Should You Buy OnePlus 3 in 2017?

It’s more than halfway through 2017, with 2018 just three months away. More smartphones have been added to our options this year from all the top smartphones brands. The race for budget-fitting smartphones has more competition now than ever. Every week you will see a new smartphone with promising features being launched with price tags so low that would make any potential buyer question their quality or integrity.

But, is OnePlus 3 still in the race? More than a year after its release, it still defeats smartphones released today because of its specifications and build quality. OnePlus 3 was a big hit in the market after OnePlus 2 didn’t meet the expectations of the customers. It was well-designed, and most importantly, well-marketed. It’s pretty difficult to produce a smartphone with so many features and have such positive feedback. OnePlus 3 managed to achieve that feat in 2016. How does it compete in the market in 2017, or say, early 2018? Let’s find out.

Specifications

The smartphone’s features easily outsmart any device present in the market with the same price tag. Below I’ve listed the major features of the smartphone.

- 5.5 inches 1080p Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels)

- 401 ppi with Corning Gorilla Glass 4

- 6 GB LPDDR4 RAM

- 64 GB Internal memory

- 16 MP f/2.0 Rear Camera with 4K Recording

- 8 MP Sony IMX179 Front Camera

- Fingerprint sensor

- USB 2.0 Type-C Port

- Dual nano-SIM slot

- 3,000 mAh Battery with Dash charging (Charge up to 60% within 30 minutes)

- 3.5 mm audio jack (pretty nice to have it in 2017)

Features still rare in 2017

6 GB RAM

The amount of RAM OnePlus 3 has, is more than what some laptops have today. One must think how such a huge memory becomes useful in daily life. It is due to the fact that more robust and larger applications and games are hitting the stores. You will find games in Google Play Store that are as large as 2 GB and consume more than 1 GB of RAM while running. If you are a fan of such bulky games, then you will obviously want to have six gigabytes of RAM on your smartphone. Other than that, what benefit one would have is the superfast memory allocation and optimization of a large number of applications and games running in the background. The applications you use in your day-to-day life, say Facebook and Messenger, use hundreds of MBs of RAM. So it doesn’t hurt to have some extra gigabytes of RAM, even if you never feel the need of using them.

16 MP Camera which supports 4K and Slow Motion Recording

The rear camera is facilitated with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), a feature that makes your pictures and videos less blurry and more detailed. This feature puts the object in the shot into correct focus and prevents any blurs that you normally see in photographs.

What’s more surprising is that the rear camera supports 4K video recording (at 30 fps) and slow motion video recording (at 120fps). These are the features that are very rare even in devices launched in 2017. 4K resolution was still relatively new in 2016, yet OnePlus 3 managed to include it. So, you can say that even in 2016, OnePlus 3 was way ahead of its competitors in the race.

Quick Charging: Dash Charge

The OnePlus 3 has a feature that many smartphone lovers find useful. Quick charging allows your device to charge faster than it would usually do without the Dash Charge technology. You can charge the device from 0% to 60% in just 30 minutes, and I’m not joking. Say, you are late for work or class or any important event, and you need to leave in 30 minutes. You used your OnePlus 3 excessively last night leaving some 5% battery juice and forgot to connect it to the charger before sleeping. You already knew how Dash Charge feature would save the day before I even started explain the situation!

Quick charge is not common in 2017 yet. We hope it becomes more and more common in 2018, but that just means that OnePlus 3 is still winning the race.

Reasonable price with 3.5mm audio jack

I didn’t want to include this as a ‘rare feature’, but I had to, considering how top brands are killing off the audio jack. OnePlus 3 was a flagship model when it was launched into the market in 2016. It still is as it has features that today’s flagship smartphones don’t have.

I discussed OnePlus 3 in this article, not OnePlus 3t, because OnePlus 3t was released in late 2016. OnePlus 5, the company’s latest product, was launched one year after the release of OnePlus 3. The price of OnePlus 3 has dropped significantly since. Therefore, it is a great flagship model to buy at a reasonable price if you still love the 3.5mm audio jack.

Other compelling reasons OnePlus 3 is a good buy in 2017:

- OnePlus 3 is expected to get the Android 8.0 (Oreo) update in late 2017.

- Despite such monstrous features, the device is thin with just 7.4 mm of thickness.

- The immense popularity and success of this smartphone makes it even more trustworthy and a good choice for any customer.

You could still opt for a smartphone launched this year with the same price, but I doubt you would get all the features OnePlus 3 has to offer. One thing is for sure, your OnePlus 3 wouldn’t look like an outdated phone even if you bought it right now. You should definitely go for OnePlus 3 if its launch date doesn’t bother you.