Oppo's newly minted chief product officer, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau, introduced a foldable "Find N" phone at Oppo's Inno Day today. As the Find N will only come to China, though, the most interesting aspect for US readers was his Q&A session on the integration of Oppo and OnePlus.
Oppo, Vivo, Realme, and OnePlus are all brands of Chinese conglomerate BBK. While Oppo and Vivo are two of the world's largest smartphone brands, the companies have tacitly left the US to the OnePlus brand. That strategy, so far, has been successful, as OnePlus's market share has been rising in a country dominated by Samsung and Apple.
It sounds like Lau's transformation from OnePlus CEO into Oppo's product director shouldn't imply that Oppo products themselves will ever come to the US. When I asked him that question directly, he dodged it, with a nonetheless very interesting answer about how difficult it is to get third-party apps working well on a foldable.
"When it comes to bringing an existing product from China to overseas markets, there is a new challenge, which is the adaptation of third-party apps," he said. "We had to talk to the app developers one by one, and that's really a big, heavy workload."
While Google's Android 12 software supports foldable modes, app developers have to actually implement them. "We're in communication and collaboration with Google," Lau said. "We focus on how to improve the layout design for apps with different aspect ratios, and we would like to formulate these guidelines for Google."
Because of that challenge, I don't think we should expect a foldable OnePlus phone anytime soon. Lau suggested instead that OnePlus may borrow from Oppo's camera tech. That may include the new imaging processor Oppo announced yesterday, the MariSilicon X.
Oppo's new imaging processor works with 4K ultra HDR video and captures 20-bit RAW images, according to a slide Lau showed. It's not clear how that would interact with the image signal processors in the Qualcomm Snapdragon or MediaTek Dimensity systems used in Oppo and OnePlus phones.
"Between Oppo and OnePlus there will be more sharing of resources, and some of the technologies will be able to be used and shared between the two brands in the future. Imaging is a focus for us, and Oppo has a very large resource pool for imaging technology," Lau said. "In the future, on OnePlus products, you will find a greater boost in imaging performance."
OnePlus hasn't announced details about its next phone, but we assume it will be called the OnePlus 10 and be released early next year.