Surprise: The OnePlus 6 Will Have a Notch
OnePlus’ next flagship Android smartphone, the OnePlus 6, will come with a notch. The company officially announced the notch on its flagship phone to The Verge, sharing a render of the notch on the phone which you can see above.
Notches on displays of flagships smartphones are rapidly becoming a trend. From Xiamoi to Huawei, almost all Android phone makers are embracing the notch, first seen on phones like the iPhone X and the Essential Phone. The notch is becoming a feature on all these new phones, with companies boasting about how their notches are smaller than the one on Apple’s iPhone X.
The smartphone market, 2018 edition. pic.twitter.com/nqAldxXbcH
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And OnePlus isn’t any different. The company says the OnePlus 6’s notch is smaller than the iPhone X’s and bigger than the Essential Phone at 19.616mm x 7.687mm. OnePlus—like other Android phone makers—is insisting that its notch is better than others. “Pei believes that OnePlus’ notch is different, implemented with more thought and care. His opening remark about the choices a company makes was a bit of a dig at the Essential notch, which is the narrowest one we’ve seen so far. Pei says OnePlus couldn’t have gone that small without compromising the quality of the device’s earpiece and front-facing camera or omitting the proximity and ambient light sensors or the user-requested LED notification light,” reported The Verge.
The company has apparently manually tested more than a thousand popular apps on the Play Store and will offer a compatibility mode for those apps that don’t support the notch. It’s also moving the time on the status bar to the left in order to leave enough space for the status icons on the right. OnePlus is going for an iPhone X-inspired approach for the home buttons, too. The company is likely going to implement iPhone X-like navigation gestures on the OnePlus 6, which is already available as a beta for existing OnePlus devices. As an iPhone X user, I find these gestures incredibly intuitive and natural, and the experience shouldn’t be any different on the OnePlus 6.
Even then, the OnePlus 6 will have a screen-to-body ratio of 90%, which isn’t any larger than the company’s existing handsets. I am not too sure why exactly OnePlus is adding the notch to the display, but OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei insists the notch will give more real estate to the user.
“Learn to love the notch.”