OnePlus in the news: Project Treble Support, software update commitments and OnePlus 6 prototypes

OnePlus are great at staying in the news, and lately it has been for positive reasons. With their OnePlus 6 is taking the world by storm (where it is being sold it is anyway) with many positive reviews it seems the company is finally maturing into something special. Today the good news continues.

Project Treble

Back when Project Treble became all the rage last year (with the release of Android 8.0 Oreo) OnePlus stated that they would not be able to support Project Treble on any of their legacy devices, including the OnePlus 5 and the 5T. Their reasoning was that the requisite repartitioning of the device was too risky to do OTA and could possibly lead to many bricked phones.

Today OnePlus have released the latest Beta updates for the OnePlus 5 and 5T and included in the changelog:

• Supported Project Treble
  • After several months of evaluation and hard work, we finally found a solution to make this possible, and we are very excited to share this good news with you.

Interestingly there is also a “brand new user interface” which has been confusing everyone — XDA were able to see some icon changes but not many style changes. There is full accent colour customisation which may be what OnePlus are referring to. Below are a few screenshots of the new interface thanks to XDA Developers.

Update Commitment

OnePlus do not have a great history with updating some of their phones but there was a bit more behind those non-events than meets to eye. The past year they have been great with updates to their OnePlus 5 and 5T. They have now committed to an update schedule for their phones.

OnePlus are now committing to:

As per the maintenance schedule, there will be 2 years of regular software updates from the release date of the phone (release dates of T variants would be considered), including new features, Android versions, Android security patches and bug fixes and an additional year of Android security patch updates every 2 months.

This schedule closely mimics the update schedule that Google promise for their Pixel phones, although we highly doubt that the updates from OnePlus will arrive as quickly as those on Pixel devices. In saying that OnePlus have an easy-to-enter beta program where you can get all the latest updates before they are distributed to the public.

Hopefully OnePlus stick to this schedule because if they do it will put them ahead of nearly all other manufacturers out there. Most promise but few deliver.

OnePlus 6 Prototypes

PC Mag were fortunate enough to visit the OnePlus factory in Shenzhen, China where they were shown through the manufacturing process including some of the OnePlus 6 prototypes that did not make the cut. After they announced the OnePlus 6 Red the other day it is interesting to see the colours that did not make the cut — the red though is stunning for sure.

It is not uncommon for companies to test out quite a few designs before a final one makes it to market but it is very unusual for those prototypes to be shown to the public. Rather than show you a heap of different pictures you can check out the video below for all the different prototypes PC Mag were shown. Let us know in the comments below which is your favourite.

Chris is currently putting the OnePlus 6 through its paces and we hope to have our Australian review ready for you in the next week or so. If you are interested in purchasing one in the future but want to know how it handles Australian conditions check out that for some peace of mind.

Let us know in the comments how you feel about OnePlus now. Do you trust them more with the direction their company has progressed in recent times?