Soft Gold OnePlus 3 Hands-On & Photo Gallery: Same Great Value with a Premium Touch

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When OnePlus first unveiled the OnePlus 3, we caught glimpses of a white and gold variant that was sadly absent from the OnePlus store. It took a month for the company to allow consumers to buy the shinier variant of their latest flagship, but now it’s available for everyone to buy.

We rushed to put one in our cart and after some headaches with DHL shipping, it finally arrived to the XDA HQ. How does this cosmetic revision live up to the original block of graphite metal and black glass? We took it out of the box and put it in front of our camera lenses to find out.

As you’d expect, the color change of the back is the real eye candy here, with the soft gold variant bringing the light champagne look that other OEMs have been offering on their flagships. It’s also worth pointing out that the texture feels different, with slightly better grip due to a different finishing which OnePlus should feel like a “fine, silky-soft sand”. At the back you also get a color change in the antennae bands (now white) and the logo shines differently virtue of the new palette surround it. The rest is standard affair until you reach the front, which abandons the black slab look for a pure white face that only has a few accents in the form of the fingerprint scanner, earpiece, front camera and sensor. The bezels look quite minimal once more, although there’s more than meets the eye.

Turning on the display reveals a somewhat-thick black border around the display, the kind we complained about in editorials before. This isn’t to say that the regular OnePlus 3 didn’t have these, of course it did; but the black slab front plus the 2.5D glass at least gave a better illusion of thinner bezels. This isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, though, as the phone is still very easy to handle and has an above-average screen-to-body ratio. It’s also worth noting that the rubber border serving as an interface between the edge of the phone and the display is notably minimized here, a plus given some users reported early and easy scuffing on that area.

The device weighed 2 grams heavier than our standard graphite unit, but other than that there don’t seem to be differences in thickness. From the side, the soft gold OnePlus 3 looks quite attractive and nicely reflects the light around its edge. It ultimately looks very appealing in our opinion, but we did wish that the black border around the display was thinner.

So there you have it, that’s the soft gold OnePlus 3 in all its glory and compared to the regular variant. Considering there is no super-high premium cost to the gold paint, it’s definitely an attractive option for those wanting a flashier OnePlus 3. Let’s hope supplies aren’t so limited, so that anyone on the fence can get theirs in time should they choose this alternative.

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