How OnePlus built its latest phone, the OnePlus 5T, so quickly
Is hardware really that hard?
OnePlus pointed to the borderline-cliché catchphrase, "Hardware is hard" at its event on Thursday to launch its latest flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 5T. But the company's own product release schedule appears to belie the saying, with the 5T coming a mere five months after its predecessor, the OnePlus 5.
However, if you look at OnePlus' ambitious launch timeline and conclude the opposite -- that hardware is easy -- you'd be jumping to the wrong conclusion. The China-based company has simply gotten really good at leveraging its natural advantages (for instance, its proximity to prototype facilities in Shenzhen) to fuel its nimbleness.
OnePlus also earns its reputation as a bold upstart. It doesn't think in the same new-flagship-every-year-on-the-dot terms as bigger brands like Samsung and LG. The company just ships phones when they're ready, and the "T" suffix it's attached to second-gen releases is an unsubtle dig at Apple's biannual "S" upgrades.
Still, are they going too fast, even for an upstart? Like other mobile manufacturers, OnePlus has had some optically bad software issues over the past few months. First, it was reported OnePlus phones were harvesting data on customers in questionable ways, and then there was the "Engineer Mode" discovery -- a potential backdoor for hackers, at least those who got a hold of your device.
OnePlus Head of Marketing Kyle Kiang (pronounced "jong") drops in on the MashTalk podcast to set the record straight on those incidents, explain why the OnePlus 5T is coming so hot on the heels of the OnePlus 5, and reveal how he is able to tell the OnePlus story at a company that does very little traditional marketing.
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Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
