If you were wondering what OnePlus' 5G phone or the
OnePlus 7 are going to look like, we may now have the answer. The image you can
see below has been leaked today, and it's a shot from an internal company
meeting, with OnePlus CEO Pete Lau attending. The employee who took the picture
surely risks being fired for this.
Anyway, as you can see, the design of the back is a
pretty big departure from OnePlus' recent phones, with a huge circular camera
island. The device on the slide is red, as is a prototype just laying on the
desk, but there's also a white model in development - don't miss the right part
of the shot.
It's unclear which handset this is, but given the
fact that the 5G phone is coming sooner than the OnePlus 7 we'd venture a guess
and say it's more likely to be that model. This will launch in early 2019 and
don't be surprised to see it offered by T-Mobile at some point - in light of
the carrier's recent partnership with OnePlus for selling the 6T.
An additional factor lending credence to that
hypothesis is that OnePlus still hasn't figured out how to do mmWave 5G in a
phone (because of how many antennas are needed), so it's going to start off by
going with the so-called "sub-6GHz band" 5G, which will be used in
the US by, you guessed it, the magenta carrier. And also Sprint, but the two
are in the process of merging.
In the meantime, the first carrier to get the
OnePlus 5G will be EE in the UK (and yes, it's also using sub-6GHz). The phone
is expected to be US$ 100 to US$ 200 more expensive than the 6T because of all the
additional bits and pieces required for 5G. It will be powered by the
Snapdragon 855 chipset paired with the X50 modem. The 855 should also feature
in the OnePlus 7, but with the 4G X24 modem instead.
