Samsung now has some real competition. The OnePlus 10 Pro will be announced for the US next week, the company says, and review units are already in our hands.
The 10 Pro joins the Motorola Edge+ as competitors for the Samsung Galaxy S22 lineup here in the US. The two non-Samsung phones are likely to take different segments of the market, though, as they’re primarily sold through different carriers. The Motorola phone will appear at Verizon stores, while OnePlus has a stronger relationship with T-Mobile.
“OnePlus continues to be the leading Android alternative to Samsung at T-Mobile,” a February 2022 report from Wave7 Research said. This month, OnePlus market share at T-Mobile came in at 5%, and it’s likely to become higher with the launch of a new phone.
The biggest question about the OnePlus 10 Pro launch is: What’s new? The 10 Pro was launched in China a full three months ago, and to a lot of mobile aficionados it’s already old hat. If you go to OnePlus’s Chinese website, you can see everything about that model of the phone. We know the phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 3.3x telephoto camera, and a wacky 150-degree fish-eye wide-angle mode, for instance.
There are already plenty of hands-ons and even feature reviews of the phone, although not from this publication. If you want to see images of the phone, there are literally hundreds on the internet, which makes it even weirder that OnePlus told us we could only run photos of the box.
Last month, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau said the US was still a critical market for the company.
The phone’s price will definitely be a key piece of news. The 6.7-inch OnePlus 10 Pro seems to sync up best as a competitor to the 6.6-inch Samsung Galaxy S22+, which starts at $999.99. Motorola undercut Samsung’s pricing somewhat with its big $849.99 Edge+. If OnePlus shoots for $799.99, for instance, it would present a strong argument against Samsung.
OnePlus says the launch event will be streamed at 10 a.m. ET on March 31 on its YouTube channel. We’ll have a full review around the time of our launch.
