This week during Qualcomm’s summit in Hawaii, OnePlus unexpectedly took the stage to announce it would introduce a phone next year that supported 5G and packed a Snapdragon 855 processor. The former is expected from a lot of manufacturers going into 2019, but the latter was interesting since the company’s CEO, Pete Lau, said they’d be the first to ship a phone with the chipset onboard. As we’re learning now, however, this appears to be a miscommunication.
As per an article out of Engadget who spoke to OnePlus on this topic, the smartphone maker has confirmed it will not be the first to market with a Snapdragon 855-equipped device. This means there’s a really good chance another company, like Samsung, will beat them to the punch.
So why the miscommunication in the first place? After all, the slide OnePlus showed on stage said they’d be the first to ship a phone with the 855 inside. Well, as it turns out, the person who wrote those slides isn’t a native English speaker and had to translate in order to appease the international audience attending the summit. Because of this, those in charge of the company’s slides thought saying the phone would be the “first to feature” an 855 meant it would be the first phone Qualcomm gave access to the 855.
This ultimately led to a misinterpretation among many tech journalists (including myself) along with OnePlus’ social media team who seemed pretty convinced the company they were working for would be the first to introduce Qualcomm’s bleeding-edge technology to the smartphone market. “We appreciate the opportunity to clarify that we will be one of the first to have access to, and use, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, and apologize for the miscommunication,” a OnePlus spokesperson said in a statement to Engadget.
In the end, while the next OnePlus smartphone will still have an 855 on board, it won’t be the first phone to do so. Speaking of which, we expect to see the initial batch of Snapdragon 855-powered devices in the coming months so stay tuned.
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