Daily Authority: ♠️ OnePlus what now?

🐇 Good morning! This newsletter will be off tomorrow for the Easter break but back Monday!

OnePlus Ace

Oh boy! OnePlus can’t stop doing weird stuff. The smartphone industry just never sits still. (Image above is auto-translated, so don’t condemn the wording too much…)

What’s happened:

• OnePlus announced a product launch for the OnePlus Ace, its new product line, with the announcement set for a week: April 21, in China.
• Quote: “According to the brand, the Ace line (Yes, there will be more Ace branded OnePlus phones in the future) will focus on high-end textured designs, reliable quality, and strong performance.”
• Images of the phone, a new logo, and a few details were released: OnePlus confirmed that it will pack a MediaTek Dimensity 8100 chip, and that blisteringly fast and (arguably unnecessary) 150W charging.
• Unofficially, the tip is the Ace is effectively a beefed-up version of the OnePlus 10R, which is an India-only release.
• It also looks extremely similar to the realme GT Neo 3, which is another OPPO brand, and has the same specs.
• The China launch tells us plenty, but leaves a gap, we don’t know if it’s coming with wider availability.
• It’s really fun that OnePlus says its new phone is focusing on design, performance and quality. It’s not like OnePlus put out phones that didn’t focus on these things!

Huh?

• So what’s really going on?
• The OnePlus brand is now being used in the Xiaomi style: Xiaomi uses its sub-brands of Redmi and POCO to put out a variety of similarish phones, with minor differences in software and marketing, as well as regional availability.
• realme was to be the main OPPO attempt to do this as well, with it seen as a direct Redmi competitor.
• Now, OnePlus, with its relatively high brand prestige, is the next workhorse.
• Explaining why is a little tricky: Maybe the new OPPO-OnePlus leadership think OnePlus has untapped potential. Maybe the idea of selling more devices into the US is the strategy, and China launches provide a low-risk option to get feedback and sense market appetite.
• Maybe something else! Whatever the exact reason, it’s going to be hard to adjust to this new OnePlus.

Roundup

🆕 Breaking: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, so it can be ‘transformed as private company,’ which would cost about $43B in total, minus what Musk owns already. Interestingly, he didn’t tweet this (CNBC).

📱 Samsung Galaxy A53 5G review: Mid-range mastery (Android Authority).

👉 Official: The POCO F4 GT will be coming later this month (Android Authority).

💧 Two new Motorolas break cover: A 144Hz mid-ranger and a 90Hz budget model (Android Authority).

🕶 Details of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse plans: Aiming to release its first standalone AR glasses in 2024 (The Verge).

🥽 Meta announces plans to monetize the Metaverse, and creators are not happy: Meta is effective taking around 50% of sales, which is nuts! (Ars Technica).

🔊 Bigger sound in smaller packages, as Sonos buys Mayht for $100M (TechCrunch).

😬 Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT tweet went to auction, with an asking price of $48M. The top bid? $277, until the auction was extended. It’s now at a “better” 2.2 ETH or about $6,850 (CNET).

📺 Amazon is rebranding IMDb TV as ‘Freevee’ for some reason (Engadget).

📈 Record inflation will almost definitely jack up the price of your next phone (and everything else) (Gizmodo).

🏢 The concrete jungle is turning green, again (Wired).

📈 Speaking of: Amazon slaps US sellers with 5% fuel and inflation surcharge (CNBC).

🌶 “ELI5: What is a banana pepper and why is it only ever pickled?” (r/explainlikeimfive)

Throwback Thursday

Windows 3.1 turned 30 back on April 6. Amazing.

Windows 3.1 has plenty of history dug into by How-To Geek around bringing elements like the Windows Registry to the world, and things we still use today:

• It first introduced the CTRL+C and CTRL+V shortcuts for copy and paste.
• It also added TrueType fonts, came with screensavers, and a media player as well.
• Perhaps most memorably, it came with two(!) games preinstalled: Solitaire, like Windows 3.0, but it booted the Reversi game for the iconic Minesweeper. Good choice!

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.