Natural abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of a new version of the OnePlus Open foldable phone, we're getting treated to speculation that we may never see a foldable from OnePlus again. That's how I choose to view the reports bubbling up out China that speculate a company is about to discontinue its foldable phone efforts, with fingers pointing at the phone making conglomerate that includes OnePlus.
Specifically, 163.com in China claims a major company will suspend its foldable phone product lines, though the report never seems to explicitly say who that will be. (In fairness, that could be a limitation of the translation feature that converted the report into English.) Nevertheless, a number of tech sites like NotebookCheck and Android Central have picked up on the report and, by the process of elimination, the assumption is we're talking about Vivo, Oppo and OnePlus, who all fall under the BBK Electronics umbrella.
OnePlus is of particular interest for our purposes, given that the phone maker's devices are widely available in the U.S. as well as the U.K. and Australia. (The same can't be said for those other outfits.) What's more, OnePlus happens to be really good at making foldable phones — the company's OnePlus Open currently ranks as the best foldable phone in our estimation, beating out devices from major players like Samsung and Google for top honors.
But the OnePlus Open has been around for a while, having launched a little more than a year ago. In that time, Samsung has released the Galaxy Z Fold 6 while Google came out with the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, adding to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind nature of OnePlus' foldable.
Still, despite those improved devices from Samsung and Google — the Galaxy Z Fold 6, in particular offers a more durable design than before and a more powerful chipset than you'll find in the original OnePlus Open — I'd still recommend the Open over the competition. And that gives me a bit of hope that not is OnePlus here to stay in the foldable business, but that its follow up phone will continue to raise the bar for other foldables.
Why we like the OnePlus Open
The OnePlus Open drew on Oppo's Find N3 for inspiration, so it wasn't really a revelation when it landed in our hands last year. But it did impress — it was thinner and lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold 5, and its Flexion Hinge design proved satisfying to open. The presence of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset — best in its class at time of launch — also helped the OnePlus Open perform well in testing.
But the real revelation was the Open Canvass multitasking feature, which my colleague John Velasco believes is the best multitasking implementation on a foldable phone. You can run three apps at once, even if they're not optimized for a larger display, wiuth apps shifting around depending on what you're using them or if you've tapped over to another app.
It didn't hurt that the OnePlus Open was relatively cheaper than the Galaxy Z Fold 5, starting at $100 less. That gap has only widened, with Samsung raising the starting price on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 by $100 when that phone debuted earlier this year.
The price on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 may have gotten bigger, but Samsung's phone has shrunk in other ways to the point where it's just as thin as the OnePlus Open when it's unfolded. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 weighs about the same, too. Meanwhile, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold introduced its own improvements to design and durability, shrinking the bezels around the interior display and changing the aspect ratio to better compete with other foldables.
I'm not naive to think that these changes weren't in the works for the Samsung and Google phones before the OnePlus Open came along. But the presence of OnePlus' foldable phone doubtlessly strengthened the resolve of those phone makers to improve things, lest they fall further behind the leader.
OnePlus Open 2 outlook
That's why it would be a shame if this report out of China not only proves to be accurate but also affects the future of OnePlus foldables. I don't think it will, certainly, because I'm pretty sure that OnePlus knows it has a winning device on its hands, even if the market for foldables ramins in flux.
It's reassuring, then, that we've already head a few rumors about the OnePlus Open 2, with most observers expecting the follow-up foldable to ship at some point in 2025. If you want to narrow it down further, one rumored release point to a March 2025 launch window.
Rumors aren't as fully formed as you'd hope to see if a device's launch was imminent, but one early OnePlus Open 2 rumor tips the phone to get even thinner, even when it's folded shut. That would be a significant change as one of the lingering complaints about foldable phones is how bulky they can be to tote around. Striking a better balance between a big screen device and something that fits easily in a pocket or purse could help persuade more people to give the foldable format a try.
You'd also expect the OnePlus Open 2 would be in line to feature the newly announced Snapdragon 8 Elite system-on-chip, since the original OnePlus Open ran on the best Qualcomm silicon available at the time. If so, that would provide not only a performance boost to the new OnePlus phone — remember the OnePlus Open 2 would be skipping a generation of Qualcomm chips if it jumped straight to the Snapdragon 8 Elite — but it could help with battery life, too. And that's another area where foldable phones come up short compared to handsets with more conventional designs.
Even better, should OnePlus sticks to an early 2025 launch date: it would get the jump on the next Samsung foldable in terms of benefiting from a faster, more power efficient chipset, as the Galaxy Z Fold 7 likely won't show up until mid-year.
In other words, there's plenty of reasons for OnePlus to stick with its foldable business — and plenty of reasons for the rest of us to be excited once they do.
