OnePlus officially launches its debut foldable, the $1,699 OnePlus Open

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The OnePlus Open with two apps running side by side.

The OnePlus Open is the first foldable from Oppo sub-brand OnePlus. Preorders start today for $1,699 (€1,799 / £1,599) ahead of retail availability on October 26th. Check out my colleague Allison Johnson’s complete thoughts in our full review or read on for an overview of the device’s specs and features.

Although the Open is a first for the OnePlus brand, it’s pitching the device as a collaborative project with parent company Oppo, which has previously released the Oppo Find N and Find N2 foldables in China. It means the OnePlus Open is effectively a third-generation foldable and will even be sold as the Oppo Find N3 in the company’s home market. But OnePlus is keen to emphasize the OnePlus-y inclusion of an alert slider on the foldable, which it sees as one of the brand’s signature features.

The phone’s large rear camera circle, containing three cameras.

The phone’s all-important hinge.

One of the Open’s more eye-catching specs is that it’s been tested to survive a million folding cycles, roughly five times what its major competitors, the Pixel Fold and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, advertise. OnePlus says the hinge should be durable enough to survive being opened and closed 100 times a day for over 10 years, allowing the mechanism to function long after the phone stops receiving software updates. (It’s due to receive four years of Android version upgrades and five years of security patches.)

As well as emphasizing durability, OnePlus is also touting the size of the Open at just 5.8mm thin when unfolded and weighing as little as 239 grams when choosing the black vegan leather-backed version. (There’s also a glass-backed green version that weighs slightly more at 245 grams.) That’s not quite as svelte as the thinnest and lightest version of the Honor Magic V2, which is 4.7mm thick and weighs 231 grams, nor is it as slim as Huawei’s 5.3mm-thick Mate X3. But the OnePlus Open has beaten Honor’s device to international markets and comes with support for 5G as well as Google’s apps and services, unlike Huawei’s phone.

The inner folding screen of the OnePlus Open measures 7.82 inches, with a resolution of 2440 x 2268, a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, and a peak brightness of 2,800 nits. It still has a visible crease, but OnePlus says it’s using a teardrop-shaped folding mechanism to minimize its appearance. The screen uses a layer of ultra-thin glass in its construction for durability, and the whole device has an IPX4 rating for resistance against water splashes. (For reference, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 5 has a more durable IPX8 rating, which indicates protection against full submersion.) The Open’s cover display measures 6.31 inches, with the same maximum 120Hz refresh rate, a peak brightness of 2,800 nits, and a resolution of 2484 x 1116.

Like other foldables, you can prop it half-open to watch YouTube videos.

In the hand, it almost feels like a regular, large smartphone.

For software, the device runs OxygenOS 13.2, which is based on Android 13 and which OnePlus has equipped with some tweaks to make it work better on the Open’s larger screen. There’s a taskbar at the bottom of the screen to offer quick access to files as well as favorite and recent apps and the ability to multitask by running multiple apps side by side.

OnePlus’s solution to the problems some apps can have when you try to run them in the weirder aspect ratios of foldables is a feature it calls Open Canvas. This lets you tile each of your apps on the screen in a way that attempts to keep them at a usable aspect ratio at the expense of losing some visibility, rather than resizing and stretching them at the risk of creating glitches.

Three apps tiled on the Open’s display, one below and two above.

Three apps tiled side by side.

Internally, the phone is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and ships with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of onboard storage. The OnePlus Open has a 4,805mAh battery that can be fast-charged at up to 67W.

Finally, for cameras, the Open has a Hasselblad-branded triple lens setup on its rear consisting of a main 48-megapixel camera, a 64-megapixel telephoto with a 3x optical zoom, and a 48-megapixel ultrawide. There’s support for recording in Dolby Vision HDR at up to 4K 30fps, or if you don’t care about HDR, it’ll do 4K 60fps. The rear cameras are joined by a pair of selfie cameras powered by 20- and 32-megapixel sensors and which sit within a pair of hole-punch notches.

For more on how these specs work in practice, check out Allison’s full review.

Photography by Jon Porter / The Verge