One plus six equals flagship killer

Disruptive Chinese smartphone vendor One Plus launched its latest flagship device, which offers premium specs for far less money than the competition.

The OnePlus 6 has a 6.28-inch AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC, a 16MP main camera, supported by a 20MP secondary camera, loads of RAM and storage and all the other bells and whistles that you would associate with a flagship smartphone. But one of these will set you back around £519, while an equivalent Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus comes in at £869 and a Google wants £899 for a Pixel 2 XL. It might be fun to get hold of all three and compare; watch this space.

“With the OnePlus 6, we challenged ourselves to deliver an external design as smooth and elegant as the work we’ve done inside the device,” said OnePlus Founder and CEO Pete Lau. “We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, and we hope our users are too.”

O2 has the exclusive operator partnership in the UK right now, but main message from OnePlus over the years has been that you don’t need to get into these big, long contracts to subsidize your flagship phone. Find £500 from somewhere and go SIM-only – the total cost of ownership will be a lot lower. O2 wants £40 per month for a 4GB plan, which comes to £960 over two years, but you can get 6GB SIM-only from them for £15 per month. You can also buy two of these for one iPhone X! Here are the details.