OnePlus 3 leaked online: Snapdragon 820, dual front speaker and more

Now that the OnePlus 2 is available without an invite, it makes sense to believe that OnePlus is working on its next “flagship killer” the OnePlus 3. And the leakers and tipsters are back at their game as well, as a famous leaker and tipster have together both images and some speculations about the OnePlus 3 smartphone. What you see is clearly a render of what we are told is the OnePlus 3. And since this is a render we should take all the observations below with a pinch of salt. Still then, the images do come from a trusted source called mobile-dad and we are told that this is what the OnePlus 3 may look like.    We can see that OnePlus has finally moved on from its Sandstone coated back. The 3 appears to have a unibody metal one with only the power, and volume buttons as accents. On the front things  appear to be minimalist with no touch targets for the home back or multi-taking buttons either. But we do see a front facing speaker at the bottom. More importantly, there is not fingerprint scanner out here as well (more on this later). Coming to the back we find a lonely camera unit sitting all by itself on the top while the OnePlus logo sits on the bottom end.    In what appears to be a separate leak, tipster upleaks has pointed out that the OnePlus 3 will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset but will still stick to its Full HD display. While the reasons for this are unknown, the Snapdragon 820 chipset does hint at something else, Sense ID fingerprint reading by Qualcomm. As you can see from the images above, there appears to be no fingerprint reader button anywhere on the device, which could indicate that OnePlus may be hiding the ultrasonic fingerprint reader within the device. According to the note from Qualcomm, “QTI’s ultrasonic fingerprint technology has a number of distinct advantages over capacitive touch-based fingerprint technologies, including the ability to scan through a smartphone cover that is made of glass, aluminium, stainless steel, sapphire and plastics.” This also means that there needs to be no button but just a designated area on the device to place your finger on for a scan. Right now this is simply speculation, but OnePlus could be up to something consider that OnePlus 2 just jumped aboard the security bandwagon with a fingerprint reader. More importantly, Google is out to make fingerprint readers a standard on Android so this could be the next step forward. Last we heard from the rumour mill, even the Xiaomi Mi 5 smartphone was supposed include similar ultrasonic tech. You can have a look at the Sense ID ultrasonic fingerprint reader in action below.