OnePlus 2

After months upon months of rumors and speculation, OnePlus finally announced its highly anticipated OnePlus 2 smartphone this evening. While nearly everything was already known about the device, it’s nice to get confirmation and some rehashing of details from OnePlus. As expected, the OnePlus 2 features a 5.5-inch display at 1080p and a refreshed design. The company brags that it’s not a 2015 flagship, but rather a 2016 flagship. The device will be available August 11th in the US,  Canada, India, EU, and China. It will rollout to Southeast Asia in Q4.

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It looks like this could very well be the much-anticipated OnePlus 2 that is set to be announced later today. These images perfectly match what we saw from Chinese telecoms regulator TENAA last week. Head below for the full gallery…
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Update: OnePlus has also launched its invite page, where you can add your email address to the reservation list. Head on over to OnePlus’ site and read more about this year’s invite system.

OnePlus has been teasing us for weeks, or even months, about 2016’s “flagship killer”. The OnePlus Two is going to be announced at an event on Monday, July 27 from 7PM Pacific Time, and will be the first smartphone announcement to use Google Cardboard VR to enhance the experience. OnePlus has been sending out its own Cardboard units to fans and members of the press, and now the viewing app has finally hit the Google Play Store.

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There’s no getting away from OnePlus‘ effect on the market. From the very beginning it planned to be disruptive and offer consumers what they really wanted: A flagship phone at a low price. Despite controversies and frustrations over its marketing and invite-based purchases, OnePlus has gone on to sell over 1.3 million units of its first smartphone. That may not seem like much in a market where companies sell millions of phones. But this is just one phone, made by one small company that most consumers still haven’t heard of.

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The OnePlus 2 looks to have been outed by the Chinese certification body, TENAA. These images appear to show front, back and side profiles of the next-generation OnePlus smartphone, which looks like it’ll include a physical home button similar to the Samsung Galaxy S6 – presumably where the built-in fingerprint sensor will be housed … 
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OnePlus sparked conversation, controversy and frustration last year when its sought-after debut smartphone launched. Its invite system meant you could only get hold of a OnePlus One if you received an invitation to buy one. With the OnePlus 2 — due to be announced in 11 days — the company will still have an invite system in place, but promises that it is “new and improved”.

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OnePlus came out not long ago to say that the upcoming OnePlus 2 will sport the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor. This obviously caused a bit of concern in the community considering the system-on-a-chip’s mixed history with heat problems, but the company reassured us that it was going with some kind of updated “version 2.1” of the chip that didn’t have as many problems — and they said they were optimizing it themselves, too.

The company touted this as some kind of selling point for the device over the year’s other Snapdragon 810 handsets, most notably the HTC One M9 and the LG G Flex 2. AnandTech even tested the v2.1 chip to make sure that the company’s claims were legitimate, and it turned out they were. But what the company didn’t say was that v2.1 is already (today!) being built into other handsets. And that includes the HTC One M9…
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OnePlus One with a OnePlus 2 underneath

OnePlus held an AMA on Reddit this morning, and actually used the opportunity to give us some more details about the upcoming handset. According to various OnePlus team members (who did indeed verify themselves), the phone will have a slightly larger 3,300 mAh battery (up from 3,100 mAh of the OnePlus One), while the physical size of the phone will actually be moderately smaller than that of its predecessor…
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A pair of interesting developments concerning the upcoming OnePlus 2 smartphone have emerged recently. First off, three variants of the device have been spotted on the Bluetooth SIG website. The variants all have been certified with hardware build 2.2 and software build 2.01 for Bluetooth 4.1.

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The OnePlus 2 isn’t scheduled to be unveiled for about a month, but PhoneArena has apparently come into some nice new shots of both the back and front of the device. They’re a little bit blurry — what leak isn’t? — but they do give us a relatively clear look at the overall build of the phone and an early peek at its software as well…
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The company’s OnePlus One

OnePlus has today announced that they plan to launch their upcoming OnePlus 2 handset by way of virtual reality, something that has never been done before. Tired of traditional keynote-and-an-audience tech announcements, OnePlus decided to do something new — and, perhaps more importantly, way cheaper:

In our industry, product launches tend to be the same. An auditorium, a keynote, and a seated audience. For the OnePlus 2 launch, we didn’t want that barrier between us and you; we want to invite you into our world, because you’re a major part of it. That is why we will be unveiling the OnePlus 2 to the world completely in VR.

OnePlus has a reputation of being as loud and disruptive as they can in their marketing, and this is yet another step in that direction as the company slowly announces the specifications of the OnePlus 2 one by one…
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Following the announcement that the OnePlus 2 would have a USB Type-C port, Mobile Syrup wrote an open letter on Monday to OnePlus calling for sanity. Most who have watched OnePlus evolve as a company agreed wholeheartedly with this letter. From teasing a “game changer” that ended up being a miniature drone barely made available, to teasing the end of the OnePlus One invite system several months after the phone finally hit the market, the company has been known to be really loud (and many times obnoxious) about nothing. But OnePlus says that there’s a reason for all of this…
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Update: Images of the company’s USB-C cable have now been leaked online by the company itself…

Here comes the next little detail about the OnePlus 2. According to a tweet this afternoon from OnePlus, the company’s upcoming OnePlus 2 flagship phone will be one of the first — if not the first — to sport a USB Type-C port.
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The onslaught of OnePlus posts teasing out each individual facts about its upcoming phone, the OnePlus 2, continues. Today the company is responding to more concerns about overheating, as well as about the price of the OnePlus 2.

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In a post to its community forums, OnePlus today unveiled which CPU its much-anticipated OnePlus 2 will use – Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810. The company said that the Snapdragon 810’s unmatched speed and ability to multitask while maintaining battery performance had them coming back to it over and over again during their search for the right processor. But don’t worry, the company says it will be version 2.1 of the chipset, a version that they collaborated on with Qualcomm engineers to integrate and fine-tune for the OnePlus 2’s hardware and software, and that (apparently) won’t overheat.

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We’ve heard very little about the much-anticipated OnePlus 2 since September of last year when OnePlus confirmed it was working on the device and targeting a Q2 or Q3 2015 launch. We expected the company to unveil it late last month when they tweeted a plan to “shake up the industry” on June 1st, but that turned out to be teasing flash sales and a consequential permanent price drop of the OnePlus One. Today, however, OnePlus is actually teasing the OnePlus 2 in the form of two contests.
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