The OnePlus 16 launches in China on October 12th at 7:00 pm Beijing time (7:00 pm Manila and 4:00 am Pacific), according to its listing on Oppo’s official store in China. OnePlus has already shown most of its hand: a 9,000mAh battery, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip and a screen that runs at up to 185Hz.
In a post on Weibo, the company says the screen is BOE’s X4 OLED panel at 1.5K resolution. Day to day, it runs at up to 165Hz. The full 185Hz only unlocks in gaming mode, in supported games like Arena Breakout, Naruto Mobile and Peace Elite, the game Tencent put out in China in place of PUBG Mobile.
So the big number on the box is really for gamers, and only in a handful of games. It says the panel can dim down to 1 nit for reading in the dark, and that it draws about as much power as a 120Hz screen. That’s a lab claim we’d want to check against a real day of use. Behind it all are three custom chips: one for the display, one for touch response and one for the network connection.
The rest is confirmed too. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is Qualcomm’s flagship phone chip, built on a 2nm process. The main camera is 200MP. OnePlus says the 9,000mAh battery is built to stay healthy for five years. The phone runs ColorOS 17 and comes in three colors: Dark Forest (black), Tomorrow Starlight (silver) and Mars Masterpiece (red), which has “MASTERPIECE” printed on the back, actually.
What OnePlus hasn’t said yet: how much it will cost, when it goes on sale (the store’s timeline doesn’t give a sale date yet), or whether the phone is coming outside China – and where exactly.
If the OnePlus 16 does leave China, check the battery line before you get excited. Oppo, whose store is taking the OnePlus 16 reservations, says in its Find X10 announcement that the Find X10 and Find X10 Pro Max get a smaller 7,150mAh battery in “selected markets,” down from the standard 8,000mAh. That doesn’t mean OnePlus will do the same. It’s just the first thing we’ll look out for.
