One of the most anticipated Android phone releases of 2015 will be the OnePlus 2, the follow up to the highly successful OnePlus One from the Chinese manufacture OnePlus. There have been a huge number of leaks, rumors and guesses as to what the OnePlus 2 will look like, it’s price, what it will have powering it and when it will actually be released. The challenge of course is separating the fiction from fact and, to their credit, OnePlus has been doing a pretty good job of confirming and denying these leaks and rumors as they have come out.
To help set things straight, I’ve put together a list of the things that we know for sure about the OnePlus 2. These are all confirmed by OnePlus themselves. I have purposely avoided rumor posts just to get visitors to my site and I stand firm in that. What you won’t find in this post are supposed leaked images of the phone or other guesses. It’s just facts.
That said, I have been clear in my opinion that the OnePlus 2 is critical to the long term success of OnePlus. It has to be a success for the long term sustainability of the company.
Release Date
OnePlus has indicated via Twitter and their blog that the release date of the OnePlus 2 will be on July 27th and will be done via a Virtual Reality session. OnePlus will be releasing a Cardboard viewer for the OnePlus One for viewing of the release and they will be providing these for free and you can get more information on it at http://oneplus.net/cardboard.
Pricing
No formal pricing has been announced but given the features that have been announced, OnePlus has indicated that the price point will be higher than the OnePlus One. How much more is not clear but one thing you cannot fault OnePlus for is their transparency on why they price things the way they do.
Processor
The first feature that was announced by OnePlus on the OnePlus 2 was the processor that will be powering the phone. It will be a Snapdragon 810 v2.1. This processor is an eight-core, 64-bit
OnePlus One with Google Apps
architecture processor and is able to support things like 4K video, exceptional battery life and coupled with the Adreno 430 GPU. What isn’t clear is the processor speed. According to Qualcomm, the 810 can run as high as 2.5GHz but to save battery life, it could be throttled back a bit.
Connector
If there was any doubt if USB Type-C was going to be “Apple only”, remove that doubt now. The OnePlus 2 will have the latest USB standard which has a huge number of benefits for users. First, it doesn’t matter how you insert the connector into your phone, it is universal unlike the MicroUSB standard. Second, the throughput of the Type-C supports the USB 3.1 standard and can output of up to 20v and 100w of power and it is bi-lateral so you can charge a device while a peripheral device is connected to it. The OnePlus 2 is the first phone to announce the Type-C connector as it’s connector and while they may not be the first to market, it will certainly set the standard for other manufactures to quickly adopt the standard.
Fingerprint Scanner
This week OnePlus announced that the OnePlus 2 will have an advanced fingerprint scanner for bio-metric security. The company is promising that it will be superior to TouchID from Apple which is generally considered to be the standard for the industry. How exactly they will do this is a great question. Will it be on the front? Will it be on the back? It’s unclear but clearly mobile device security is an ever increasing need for both consumers and businesses.
RAM
In a recent blog post, One Plus confirmed that the OnePlus 2 will have an impressive 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. This is really key in combination with the Snapdragon 810 processor because it can actually take advantage of all that RAM. This is mainly due to the 64-bit architecture of the chipset. The LPDDR4 will run at 1.1v, less than DDR3 (think better battery life) and will have throughput of 32GB/s. That will be plenty powerful for any Android app you put on the phone. Period.
What Next?
OnePlus has indicated on their blog that they will be announcing a new feature of the OnePlus 2 each week through to the July 27th launch date. I would expect that we will see the RAM and Storage capacities being announced but I would also expect to see another new feature or two. For example, we don’t know about the display. If the Snapdragon 810 can support 4K video the OnePlus 2 will need to have a display able to show that crisp video.
I will be updating this post weekly as more features are announced.
