OnePlus 5 price and release date? Let's make an educated guess...

OnePlus has managed to achieve what's nearly impossible in today's oversaturated smartphone market — make a name for itself, gather a following, and even build a certain level of anticipation for its next product. All of this through tons of (hit-and-miss) guerrilla marketing, aggressive pricing, and attention to customer needs and desires.

Needless to say, the upcoming OnePlus 5 doesn't suffer from a lack of interest, especially since it is to follow up two pretty successful products — the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. The company has now started to tease it more and more with each passing day, but we still don't know anything solid about the OnePlus 5 (we do have tons of rumors — check out the links below), neither do we know when it would be officially announced.


However, we could try and take a stab in the dark, or make an educated guess if you will.

Find the pattern

Thus far, there is no established pattern in when the OnePlus phones get released. While other companies like to stick to annual refreshes, OnePlus is still pretty fluid in this regard — the One came out in April of 2014, the OnePlus 2 was out in late July of 2015, and the OnePlus 3 got to see the light of day in mid-June of 2016. Then, there's the oddball OnePlus 3T, which came out 5 months after that, but we'll consider this a one-off upgrade for now.

So, we could definitely be looking at a June or July announcement. Let's consider the fact that OnePlus has just shown its very first official teaser for the device (excluding this vague post by CEO Pete Lau, which basically just says "we're working on a phone"). Remember the whole “guerrilla marketing” thing we talked about? This is pretty much how it starts — the company dropped a picture that just says “Hey Summer! Give me five!” and has a “Hello 5” slogan in the center of it. Basically, all it does is confirm that the phone line will, indeed, skip the number 4 and jump to 5, but also that it will be released in the Summer (shocking, we know, we know).

Look elsewhere

Let's take a look at another trend — how long before the actual unveiling does the company start to tease the phone? We don't mean leaks, questionable renders, or anything of the sort — we mean actual hype-building teases, which are dropped by OnePlus' (or co-founder Carl Pei's) official media channels. We will exclude the OnePlus One here, since it had tons of hype-building in the months before its release, as the company needed the momentum.

So, the OnePlus 2 was first teased on the 18th of June in a picture, where the whole OnePlus team is gathered around the device, allegedly reading forum posts that speculate how it will have overheating issues (it was released with the Snapdragon 810. If you don't remember the fiasco – that's a different bag of cats, which is best left unopened). The phone was actually unveiled on the 28th of July — about a month and 10 days after the aforementioned tease.