OnePlus celebrated its 9th year of life as a tech brand today (December 17, 2022), and chose to mark the event with a public address outlining its “rebirth” as it goes into the next 9.
The livestreamed keynote, presented by co-founder Pete Lau, mostly focused on OnePlus’ ongoing relationship with its parent company OPPO in truth.
The 2 entities have been growing more transparent about their links over the last few years, which will now apparently evolve into a new “dual-brand” strategy that serves different tiers and use-cases in their market.
Then again, they will continue to pool resources for production as well as R&D in a way that could see OPPO’s more cutting-edge prototypes go to market as OnePlus products in the future. To this end, the former plans to invest 10 billion yuan (~US$1.43 billion) into the latter over the next 3 years.
This, according to Lau, will empower OnePlus to focus on making “quality” products, even at the expense of its profit margin. Therefore, there was only just enough time left in this live-streamed conference to confirm that the long-rumored 11 is on the way.
This announcement came with an inaugural teaser video revealing a switch to a round camera hump in this 10 Pro successor, complete with Alert Slider and Hasselblad logo placements.
OnePlus already touts its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered handset as a “future performance leader” set to “challenge many impossibilities in the industry“, although the brand still prefers its favorite phrase “soon” to a launch-date reveal for now.
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I became a professional writer and editor shortly after graduation. My degrees are in biomedical sciences; however, they led to some experience in the biotech area, which convinced me of its potential to revolutionize our health, environment and lives in general. This developed into an all-consuming interest in more aspects of tech over time: I can never write enough on the latest electronics, gadgets and innovations. My other interests include imaging, astronomy, and streaming all the things. Oh, and coffee.
