Back in April, OnePlus unveiled the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 Pro - the brand's latest smartphones designed to compete with the highest-end premium flagships on the market. At launch, OnePlus offered the two devices in a variety of colors, including Glacial Green, Onyx Black, Interstellar Glow, Ultramarine Blue (as shown above), and Polar Silver. It appears that OnePlus may have another color in the works, though. Furthermore, there's more evidence that OnePlus is working on an even faster version of its Warp Charge 30 technology.
Twitter user Lavin Amarnani discovered a few new strings in OnePlus' Engineering Mode app which the company uses for hardware testing. If this app sounds familiar to you, it's because it's pre-installed on every OnePlus phone. The app made the news in late 2017 when it was discovered that a simple intent could be constructed to elevate the privileges of the ADB shell process to superuser levels.
New Ice Blue Color?
The Engineering Mode app that's present in the latest Android 10 and Android 11-based OxygenOS builds contains a list of device colors as follows:
<string name="str_sm8250_color0_title">Onyx Black</string>
<string name="str_sm8250_color1_title">Glacial Green</string>
<string name="str_sm8250_color2_title">Interstellar Glow</string>
<string name="str_sm8250_color3_title">Ultramarine Blue</string>
<string name="str_sm8250_color4_title">Ice Blue</string>
The first 4 colors in this list have all been released, but the "Ice Blue" one has not, as far as we can tell. Interestingly, the Verizon-exclusive Polar Silver color is missing from this list. Since the first 4 colors mentioned in this list all match the marketing names of OnePlus 8 series color variants, it's likely that "Ice Blue" will end up being the marketing name of a future color variant for a OnePlus 8 series device. However, we don't know if both the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro will be available in "Ice Blue" or if only one of them will be. It's possible that "Ice Blue" may be the exclusive color for an upcoming carrier launch. Sprint may start carrying the OnePlus 8 5G after making an announcement later today, according to rumors.
Update (6/12/2020 @ 11:33 AM EST): A listing for the OnePlus 8 5G just went live on Sprint, and it's only available in Onyx Black and Interstellar Glow.
65W Super Warp Charging
The OnePlus 8 Pro supports 30W wireless and 30W wired fast charging. OnePlus debuted its 30W wired charging technology with the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition. Early last month, a TÜV Rheinland certification listing revealed that OnePlus is working on a 65W fast charging solution. This feature is now confirmed in the latest version of the Engineering Mode app from the Android 11 beta for the OnePlus 8 series.
<string name="swrap_charger_test">Super Wrap Charger</string>
<string name="fastcharger_swrap">65W Fast Charge</string>
(Yes, there's a typo in the strings. It's an internal hardware testing app, though, so it's not a big deal.)
OnePlus' Warp Charge 30 technology charges at 5V/6A while OnePlus' new Super Warp Charge 65 (I'm guessing the name here) will likely charge at 10V/6.5A. This will allow the next OnePlus smartphone, possibly the OnePlus 8T, to charge much more quickly than the OnePlus 8 or 8 Pro. OnePlus may choose to debut this feature on a special model of the OnePlus 8, though they recently ended their partnership with McLaren, so it's uncertain if we'll see special hardware variants of new OnePlus phones again.
65W Super Warp charging will likely be based on the same technology behind OPPO's 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 and Realme's 65W SuperDart charging. Future OnePlus smartphones with this charging technology will likely have a dual-cell battery, much like on the OPPO Find X2 and Realme X50 Pro. There are legitimate concerns that such fast charging can deteriorate the longevity of the battery and also that there's a 2% efficiency loss during normal operation of the phone by nature of how the dual-battery solution is set up. For more information, I recommend reading Anandtech's article on how high-efficiency ICs enable fast-charging.
OnePlus 8 Forums ||| OnePlus 8 Pro Forums
H/T XDA Senior Member Some_Random_Username