Today during an event in London, OnePlus took the wraps off its highly anticipated flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 6. The device follows last year’s OnePlus 5 and 5T which proved to be two of 2017’s best amongst reviewers. Now, the company hopes to achieve the same foot with its latest offering.
Starting off with the design, OnePlus is ditching its traditional aluminum build and opting for an all-glass structure. This better follows recent trends amongst Android smartphones and, at least in the images the company provides, the OnePlus 6 looks really good. It’s also waterproof, although we don’t have an exact IP rating just yet.
Likely the first thing you’ll notice about the OnePlus 6 is its display and how little the bezels are. OnePlus opted for a 6.28-inch OLED panel with a 19:9 aspect ratio and a Full HD+ (2280×1080) resolution.
At the top of the display, unfortunately, there’s a notch. It houses a bunch of stuff like the LED notification light, selfie camera, and earpiece, but it’s still annoying to most users. OnePlus lets you hide it by giving the phone a black border via a software tweak, but I’m not sure if this will ease users’ complaints or just make them more prevalent. No matter how you feel about the notch, OnePlus wants to “learn to love” it anyway.
If there’s any sort of plus for getting the notch on a OnePlus 6, it’s the software tweaks the company made to accommodate the hardware. The company touts it made Android more precise and better suited to handle the display cutout, while it also moved the clock to the left of the notch and notifications to the right. Of course, if they didn’t include the notch at all, they wouldn’t have to put this amount of work into the software, but it’s the year of the notch so what more could you expect.
Moving on from the screen, the OnePlus 6 sports all the necessary specs to be a flagship contender in 2018. It packs a Snapdragon 845 processor, 6 or 8GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage, and an Adreno 630 GPU. Additionally, there’s Bluetooth 5, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and NFC.
For power, OnePlus is including a 3,300mAh cell inside the OnePlus 6 that charges over USB-C via the company’s Dash Charge technology. For security, the phone packs a rear-mounted fingerprint reader and Face Unlock which, if history is any indication, should be pretty quick but not as secure as your fingerprint. Finally, for audio, there’s a loudspeaker on the bottom and a headphone jack.
On the back of the OnePlus 6 are dual cameras. The main shooter weighs in at 20MP while the secondary sits at 16MP. Both have f/1.7 apertures. As has been the case since the OnePlus 5, the cameras allow for portrait mode bokeh photography, lossless zoom like on the Galaxy S9 or iPhone X, natural black and white images, and 4K video at 30 frames per second.
New for this generation is a larger sensor size for the main shooter. According to OnePlus, they’ve increased the size by 19 percent to 1.22 microns which allows for more light in lowly lit situations. This area of smartphones has been a main focus point for OnePlus as of late so it should be interesting to see how they perform in the real world.
Meanwhile, the selfie shooter weighs in at 16MP with an f/2.0 aperture. Things mostly stay the same here, but OnePlus did say they’ll issue a software upgrade later on that will bring portrait mode to the front lens.
As for software, the OnePlus 6 ships with OxygenOS 5.1 based on Android 8.1 Oreo. New in this version are navigation gestures similar to what we’re seeing in Android P. There are also under-the-hood optimizations to make the overall experience faster. The company’s been known for timely updates and a fluid experience so expect nothing less from this generation.
All in all, the OnePlus 6 seems promising. OnePlus has a reputation for producing some of the finest Android smartphones you can buy so it should be interesting to see how this device performs on the market.
The OnePlus 6 will be available in Midnight Black and Mirror Black starting May 22nd. A special edition Silk White variant will land June 5th. The phone starts at $529 and goes all the way up to $629, making this the most expensive OnePlus smartphone to date.
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