OnePlus to launch 5G smartphone next year, confirms Pete Lau

New Delhi: Chinese handset maker OnePlus will launch 5G smartphones with a flagship device next year, featuring the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 mobile platform, the company's chief executive officer Pete Lau has confirmed.

Speaking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii Pete Lau said, “OnePlus has a long established close relationship with Qualcomm Technologies, which not only provides core components and engineering support but also unlocks potential for our innovations.”

“Building on our close cooperation in 5G, OnePlus is expected to be one of the first customers of Qualcomm Technologies to commercially launch premium 5G smartphones in 2019,” he added.

At the summit, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform, touted to be the world’s first commercial mobile platform supporting multi-gigabit 5G, industry-leading AI and immersive extended reality (XR.

Snapdragon 855 will offer users long-lasting battery life and superior experiences in areas such as imaging, audio, gaming and XR.

Qualcomm said that Snapdragon 855 features Kryo 485 CPU built on Arm Cortex Technology, offering up to a 45% performance improvement over the previous generation flagship platform.

The new Adreno 640 GPU provides up to 20% faster graphics than the previous generation. Gaming experiences using Adreno graphics will achieve a new level of realism with through support of Vulkan 1.1, high dynamic range (HDR), and physically based rendering (PBR).

Snapdragon 855 features the 4th generation multi-core AI Engine, which offers a total capacity of more than 7 trillion operations per second (7 TOPs), and 3x the AI performance compared to the previous generation mobile platform.

It also provides consumers with an upgraded entertainment platform for more realistic gaming, improved cinematics, and higher performing XR.