OnePlus has teamed up with automotive brand and F1 racing team McLaren to launch a collaborative smartphone. Its latest model, the OnePlus 6T, was just revealed in October, but OnePlus has partnered with brands, artists, and companies in the past to produce special limited edition versions of its smartphone. So what makes the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition special? Here’s what you need to know.
Design
The OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition will borrow heavily from the style of the OnePlus 6T, but there are some cosmetic differences between the two phones. The back of the McLaren Edition will emulate the look of McLaren’s ground-breaking carbon fiber with a carbon fiber-style appearance. There’s another nod to McLaren’s heritage as well, with an orange line flowing along the bottom of the phone’s rear. It’s colored in Papaya Orange — McLaren’s signature color. Right down at the base of the phone, you’ll find McLaren’s logo.
Little has changed around the front, and you’ll find the OnePlus 6T’s huge bezel-less 6.41-inch AMOLED screen, and the distinctive teardrop notch. The in-display fingerprint scanner is here too, and buyers will get some unique wallpapers and a special start-up animation too.
Specifications
It wouldn’t be a McLaren without some power and speed, right? The OnePlus 6T is no slouch in the power department, with the Snapdragon 845 and 8GB of RAM. OnePlus isn’t able to top the Snapdragon 845 … yet. But it can boost performance by crammed in yet more RAM. The McLaren Edition sports a huge 10GB of RAM, meaning this phone should have no problem switching between apps or handling the most intensive of games.
That’s backed up by the huge hard drive, too. There’s 256GB of storage crammed into the McLaren Edition, and though you won’t find any MicroSD expansion, you’re unlikely to need that much extra space anyway.
Camera
There haven’t been any major changes made to the camera in the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition, so you can expect to find the same camera suite as the OnePlus 6T. That means a primary 16-megapixel camera with an f/1.7 aperture and optical image stabilization, and a second 20-megapixel lens with the same aperture, plus another 16-megapixel lens around the front for selfies.
Battery and charging
Lamborghini’s partnership with Oppo — a firm closely related to OnePlus — resulted in the Lamborghini Edition of the Oppo Find X, the first to feature Oppo’s incredibly fast Super VOOC charging system, which takes a flat battery to 100 percent in less than 35 minutes. In a similar fashion, the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition is packing a new version of Warp Charge: Warp Charge 30.
Warp Charge 30 works in a similar way to Super VOOC charging, but it’s even faster, promising to deliver a day’s worth of power (around 50 percent) in just 20 minutes. That’s possible because of the sheer power on display here — the charger the phone comes with packs a whopping 3oW of power, and that’s managed with an intricate system of cooling that ensures the phone doesn’t overheat during charging.
Release and availability
The OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition will be available in the U.S. and Europe from December 13, from OnePlus’ website. In line with OnePlus’s own pricing structure, you won’t have to pay a ridiculous amount for the phone — at $699 it’s only a little more expensive than the highest spec OnePlus 6T.
Updated on December 11, 2018: We’ve updated this article for the phone’s release.
