Here’s our first official look at the OnePlus Open

The OnePlus Fold is coming on October 19 and this is our first official look at the foldable phone. In an official teaser image provided to The edgeIt appears to be a relatively slim design with at least one fan-favorite feature: a three-stage alert slider.

OnePlus President and COO Kinder Liu is not ashamed of the phone’s potential. In a conversation conducted through a translator with The edge end of last month, told us it would “take the foldable experience to new heights.” That’s a big statement about its first entry into a market where Samsung has dominated for years, but according to Liu, this device, which parent company Oppo will launch under a different name, has been a long time coming. His statements throughout this article have been edited for clarity.

“To be honest, we have been thinking about launching a foldable for a while. We spent the last two years researching and developing prototypes and wanted to launch it sooner. However, in the early stages we faced technical challenges.” He tells us that the company did not want to rush to launch it on the market and delayed its launch. until the product was completely ready. There’s also certainly been a lot to learn in recent years from the development of Oppo’s Find series of foldable phones, which haven’t been released outside of China.

But the $1,800 question is: does the world really want foldable phones? The skeptical point of view shared by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei – is that the push for foldable products originates with manufacturers, not customer needs. Liu tells us that his team had a similar belief in the recent past: “Two years ago, when we started researching this product category, we had a similar idea. “We did a lot of research and analysis because we wanted to make sure it was a real user demand.”

He says people want to do things on the big screen with their phones and believes current foldable options don’t fully meet users’ needs. “Heavy” and “thick” devices present too much friction for the people using them. “We know that if we want to bring a foldable device to the market, we have to make it more convenient for users and eliminate that friction,” he says, calling the OnePlus Open’s form factor light and thin.

Heavyweight Samsung cannot be ignored in this market segment, although Liu believes there is still room on the table and cites growth forecasts in the foldable space. There are good reasons to be optimistic: Oppo owned more than a quarter of folding sales at home in China in the first quarter of 2023 with devices like the Find N2 Flip, slightly outperforming Samsung. And foldable devices are a shining beacon of growth in an otherwise shrinking smartphone market.

However, Liu didn’t stop at the market during our conversation: “From the beginning… we didn’t care too much about the competition. Instead, we care much more about users and their needs. “We want to offer a versatile folding model that makes no compromises.” But compromise is always the name of the game when designing a product like the Open: what is included and at what cost? What do you leave out? At the very least, we know we won’t have to wait much longer to see OnePlus’ fully realized vision for a foldable phone.