People have been burned before when it comes to OnePlus and foldables; the company seemed to tease a foldable on the eve of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 launch, and disappointingly it turned out to be a marketing campaign pushing a 50% discount.
But leaker Yogesh Brar has told PriceBaba that a OnePlus foldable is in the works — albeit a device that may look more than a little familiar if you’ve ever perused our list of the best foldables you can buy.
Rather than matching the ambitious tri-fold OnePlus patent we saw last year, Brar claims that the company’s first foldable will in fact be a carbon copy of the Oppo Find N. This shouldn’t be completely surprising: Oppo and OnePlus formally merged last year, and even before that, as sister companies, certain handsets bore a similarity with each other.
While that may cause plenty of people to lose interest, you really shouldn’t. Assuming this is correct, and the phone is released soon, this could be news to seriously shake up the foldable space — here’s why.
A global foldable?
In our Oppo Find N review, we found very little to criticize, and it actually managed to eclipse the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 in certain respects, with its sturdy hinge and lack of obvious crease. It’s more compact when folded, and the core specs — a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chip backed by 8GB of RAM and 256/512GB internal storage — are still pretty strong, too.
But there’s one serious drawback for our readers: it isn’t available outside of China. And while there are ways and means of importing handsets, it’s a messy experience in the western hemisphere.
“Several of the system prompts are in Chinese, the power button is mapped to a Chinese-only voice assistant, and Google Play Services is hacked on,” our phones editor Jordan Palmer wrote.
But even if it was perfectly serviceable as an import phone, ColorOS — the operating system that Oppo uses — isn’t for everyone. And this is where a theoretical OnePlus reskin could help: following fan backlash, OnePlus pledged to stick with OxygenOS on its future phones. In other words, the OnePlus Fold — or whatever it ends up being called — could be the Oppo Find N with Oxygen OS installed. Sign us up!
No rumored release date was provided, but with the hardware supposedly all ready to go, you’d imagine we may not have too long to wait. Alternatively, OnePlus may delay a little, and improve the innards to go toe-to-toe with the reportedly upcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4. Either way, this is definitely one to watch.
