Founded by former Oppo employee Pete Lau, OnePlus is a new mobile phone manufacturer that has one goal in mind: to deliver the most cutting edge hardware with an affordable price tag. While we’ve seen neither a phone or a price tag from OnePlus for it’s first flagship, the OnePlus One, the spec list continues to evolve and interest in the new outing’s phone continues to grow. While we can’t vouch for the price tag being affordable just quite yet, we can definitely say the OnePlus One is shaping up to be top of the line, and the CPU has just been upgraded from a Snapdragon 800 to a cutting-edge Snapdragon 801. For those keeping track that’s the same processor used in the upcoming Oppo Find 7, Samsung Galaxy S5 and the All New HTC One. What’s different about the Snapdragon 801 vs the 800 you ask? More or less a jump in clock speed from 2.3GHz to 2.5GHz, faster on-board memory and a host of new features including hardware HDR photo support and more. Whether or not the OnePlus One will take advantage of all the new features of the Snapdragon 801 is not sure at this point, but we’ll have to wait for an official announcement and unveiling of the phone to find out for sure anyway.
What’s so special about the OnePlus One at this point? Well besides having the CyanogenMod team at the helm of software and operating system development, the OnePlus One promises to offer a premium unibody build and design with user-switchable backplates that feature all sorts of different material ranging from bamboo to Kevlar. Not only that but the phone is a generous 5.5-inch screen in a body that’s smaller than most 5-inch phones out there, meaning that 5.1-inch Galaxy S5’s screen will be dwarfed next to the OnePlus One’s screen while the OnePlus One will still be physically smaller. That’s a pretty impressive feat in and of itself, but it’s not unheard of, as there have been rumors that the LG G3 will also feature such a design. The OnePlus One also features a large 3,100 mAh battery, which is as big as nearly any phablet out there all while having a slimmer profile too. The phone is rounded out with a 6-element 13 megapixel Sony Exmor IMX214 sensor with f/2.0 lens, making it one of the better sounding cameras on the market. When will the OnePlus One hit store shelves? That’s up to OnePlus of course, but we expect it to be soon given the recent addition to the spec list, and of course the big flagships launching just next month.