OnePlus has announced that it's bringing its popular Soft Gold colour scheme back for its latest flagship phone, the OnePlus 5. We've been able to get our hands on it in time for launch, and figured we'd show you what it looks like in the hand (and on the desk). 

It's a recurring move from the ambitious and popular phone maker. The manufacturer brought the Soft Gold option to the OnePlus 3 some time after it initially launched, and similarly brought the colour to the refreshed 3T model.

OnePlus says the sandblasting process used to create this finish has been upgraded for this year. The particles are 30 per cent finer, resulting in a smoother feel.  

The OnePlus 5 itself has been a popular conversation starter this year. It saw the company clearly moving further away from its origins, in that it is clearly, no longer a budget phone. With that said, it's still one of the most powerful and capable phones available, and still much cheaper than its competition. 

OnePlus 5 soft gold image 6
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As is popular with most gold phones on the market, the front panel is white. And, if you really prefer white phones over black ones, this is your only OnePlus 5 option at the moment. 

Other than that, it's mostly the same shade of gold you'd find on last year's phones. That's to say that - as the name suggests - it's a very light shade of gold, but not so light that it almost looks silver. As a point of comparison, it's a more yellow-ish tone than the gold chassis found on the Huawei P10 or the Oppo R11.

The antenna bands have been coloured to match the anodised finish of the aluminium, but they're not as well camouflaged as the antenna bands on the Midnight Black model we reviewed. Still, being right along the edges means they're not as prominent as the might have been on older devices, and we're glad they're not white. 

One element we really like - because we're essentially tech-loving Magpies - is that many of the cutouts and protrusions are finished in a highly polished gold chrome finish. That's the housing around the camera unit, the machined holes for the speaker grille, visible screws and the Type-C port. All look shiny, which is never a bad thing. 

OnePlus 5 soft gold image 4
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Perhaps the only bad news is that you can't buy the phone with the highest spec in the gold colour. Soft Gold will come with 6GB RAM and 64GB, and isn't initially be available with the 8GB/128GB configuration of the Midnight Black model. Then again, 6GB RAM and 64GB of storage is hardly stingey. For an entry level model, it's generous by any standard. 

Prices are the same as the current entry model: it costs $479 in the US, £449 in the UK and €499 in Europe and is available to buy now from OnePlus.net

Tagging along with this news, OnePlus has also announced that it will be upgrading the internal memory and storage of its Slate Grey model. That will be available with the same specifications as the 8GB/128GB Midnight Black phone in the coming weeks.