A lot is known about the OnePlus 5, successor to last year’s popular OnePlus 3 and 3T made by the popular Chinese smartphone manufacturer. Today, a leaked image on Chinese social media network Weibo suggests that the 6GB RAM, 64GB Storage SKU of the new handset will be sold for Rs. 32,999. There’s also a unit with 128GB storage and a whopping 8GB of RAM, which the image suggests will be priced at Rs. 37,999. It is further suggested that the phone will be an Amazon exclusive and the sale of the handset will commence on 22nd June at 4.30pm.
This supposedly leaked marketing material was brought to our attention by Gear India. As mentioned in the headline, the pricing details are unsurprising because we’ve seen the same reported ten days ago. It isn’t too outlandish to think this would be the actual price — OnePlus has year-on-year been incrementally increasing the price of its offerings. In 2015, the OnePlus One 64GB started selling in India for Rs. 21,999. A year later, the OnePlus 2 64GB variant started selling at Rs. 24,999. Last year, the OnePlus 3 started selling for Rs. 27,999, while a slightly-updated OnePlus 3T was put on virtual shelves at a price tag of Rs. 29,999.
This year’s OnePlus 5 is confirmed to be powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip. It will most certainly feature a dual-camera-lens setup at the back, which was earlier revealed by leaked press images and then by OnePlus themselves yesterday during a cricket match. Other rumored specs include a 3300mAh battery with Dash Charge fast-charging technology, Bluetooth 5.0, a 1080p resolution display with support for the DCI-P3 color gamut, and a fingerprint scanner with ceramic coating. If you were to take away the Qualcomm chip and the dual cameras, prima facie the OnePlus 5 doesn’t appear to be wildly different from its predecessor. Maybe that’s also why the slight bump in price from the OnePlus 3T seems credible.
Still, at Rs. 32,999, the OnePlus 5 should be able to maintain its high-value proposition when compared to the Galaxy S8, the Google Pixel, and the iPhone 7 Plus, all of which cost above Rs. 50,000 today.
