Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus has built its brand on offering powerful phones at cheaper costs than comparable rivals from Apple, Google or Samsung.
Priding itself on offering the latest specs, with the race to 5G the company hopes to be among the first batch of manufacturers with a 5G device in the second quarter of the year.
Unfortunately, that phone won’t be launching in the U. S.
The phone, which OnePlus will be showing a prototype of at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona next week, will first launch on United Kingdom carrier EE and Finnish carrier Elisa during the second quarter of the year.
OnePlus shared an image of the prototype device it will displaying with USA TODAY. Wrapped in a protective casing, not much is discernible about the device but it will run Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 855 processor and utilize the company’s X50 modem.
That is the same speedy processor Samsung is using in its new Galaxy S10 line.
«It’s still very early days for 5G, and we want to take the opportunity to raise more awareness particularly within the OnePlus community, but not just limited to the OnePlus community, in what we can look forward to with 5G,» OnePlus founder and CEO Pete Lau said through a translator in an interview with USA TODAY.
It remains to be seen how consumers will take advantage of the speed and latency improvements 5G will offer, but Lau is bullish on the network’s potential impact of off-loading powerful processing to a server in the cloud, particularly when it comes to gaming.
