Hands On With the Red OnePlus 6, Early OnePlus Prototypes

SHENZHEN, China—Every bit "principal production director" at phone maker OnePlus—or, every bit the sign on his office says, "decision daddy"—CEO Pete Lau gets picky about the design of his company'southward phones.

In a visit to OnePlus'south Shenzhen HQ, we saw the new reddish OnePlus vi and got an exclusive look at dozens of designs OnePlus ultimately discarded. The red telephone is, of grade, gorgeous. The best way to feel this is to expect for yourself, in our video below:

Walking with Lau through the visitor'due south prototypes, we saw some interesting paths not taken. The start OnePlus 5 image, for example, had a strange vertical seam downward the centre designed to await like a car hood. But that idea was quickly set aside.

Nosotros saw phones with headphone jacks on their bottoms and phones without jacks; OnePlus decided to stick with the jack in the stop. Nosotros saw models with unmarried main cameras and dual cameras; OnePlus has gone with dual cameras. Their backs had subtly different curvatures, a measurement Lau has said he pays particular attention to. A few phones had particularly large, plastic "radio windows" across their metal backs for LTE signal reception. Lau hated those, and pushed engineers to collapse the radio window into the space between the dual cameras.

OnePlus 6 Colors

The OnePlus 6's "silk white" and red colors were selected out of dozens of potential dorsum plates, too. We spied one with a very similar color gradient to the Huawei P20 Pro, which a OnePlus engineer said they did "just to show we could." Other back plates had subtle designs that showed upwardly under reflected calorie-free. We didn't come across any unlike textures, though—nothing like the sometime OnePlus sandstone or woods backs, which take been relegated to add-on cases.

OnePlus will continue to innovate next year, as Lau revealed exclusively to the states in a fireside chat at Mobile Earth Congress concluding week. In the video beneath, watch him tell u.s. that OnePlus is looking at Us carrier relationships and working on a 5G phone.