OnePlus

Turning on my laptop this morning, I flicked through the Microsoft News on Edge and noticed a couple of items about something called OnePlus 7, which I had never heard of, and thought to spend a couple of minutes finding out.

Bing knows all about it and I am soon in the rather elaborate website at reference 1. I try to find the 'about' section, which often help one to find out where a website is coming from. But not here, so I resort to asking Bing for 'oneplus wikipedia', which takes me to the helpful eulogy at reference 2.

So I now know that this is a very go-ahead company from China which has been around for little more than five years, has an obscure ownership structure, has been in trouble with the Indian authorities and which makes very glossy looking mobile phones (which appear to be sold online, rather than in shops) with very glossy looking promotional material. They clearly have a very large photography budget. They also got into trouble with a promotion called 'ladies first', from which the snap above may have been taken. Looks a bit lo-tech compared with their other stuff.

All of which leaves me with two takeaways. First, that these devices are very complicated indeed and incorporate lots more or less ready-made chunks of technology from all over the place. A bit like a human being, incorporating lots of more or less ready-made chunks of technology handed down by evolution. Wikipedia gives the flavour: '... The OnePlus 7 Pro features a curved edge-to-edge 6.64" 19.5:9 FLUID AMOLED display with 2K resolution and 90 Hz refresh rate. This phone is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 SoC. Like its predecessor, it also comes with an optical in-display fingerprint sensor and launched with OxygenOS 9.5 (based on Android 9 Pie). It comes in three variants: 6GB RAM with 128GB storage, 8GB of RAM with 256GB storage and 12GB of RAM option with 256GB storage. The OnePlus 7 Pro also features a 4000mAh non-removable battery along with Warp Charge 30 technology...'.

Second, that these devices are as much fashion items as mobile phones. Expensive costume jewellery carefully designed to be bought to impress. To think that this is what the noble science of computing has come to.

PS: yet another brand name consisting of two short capitalised words, run together without the usual space. Yet another fashion.

Reference 1: https://www.oneplus.com/uk/brand?from=foot.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnePlus.