World's six most powerful smartphones all hail from China

THE OnePlus 3 smartphone has taken the top spot in the famous AnTuTu performance benchmark with an average score of 140.288, as of August 2016. It comes ahead of five other Chinese handsets, most of which are only available in Asia.

Selling for just US$399, the OnePlus 3 has nothing to envy of pricier, high-end handsets from Apple and Samsung -- the iPhone 6s and the Galaxy S7 edge -- when it comes to performance. With a design largely inspired by the iPhone 6s, this 5.5-inch cell phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 16MP and 8MP Sony cameras and 6GB of RAM. It runs OxygenOS, a mobile operating system based on Android Marshmallow and developed by OnePlus.

The OnePlus 3 is followed in the current AnTuTu ranking by the Vivo Xplay5 Elite and the LeEco Max2, both of which sell in Asian markets. The Vivo Xplay5 Elite is the first Chinese smartphone to get a screen with curved edges. This 5.43-inch mobile sells for approximately US$674. The LeEco Max2 is a 5.7-inch smartphone with features including a 21MP camera with optical image stabilization. In China, it sells for under US$450. Note that both phones have 6GB of RAM.

The first handset made outside of China to appear in the ranking is the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, in seventh place, followed by Apple's iPhone 6s in eighth. It remains to be seen whether its successor, the freshly unveiled iPhone 7, will be able to match the performances of its Chinese competitors and their Apple-inspired creations.

The 10 highest scoring smartphones in the AnTuTu performance benchmark

1. OnePlus 3 (140.288) 2. Vivo Xplay 5 Elite (138.706) 3. LeECo Max 2 (138.026) 4. Nubia Z11 (137.685) 5. Lenovo ZUK Z2 Pro (136.853) 6. Xiaomi 5 (136.773) 7. Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (134.599) 8. iPhone 6s (133.781) 9. 360 Q5 plus (133.394) 10. HTC 10 (133.217)

AnTuTu is a Chinese benchmarking tool that compiles a multitude of data to establish a performance index, assessing the individual performance of all smartphones on the market.