It has been a year of firsts for OnePlus. The consumer tech giant, on Thursday, October 19, whipped the covers of its first foldable smartphone, the OnePlus Open, in Mumbai, at an event dubbed ‘Open for Everything’.

OnePlus Co-Founder Pete Lau had already confirmed that OnePlus and OPPO developed the foldable device together and that it would be sold under separate branding in different markets. In India, it will be sold under the OnePlus banner for ₹1,39,999. Pre-orders start today (October 19) with the device going on open sale on October 27. OnePlus is offering a Rs 8,000 trade-in bonus on select devices, as well as discounts on a few banks’ cards. The OnePlus Open will be available on OnePlus’ official website, Amazon, Flipkart, and Reliance Retail outlets.

The OnePlus Open sports squared-off edges and a massive, circular black glass ring that houses the rear camera array. It comes in two colours — Voyager Black and Emerald Dusk. The black variant has a vegan leather finish at the back and matte metal side rails, while the green version has a glass back with chromed-out rails.

The hinge is made of a titanium and cobalt molybdenum alloy, which, OnePlus claimed, makes it extremely strong while ensuring no extra weight and minimal crease. The company claimed the hinge was tested a million times and can last 10 years at 100 folds per day.

The OnePlus Open has a cover display measuring 6.31 inches and a main display that measures 7.82 inches. Both displays come with LTPO 3.0 technology, 120 Hz adaptive refresh rate, and 2,800 nits of peak brightness — the highest brightness level currently on a smartphone.

The device runs on Open Canvas, a version of OnePlus’ Oxygen OS customised for foldables with a special focus on multitasking capabilities, especially on the main screen.

The OnePlus Open is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, and comes with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. It packs a 4,805 mAh battery and supports 67 watts of fast charging, which OnePlus claims can charge the device from 1-100% in just 42 minutes. OnePlus promises four years of OS updates and five years of security patches for the device.

Commenting that foldables have traditionally eschewed the camera experience in favour of the device, OnePlus said it has brought flagship camera quality to the OnePlus Open in partnership with Hasselblad. The OnePlus Open boasts a 48MP main sensor with optical image stabilisation (OIS) and HDR support. This is complemented by a 64MP telephoto camera capable of 3x optical zoom and 6x in-sensor lossless zoom, and a feature called ‘Ultra Res Zoom’, capable of capturing photos of the moon. Rounding off the rear camera setup is an ultrawide lens that takes photographs at 0.6x. The camera setup is capable of shooting videos in 4K at 60 frames per second (fps), and in Dolby Vision at 30fps.

OnePlus, during the launch, said there are five pillars to the ideal foldable — durability, weight and crease, performance, camera, and software — and claimed that so far, no single device effectively addressed these concerns, before going on to claim it has achieved this in the “next chapter” of the Never Settle journey. The company claimed the Open is light, compact, durable, and runs an operating system customised for the foldable form factor.

The OnePlus weighs in at 238 grams, making it the lightest foldable currently available in India. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 weighs 253 grams, while the Phantom V Fold comes in at a hefty 299 grams.

OnePlus had already announced that the device would come with a range of pre-installed applications. In a statement, the company had said, “To provide the best user experience, a small number of applications will come pre-installed on OnePlus Open. We believe this approach strikes the right balance between delivering a novel and seamless user experience while preserving the stability and security of our products.”

The OnePlus Open is only the third commercially available vertically foldable smartphone in India — the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5, which starts at ₹1,54,999, and the TECNO Phantom V Fold priced at ₹88,888 are the only other devices officially available here.

(Edited by : Pihu Yadav)