The latest OnePlus smartphone to hit the U.S. – the One Plus 6 – is not only a powerful phone in terms of performance but also in terms of connectivity, if recent reports are to be believed. That’s because the mobile OEM appears to have packed as much modern radio tech as possible into its new flagship. In fact, although it won’t work with CDMA-based networks such as Verizon and Sprint, it turns out the device has a few tricks up its sleeve on that front. It supports no fewer than 15 international bands, 8 AT&T bands, and five T-Mobile bands in the LTE spectrum. That’s leaving alone almost pointless support for the bands of the other two U.S. carriers. Among those, the company has ensured that 4×4 MIMO is supported on bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 38, 41, and 66, in addition to 4x carrier aggregation on both GSM networks. That’s all pushed across both of the OnePlus 6’s two nano-SIM slots.
The result is that while the newly launched handset doesn’t support newer 1.2Gbps bands from AT&T or T-Mobile, it does completely support gigabit speeds over LTE. One other tradeoff may be that it won’t support AT&T’s FirstNet emergency services band of the spectrum. But even a 1Gbps network is something that most users will never come close to using in its entirety. The Wi-Fi stack, meanwhile, is also fully in use. That means there should be nothing at all slowing this handset down for the time being. Moreover, it means that T-Mobile subscribers will have high-quality voice-over-LTE and voice-over-Wi-Fi connections – although the company appears to have shirked AT&T’s VoLTE and VoWiFi users on that front.
What makes that impressive is not that a flagship is capable of those feats. It’s that OnePlus has managed to put all of that into a device that starts at just $579 for a model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. That’s for the mid-range variant. The budget version costs just $529 for 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, compared to the top-flight model at $629 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The latter model is no longer available in the U.S., selling out after just a week. However, the company’s not skimping anywhere else to make up for all of that technology, either. In fact, this handset comes with a 6.28-inch fullHD+ (2280 x 1080) Optic AMOLED display set at an aspect ratio of 19:9 and the all of that memory helps push a Snapdragon 845 SoC, among other components.