OnePlus might be ditching curved edges too

The next OnePlus flagship looks a little flat — and that’s a good thing. The alleged image of the unreleased OnePlus 13 was posted to Weibo and has been since removed, but not before it was spotted by 9to5Google. It shows the phone with flat sides rather than the curved edges featured by recent OnePlus phones. It’s a small shift, but it would make OnePlus the latest in a long list of phone makers to adopt the (arguably more comfortable) flat edge design.

The current trend dates back to 2020 when Apple released the iPhone 12 with flat sides, calling on an older design from the iPhone 4 and 5. Over the past few years, other companies followed suit with flat screens and less curved side rails: Samsung started straightening out the Galaxy S series with the S22, and Google’s latest Pixel 9 phones all feature flat edges. Even Motorola has adopted straight edges for many of its phones this year, with the exception of its “Edge” devices, which, sure. Curved edges are kind of its whole deal.

Does this design detail matter a great deal when most people put a case on their phone right after unboxing it? No. Is this the kind of thing you care about when you spend all day thinking and writing about phones? Yes. But hear me out: straight edges just feel nicer to hold. They make a phone easier to pick up off a table. And they just look better. All the phones kind of look like iPhones now anyway, and that’s fine. Why try and reinvent the wheel?

In any case, we probably won’t have to wait long to find out what shape the OnePlus 13 will take: the company appears to be planning to launch it in China sometime this month.