OnePlus has a habit of building flagships that make us genuinely excited, both for the specifications and the price at which they’re offered, then finding ways to complicate things.
The OnePlus 16 is shaping up to be yet another example of the same pattern, and an extreme one no less. It’s a device with specifications that look deliberately unreasonable, with bizarre availability rumors suggesting most of the world won’t be able to buy one.
What does the latest leak actually say?
The most recent batch of information comes from Chinese leaker Smart Pikachu (via Weibo), who now claims the OnePlus 16 will sport a 185Hz refresh rate display, instead of the 240Hz figure that was circulated earlier.
That would be faster than anything that Apple or Samsung currently make, and even faster than the OnePlus 15’s 165Hz display. It could also feature a 200MP periscope telephoto camera for 3x optical zoom, a four-times resolution improvement on the OnePlus 15’s 50MP zoom camera.
A 9,000 mAh silicon-carbon battery rounds out the headline features, which, in retrospect, would make it significantly larger than the 7,300 mAh and 7,400 mAh batteries on the OnePlus 15 and the OnePlus 15R, respectively.
The current flagships already last around two days of regular usage, and OnePlus 16 could only improve on those numbers.
So why is this forbidden fruit?
Finally, it could be the unreleased Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, the successor of the 8 Elite Gen 5, that might show up on the Chinese flagship, helping it set new benchmark scores for both CPU and GPU performance.
The OnePlus 16 is likely to arrive in China by the end of this year, but if you’re reading this in the United States, it might be tough to get your hands on the device. Due to patent disputes with Nokia, high marketing costs, and intense competition from brands like Samsung and Google, the company is reportedly scaling back its operations outside of Asia.
For now, global availability of the OnePlus 16 remains far from confirmed, particularly for markets like North America and Europe. It’s quite an irony, I’d say: the OnePlus 16 doesn’t sound like a phone Android enthusiasts would want to miss out on, but it doesn’t matter if it won’t see an official American launch.