 Watching OnePlus mature as a company has been kind of like watching a kid grow up. In high school, he was the kid who got caught picking his nose and eating it, but like, he had this sick home theater set up for his Xbox, so we all pretended it never happened. In college, he blossomed into this wicked athlete, who ended up getting cut from the team for blazing up behind the portables. And now, he's back to show me what he can do now that he's all grown up. This is the OnePlus 3. Cooler Master's MasterCase Maker 5 features their Freeform Modular System, allowing you to customize, adjust, and upgrade. Make it yours through the link down below. So why couldn't OnePlus repeat what they did with the OnePlus One, their first flagship class phone at an impossibly low price of $299 US dollars? Well, because it's easier to do that when you piggyback off of your parent company as an experimental startup project with no expectations of profitability. You can't actually do the marketing, customer service, and both software and hardware R&D necessary to compete as a global brand on margins that thin. So some compromises got made on the OnePlus 2, including its lack of NFC, and its pricing was still higher, even for the base 16 gig model at $329 US dollars. But are users really that sensitive to a few bucks? What if we didn't have to make any compromises, and the device could still be a couple hundred dollars cheaper than its flagship competitors? Well, that seems to be the formula this time, and I think it worked. Let's have a look at this puppy. The OnePlus 3 is thinner than the Samsung Galaxy S7 at 7.35 millimeters, though it's hard to say just how much of how great it feels in the hand is due to this, and how much is due to the excellent weight distribution and very similar overall weight in spite of the significantly larger screen. 5.5 inches, eh, it's still too big for my hands, but the aluminum alloy construction is very confidence-inspiring, and I can say confidently that it's the most comfortable 5.5 inches that I have ever held, thanks to the rounded rear edges, reasonable-sized chin bar, and super slim bezels around its 1080p display. Which, okay, so there's one compromise. OnePlus has opted for a 1080 screen again, but I didn't disagree with their choice last time, and I don't disagree with it this time, and there are some upgrades to it, too. The 3 gets this wonderfully high contrast, non-reflective, and miraculously not over-saturated AMOLED panel with white point adjustments built right into the operating system, so you can tune it according to your preferences. Direct sunlight performance is not quite there with the Galaxy S7, and 1080p is not ideal for VR, so residents of the planet Mercury who are really into Google Cardboard need not apply, but it is a great display. Above it, next to the 8-color notification LED, is an 8-megapixel, 1080p video selfie camera that falls comfortably into good enough for front-facing, if you need better, turn-your-damn-phone-around territory, and then below the screen is one of my favorite things about the OP3. Samsung's marriage to ripping off the iPhone's physical home button is becoming more and more out of place, and the OnePlus 3 is, in my mind, the golden standard for how to handle Android buttons. You can choose to use the capacitive hardware buttons with a very fast fingerprint sensor embedded in the middle one, or you can choose to disable them outright and opt for on-screen buttons, and in either configuration, you can set back and recent apps to whichever side you prefer. And Oxygen OS, as clean and stock Android-like as it is, includes a number of these small but actually meaningful customizations. Some, like the invert color mode or the night mode, I didn't really care for, but others, drawing on-screen, long press, and double-press gestures for launching apps, and their easy memo-taking and shelf when you swipe to the left of the home screen, sucked me right in. On the left of the device, you'll find a button I didn't really use much that lets you allow all, some, or no notifications through, a one-button feeder mode, if you will, and one of OnePlus's few missteps, the volume rocker, which is directly opposing the lock button, making it hard to especially adjust volume up without mashing the lock over on the right side that sits below the SIM, and only SIM, no micro SD expansion, that's the last real flaw I'm gonna point out, tray. On the bottom, the good stuff continues. The built-in speaker is downward-facing, but it is surprisingly loud, with only a little bit of distortion creeping in at the top two volume settings, and this is really smart if they did it on purpose, the grill is on the opposite side compared to the iPhone 6S and the Galaxy S7, which means that while you do have to do the palm cupping thing, it works way better than usual because it fires right into the rounded part of your palm. Cool. Between the grill and the headphone jack, which, by the way, I prefer on top so I don't mash capacitive buttons trying to take my phone out of my pocket, in case anyone from OnePlus is actually watching this, is a USB type-C port with support for another solid feature, up to 4 amp charging at 5 volts, that allows the 3000 milliamp hour battery to reach 60% in about half an hour, and this, they claim, is without generating as much heat in the phone itself as other quick charging solutions for less thermal throttling while gaming on wall power, for example. Here's a thermal camera shot versus the HTC 10, which uses Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 for comparison. But without the right horses, you wouldn't be gaming much anyway, and I haven't been avoiding that on purpose. The 3 packs a Snapdragon 820, 6 gigs of LPDDR4 RAM, 64 gigs in the base configuration of UFS 2.0 storage, which makes the lack of microSD quite a bit more forgivable, IMO, dual SIMs, NFC, Gorilla Glass 4, great call quality, and a 16 megapixel front camera, so on par with pretty much anything else out there, in theory, all at its $399 price point. However, we know cameras are a critical feature, and we know that megapixels do not a camera make. But there's more good news. The camera on the OnePlus 3 kicks ass. It launches lightning fast, it focuses very quickly, it shoots 4K video and RAW photos, it features ample manual controls in its stock app, and its image quality is competitive enough with flagship phones like the Galaxy S7 and the iPhone 6s, that when Brandon took his test shots around to folks here at the office, even if they could pick out a winner, and it wasn't the OnePlus 3, it took a while, and they had to look at it pretty closely. And remember that these are much more expensive devices. Compared to my pre-production Axon 7, a more comparably priced device, there is no contest whatsoever. I am a little salty that it can't snap a photo or start shooting video from the same initial screen, instead requiring a swipe, but hopefully, OnePlus, are you listening? That can be fixed in software, and then I wouldn't feel like I was missing out on really any part of the S7's camera experience by switching. I don't actually know what's more remarkable here. The way OnePlus has grown so much in such a short span from a weird offshoot from a Chinese brand, to a bona fide sustainable competitor in the high-end smartphone market, did I mention by the way the deplorable invite system is gone? Or the way that through all of it, they have proven to be the only high-tech company in the mobile space, or otherwise, who actually knows how to count. So I'll just congratulate them on both and say, good work on the OnePlus 3, keep it up. You know who else did a good job? dbrand. Because dbrand made a skin for the OnePlus 3 already, and you can head over to dbrand.com, we've got a link in the video description, and check out the wide variety of skins they have, not just for the OnePlus 3, but also for a huge variety of other devices, including phones, game consoles, game controllers, and even laptop computers. The best part about dbrand's site has got to be their configurator, which lets you take all the different skins, wood grain, carbon fiber, solid color, and preview what they look like as a precision fitted skin on your device, including combining different colors with other colors, like I did in my iPhone SE review, to great effect, that is one eye-catching phone. So check it out at the link in the video description, that's dbrand skins, makers of the high quality vinyl skins that you'll see on pretty much every phone that we review over here. 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