A likely early April Fool’s Day prank saw OnePlus tease a cryptocurrency bet on Wednesday, with the company’s co-founder Carl Pei stating the firm is now setting out to “reimagine one of the most fundamental elements of our everyday lives – currency.” The Chinese phone maker has a history of April Fool’s pranks, having started such practices three years back with the DR-1 drone which ended up having a limited commercial run as part of a prolonged publicity stunt. In 2016, the firm jokingly announced a similar product lineup allowing consumers to “get sandstoned,” i.e. apply a sandstone finish to everyday objects to prevent them from slipping out of hand. Last year, OnePlus’s April Fool’s Day prank came in the form of a Dash Energy drink; the company’s history of joke product launches can be seen below.
With April Fool’s Day still being four days away, it appears OnePlus started teasing its annual prank early this year, less the firm truly ends up unveiling a real cryptocurrency initiative. The Twitter video seen below still suggests some kind of an announcement is meant to take place in the coming days, even if it’s widely expected to be made in jest. On the more serious side of things, the Shenzhen-based company just confirmed the OnePlus 6 will have a display notch, with Mr. Pei telling consumers to “learn to love” the cutout and arguing that including one “made sense” because it allowed the OEM to increase the screen real estate of its upcoming device while retaining the overall physical footprint of the OnePlus 5T by simply moving the notification bar higher up the 18:9 phablet.
As the company’s last Android flagship is now out of stock in most parts of the world, its successor is widely expected to be announced in the coming weeks, with OnePlus following that same product release pattern since its inception and first handset launches in 2014. The OnePlus 6 should be sold on a global level and is likely to become the most commercially successful product from the firm to date.
It’s not a coin toss. It’s a better way. pic.twitter.com/LbOXAnBWrH
— OnePlus (@oneplus) March 28, 2018