OnePlus is making a 5G phone, but it won’t be cheap

Here’s a fact about 5G phones you probably didn’t think about: They’ll be expensive — at least at first. 

According to OnePlus CEO Pete Lau, who spoke with The Verge, OnePlus is indeed working on a 5G phone, but it’ll cost $200 to $300 more than the company’s upcoming 4G flagship phone. 

Lau didn’t share any more details — “there’s a lot of specifics still to look at,” he said — but it sounds like OnePlus just can’t make the 5G phone as cheap as it’d like to, so it’s switched to working on two flagships in parallel, something the company hasn’t done before. 

Another reason might be the phone’s looks. Due to the antenna design required for 5G, Lau says it “appears impossible to make a nice-looking flagship device, for now.”

We do know some details about the company’s 5G phone from an earlier announcement. It’ll launch in Europe first, on EE’s network, and it will sport Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 855 processor. No exact release date has been set. 

But why launch a 5G phone at all if it’s going to be that expensive? According to Lau, it’s about learning about the technology and how best to integrate it into a phone before it becomes commonplace. 

Lau’s comments give us some idea of how much other 5G phones will cost when they hit the market. Most major smartphone makers (with the probable exception of Apple) are planning to launch a 5G phone next year, but if you want those mind-boggling data transfer speeds, expect to pay a couple hundred bucks extra.