OnePlus News Daily Dose #35: OnePlus 7 purported leak, 3/3T Pie closed beta fiasco, local GC and more!

Waiting for the next big thing is a cumbersome task. Being impatient is one of the most nasty ‘features’ of human nature. It’s like the the circles of Inferno, but started with speculations and ended with constant whining.

OnePlus promised to bring Android 9 Pie update for their 2016 lineup – the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T in an unexpected announcement. People took a brief amount of time to absorb the shock, then unleash the same old lack-of-patience saga.

David Y., Community Manager of OnePlus, had to deal with these incidents. As a consequence, he came up with this Software Update Excitement Thread.

We noticed that some members of our community are very eager for software updates, often making requests on unrelated threads or creating a thread just for the purpose of asking about the next update.

The (in)famous no-ETA policy of OnePlus was formally stated in the same announcement post:

We will NOT share any ETA (estimated arrival time) for our OxygenOS updates. You will only receive an update when our software is ready. Harassment of staff members via public or private messaging is an express violation of our community rules and will be punished accordingly.

Well, people are people!

OnePlus started recruiting testers for evaluating the closed beta of the Pie update for OnePlus 3 and 3T a few days ago. Conducting a prior closed beta is a tactical move to ensure a smoother transition in real life.

Even tho the overall Pie experience works pretty well at this stage, software team decided to postpone the open beta a bit because we believe a well-baked Pie should be on the top priority, that’s why we scaled up the existing Closed Beta Program to tackle more potential issues.

(Source)

The recruitment process in China was started earlier, thus eligible Chinese users already got their hands on the beta build of HydrogenOS 9.0 (based on Android 9.0). Despite under NDA, some of them leaked screenshots of the builds.

As readers can notice, moderators quickly took appropriate steps to edit the post and remove the materials. The screenshots are still circulating online, but we prefer to ignore them.

Meanwhile, the enrolment window of the global closed beta has already been closed today on GMT 2 PM. There is no official announcement  from OnePlus at the time of writing this article regarding further update.

The OnePlus 3/3T section of the global OnePlus forum is a hot mess at this moment!

The online survey link is still online though.

Let’s hope OnePlus will notify the qualified members sooner than expected. Don’t forget to check your spambox!

The speculation part is applicable for the upcoming OnePlus 7 as well. Amidst several fake leaks, someone has spotted another listing of alleged OnePlus 7 from a Chinese retailer.

Located by redditor u/GrowToronto, the phone is listed by Shenzhen Ocar Lighting Technology Co., Ltd. on Alibaba.com. The specs tells us nothing new, while there are multiple discrepancies (example: the OS version) in the description.

The reddit user even contacted the seller to query about the authenticity. The response was not very much exciting at this moment.

On the other hand, several blogs and news outlets are talking about another alleged leak of the OnePlus 7 gradient back panels.

Around a week ago, T3 published the news about these color variants. They credited Tiger Mobiles for the leak, although the T3 writer did not explicitly mention any post/tweet from the latter.

We digged a little after noticing the post on T3 and discovered a small blog who shared the same picture on March 5th. Guess what – they also credited Tiger Mobiles without any proper citation.

My advice? Always refill the your salt cellar while dealing with these ‘leaks’.

In another news, OnePlus India got their first local general counsel (GC) a couple of days ago.

Reported by Legally India.com, Maitrayee Sanyal is the new GC reporting from Bangalore to the global legal team in Shenzhen, China. Maitrayee, who started the journey in OnePlus India as “technical lead” in July 2018, commented the following:

I have been very grateful to them for their consideration and I would like to believe that I am being a good resource to them,

As OnePlus GC, they need to deal with the domains like advisory on various aspects of the corporate and media laws, labour law evaluation, consumer protection laws, aspects of intellectual property as well as “subsequent explanation of the same to the relevant stakeholders”.

That’s it for today! See you guys on Monday. ?

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