A lot of us in the community are counting the days until the release of the OnePlus 6. The design and the specs, the features, everything is being scrutinized. Among all those questions, there one that I see a lot here in the forums, social media and even the comments section on the YouTube channel: will the OnePlus 6 have a Notch?
And now, we have an official answer: it will.
As you can see on the top of this thread, The Verge published an article with the first official image of the new phone. Not only that, but Carl Pei, co-founder of the company, provided an explanation for it.
“How big a notch is always depends on your choices as a company,” said Carl Pei, the public face of OnePlus, when he met me in London last week. In his mind, the question of whether to have a notch at all is a foregone conclusion. OnePlus, like every other phone maker opting to go this design route, sees it as adding more screen real estate instead of taking anything away. “What you are essentially doing is moving the entire notification bar up, giving users more content on their screen.”
The Verge article adds that “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. At the same time, argues Pei, “we don’t feel the need to have structured light on our phones” akin to Apple’s Face ID, so OnePlus’ notch is appreciably smaller than Apple’s. “Our notch, it will be there,” sums up Pei, and “it’ll be bigger than the Essential Phone, smaller than the iPhone”.
And if you want to grab a measure tape, here are the official measurements of the Notch that will see on the top of the OP6:
19.616mm x 7.687mm.
The article also mentions some nice tidbits about the changes you will see on the software side of things. “OnePlus has had its team manually test the top 1,000 Play Store apps to determine which would need a compatibility mode with the notch. The company is shifting its clock to the left side of the screen to allow more room for status icons, and it’s going to disguise the notch any time video is playing on the phone in a way that recreates the overall screen curvature. In my experience with the iPhone X, the only times that the notch has ever been noticeable as an incursion into the regular user experience has been exactly when viewing photos or video, and I’m encouraged to see OnePlus tackling those pain points directly”.
We saw the implementation [of gestures] on the iPhone,” admits Pei, and “maybe it would have taken longer if Apple hadn’t done it.” He has the same answer when I ask him whether OnePlus would have done a notch design had it not been for the iPhone X: “Maybe not as fast. But we have access to the roadmaps of all the screen manufacturers, and when they gave us the opportunity to make cutouts at the top of the screen, it just made sense.” OnePlus agrees with the widely held view that Apple “accelerates the adoption of things within the industry,” adding the subtle caveat of “where it makes sense.”
You can read the full article
here. As a closing note, it was also confirmed the next OnePlus device will have a headphone jack.
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