NYC is the place to be if you’re a OnePlus fan, because the OnePlus 7T is going to be featured at the city’s unique Showfields retail concept shop on October 11. That’s a full week before its official release date of October 18.
The pop-up OnePlus store inside the Showfields concept center will revolve around the OnePlus 7T and its Pro variant, and will also feature some unnamed swag for the first 100 to come and buy a unit. The event will open to the public at 3 PM EST, and OnePlus staff will continue slinging the new device until 10 PM.
The venue is a unique, yet convenient one. Showfields holds a revolving cadre of events, art shows, dining experiences, and merchandise.
The main focus of Showfields is to offer a commitment-free alternative for online brands that would benefit from a physical retail space. The large shop also has a special loft area for patrons to relax and take in a similarly revolving selection of food, drinks, and art pieces.
Showfields is open to just about any retailer without an existing physical presence, though there is an application process to make it onto the floor and be part of the place’s mystique.
The venue’s use by OnePlus for the early release of the 7T family is an act of convenience that will allow fans to get up close and personal with the brand, and appease those who may otherwise not buy OnePlus products because they like to physically touch a phone before committing to buy it.
Curiously, the event is not mentioned in Showfields’ online calendar, which likely means that it’s meant to cater exclusively to those who are already loyal enough to OnePlus in some capacity to have heard about the event.
That loyalty, of course, could take many different forms; a casual reader of this site living in New York City, for example, may have never laid hands on a OnePlus device or given the brand any serious thought before.
The phones that the event centers on are a power duo of modern flagships meant to compete with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and Apple iPhone 11, but at a vastly lower price point. By nixing or cutting back on non-core features, the phones are meant to offer a smooth, high-end experience at the lowest price tag possible.
This is how the OnePlus brand has always operated, and is the same attitude behind the new devices’ incremental predecessors, the OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro.
For those not in the know, the OnePlus 7T and 7T Pro are built around Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 855 Plus chipset, one that’s a bit more capable than the Snapdragon 855 found in the OnePlus 7 and other late 2018 and early 2019 flagships.
Alongside the new processor, the phones boast large, clear, and smooth 90Hz displays, more than passable battery sizes that should translate to good battery life, a 48-megapixel camera as the centerpiece of a three-shooter array, Warp Charge 30T charging, and of course, storage selections running up to 256GB. Unlike the slightly older model, the OnePlus 7T lineup is locked in at a decidedly more-than-adequate 8GB of RAM. The OnePlus 7T lineup starts at $599.