What we know about the OnePlus 6 so far
OnePlus has steadily grown to become one of the more trusted smartphones brands in India. Over the last few years, the company has made a name for itself with its strategy of bi-annual flagship upgrades. A case in point is the success of the 5 and 5T that raked up stellar sales figures during 2017 – the latter even breaking the company's previous launch day sales record in just under six hours.
However, the smartphone maker will look to better those numbers with its next device, the OnePlus 6, which the company's CEO, Pete Lau, revealed will be launched towards the end of the second quarter of 2018. This falls in line with OnePlus' existing upgrade cycle, which sees it launching the first device of the year around June every year.
Speaking to CNET, Lau also revealed more details about the much-anticipated device. Here's what we know about the device and the rumours surrounding it.
More is less
OnePlus is known to be a brand for hardware enthusiasts, and as such all its new phones come with the promise of packing the most powerful internals available in the market. It looks like OnePlus 6 will carry that tradition forward. Though not much has been divulged in this regard, from what has been confirmed, the device will feature Qualcomm's latest SoC: the 845.
This will serve as a definite upgrade on the 835 SoCs found on the current generation devices.
Apart from the processor, the RAM and battery are expected to stay the same with the former maxing out at 8GB for the higher storage variant.
The phone is also expected to sport a better – 24+20 Megapixel – rear camera setup that makes use of optical image stablisation for clicking stills.
Under display fingerprint scanner
According to reports, the next OnePlus device will come equipped with a fingerprint sensor that's embedded into the display itself. Synaptics already announced that this technology will be shipping first on a Vivo phone in 2018, so the likelihood of it appearing on the OnePlus 6 isn't all that far-fetched.
Quad HD screen
The other big rumour about the OnePlus 6 is it is expected to come with a Quad HD display. Since the days of the first OnePlus handset, the company has equipped all its phones with Full HD displays. Though initially, the technology was top of the line, it has been in the last year or so that resolution has started to make the phone lag behind the competition.
With the 5T already moving to a bezel-less screen, equipping the next phone with a Quad HD display will also appear to be a logical move.
Advantage facial recognition
The phone is also said to sport improved facial recognition technology in line with what was earlier seen with the iPhone X. The current flagship OnePlus device, the 5T, does come with facial recognition technology which is quite fast but lags behind the one found on Apple's smartphone in terms of security.
Rumours suggest the next OnePlus flagship will remedy this by including an advanced camera setup on the front that will make use of infrared light to measure depth and map 3D images of people’s faces to authenticate.
However, it will be interesting to see if OnePlus can achieve this without including the ugly camera notch that Apple has included on its latest phone.