Ahead of the OnePlus 10T’s launch on August 3, the company has revealed details about the design and camera of the upcoming phone. The design language makes the phone look very similar to the flagship OnePlus 10 Pro launched earlier this year but with two key omissions: there is no alert slider and the cameras aren’t Hasselblad co-branded. Here is why OnePlus has made these changes.
The alert slider has been a constant feature on OnePlus phones for years and offers users the convenience of easily putting their phone on silent or vibrate mode without having to fiddle with on-screen menus. OnePlus chief designer Hope Liu told The Verge that the company is omitting the slider from the OnePlus 10T to have enough internal space for other components that are essential for “high wattage charging, a large battery capacity, and better antenna signal.”
Liu told The Verge that the company needs to put two “charging pumps” inside the OnePlus 10T in order to achieve higher charging speeds than the 80W fast charging on the OnePlus 10 Pro. This could be another indication that the OnePlus 10T is coming with the 150W fast charging that is available on the OnePlus 10R, which also has no alert slider.
Liu also told the publication that OnePlus has prioritised an antenna system that includes 15 separate antennas inside the phone, which is aimed at improving signal when holding the phone horizontally, like when playing online games for example. “While the alert slider appears to be a very small component, it actually has a relatively large impact on the device’s motherboard area — taking up 30 mm². To ensure the OnePlus 10T delivers in the areas we know our users value most… while retaining the alert slider, we would have had to stack the device’s motherboard, which would have made the device thicker,” said Liu to The Verge.
The second big omission seems to be the Hasselblad partnership that OnePlus embarked on since the OnePlus 9 Pro debuted in 2021. The main outcome of the partnership was Hasselblad tuning the colours of the images from the camera on the OnePlus 9 Pro but also saw a feature that allows users to capture 12-bit RAW images on the OnePlus 10 Pro.
Liu said that OnePlus decided to leave out the Hasselblad branding because it “wanted to offer an ultimate performance flagship smartphone at the device’s chosen price point.” This could mean that adding the partnership co-branding to the OnePlus 10T could have driven the phone’s price up higher than whatever range the company is targeting.
But Liu did confirm to the publication that the OnePlus 10T’s main camera will use a 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 sensor and that it will support 10-bit colour, OnePlus’s night photography mode and “improved HDR photography.”
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