OnePlus Is Still Undecided If It Will Release A 'T' Model Next Year

For two consecutive years, OnePlus has released a “T” model for its yearly Android smartphone. However, it looks like there’s no guarantee that the Chinese phone maker will be releasing a OnePlus “T” every single year.

OnePlus recently held its own Reddit-style AMA in its official forums to answer some questions about the OnePlus 5T and the company’s future plans. Early on, a OnePlus fan asked if the company will release a “T” model every year.

“We'll make a second T device if there's enough new technology that's useful to our users,” OnePlus co-founder and CEO Carl Pei said. “As of now, we still haven't decided whether we have enough upgrades next year for a T device.”

The question was fair considering that OnePlus has released “T” models for both the 2016 OnePlus 3 and this year’s OnePlus 5. The OnePlus 3T arrive last year just six months after the OnePlus 3. The 3T arrived with the same design but features incremental upgrades including a slightly more powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor. The original OnePlus 3 was powered by the Snapdragon 820.

For the OnePlus 5T, the company introduced a major redesign by introducing a “bezel-less” design featuring a 6-inch 18:9 aspect ratio display. The 5T is the first OnePlus smartphone to come with very thin bezels and to have its fingerprint sensor on the back. The handset also features a new dual-camera system ditching the secondary telephoto zoom lens from the OnePlus 5, and replacing it with a camera that’s specifically made for taking pictures in low light.

The OnePlus 5T is also the first smartphone from the company to use some form of facial recognition technology that can be used to unlock the phone. The feature is called Face Unlock and can only be used for simply unlocking the phone and nothing else.

Unlike the OnePlus 3T, the OnePlus 5T introduced a lot of new features and technologies that weren’t present on its predecessor. Needless to say, the “T” model has become more than just offering incremental upgrades and signifies OnePlus’s effort to live up to its “never settle” tagline.

That said, it looks like the company won’t be releasing “T” models every year. As Pei mentioned, they aren’t even sure if there will be a OnePlus 6T next year. With all the upgrades that the company has already introduced on the 5T, it’s really hard to imagine what the 6T would be able to offer differently from the OnePlus 6 at this point in time.

During the OnePlus forums AMA, the company also confirmed that the OnePlus 5 and 5T will share the same software update cycle of the OnePlus 3 and 3T, and all of those devices will be upgraded to Android 8.1 Oreo. The company also confirmed that the 5T will get continuous official software updates for the next two years.

The most disappointing thing that the company confirmed during its AMA is that the OnePlus 5T will not support Google’s Project Treble and that the company doesn’t plan on supporting it for its other phones. Project Treble, which was first announced by Google back in May, will separate Android Oreo OS code from the manufacturer’s own hardware code. Android smartphones that support Project Treble would be able to receive faster software updates since it will no longer be re-optimized by OEMs before pushing them out to users, according to Android Authority.