OnePlus has teased – for the second time this month – that it’s working on its first foldable smartphone, due later this year.
Speaking as part of a ‘From Fast & Smooth to Beyond’ panel at its stand at MWC Barcelona, OnePlus President and COO Kinder Liu confirmed the company has a foldable phone. in preparation, which will be launched in the second half of the year.
Liu wouldn’t reveal much more than that except to hint that the phone will pack flagship specs to match OnePlus’ best, the OnePlus 11 – which itself only launched earlier this month.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
“Our first foldable phone will deliver the fast and smooth OnePlus experience. It must be a flagship phone that does not settle because of its foldable form, in terms of industrial design, mechanical technology and other aspects.
“We want to launch a device that aims to be at the forefront of today’s foldable market experience,” Liu said.
Still, it’s a bit more concrete than our last match, which came as a tag at the end of the India-only segment of the OnePlus 11 launch earlier this year. It saw the company promise “something phenomenal” coming in Q3 – that’s July to September – with a graphic resembling the corners of a foldable phone, but the word ‘foldable’ doesn’t never came out.
OnePlus
OnePlus has already confirmed that it has no OnePlus 11 Pro or 11T planned this year, clearing the company’s calendar for high-end devices. That could mean the future foldable will land in the August slot traditionally occupied by half-step upgrade “T” phones, which conveniently falls in the middle of that wide Q3 window.
Rumors of a OnePlus foldable phone have been swirling for years and intensified after parent company Oppo announced its foldable Find N, since followed by the Find N2 and Find N2 Flip, the latter of which just launched in Europe and worldwide.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
We don’t yet know the specs of the next OnePlus device, or whether it will be a larger book-style foldable phone or a clamshell flip phone. Either way, it’s likely to look like one of Oppo’s last two handsets, likely with a few OnePlus twists along the way.
This is the second announcement from the show from OnePlus, which previously revealed a concept phone based on its flagship OnePlus 11. The imaginatively named OnePlus 11 concept features a new liquid cooling system, with a rear design transparent to make the blue cooling pipes visible at all times.
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Elsewhere at MWC, we saw Xiaomi give a global launch to its 13 and 13 Pro flagships, Honor unveil the Magic 5 Pro and officially launch its foldable Magic Vs, and Motorola show off a rollable concept phone with an extendable screen.
