Thursday, July 10, 2014

Additional OnePlus One material options just around the corner

Back in March, OnePlus gave us hope that the company’s One might be the next Moto X of sorts, giving users a fair degree of customization through some alternate backplates featuring (for phones, at least) pretty exotic materials. Sure, the sandstone finish on currently available One handsets isn’t real sandstone, but a few of the others OnePlus teased as part of its StyleSwap offerings were going to be the real deal: bamboo, Kevlar, and even denim. Only problem is, we’ve yet to see them arrive. Well, at least one could be right around the corner, as OnePlus drops a new teaser.

Considering the company has already gone public with its plans for a bamboo StyleSwap cover, it’s hard to read this “knock on wood” message as much other than confirmation that the bamboo option is arriving in another couple weeks.

Even feeling confident that this news is coming, we still have some important questions. For instance, is OnePlus going to keep tying this choice of body materials to particular hardware configurations, like right now how you can only get the 16GB phone in silk white, and only the 64GB model in sandstone black?

And OnePlus had talked about these being user-swappable, so are we finally going to see covers sold independently of the phones themselves?

Beyond this hint at bamboo finally arriving, we also pick up a new rumor about what’s next from OnePlus. We’re not looking at anything so interesting as hardware specs, nor even an early design sketch, but we hear that the OnePlus Two (or whatever it ends up being called) may be under development as codename Lettuce. Bacon, for what it’s worth, was the codename for the One. A couple more OnePlus models – Mayo and Toast, perhaps – and we’ll be looking at a very tasty lineup