quality camera. The 13-megapixel snapper on the predecessor OnePlus 2 suffered from numerous inconsistencies, not because the hardware was inferior, but because the algorithms were perhaps not perfectly optimised.

The 3,300mAh battery also impressed on paper, but in real-life it proved to be inadequate. It won't surprise us if OnePlus beefs up the camera to 21 megapixels, with tweaks to the image processing engine to offer better picture quality.

The biggest challenge with any OnePlus phone is of updates. They are often delayed. What is good is that they always come with the latest version of Android, which means OnePlus 3 could be running on Android Marshmallow.

In terms of the pricing, we expect the phone to be priced very similar to the launch price of its predecessor, the OnePlus 2. Alternatively, there could be multiple variants of the phone for the first time, something OnePlus has never done before. All in all, expect it to be priced at around Rs.25,000, and this would pit it against the LeEco Le Max2, Moto X Style and the Xiaomi Mi5.

First Published: Mon, Jun 13 2016. 04 25 PM IST

Source: OnePlus 3: To be unveiled on 15 June