OnePlus may be working on a dirt-cheap smartphone

OnePlus smartphones are no longer that cheap that they used to be earlier as the Shenzhen-based tech company now wants to compete against the likes of Apple and Samsung in the flagship territory by making ultra-premium smartphones. And while that led to people thinking that OnePlus has shifted gears from value-for-money phones, or what they called “flagship killer phones,” to premium phones, with the launch of the OnePlus Nord, the apprehension that OnePlus will no longer make value-for-money phones no longer exists.

OnePlus is committed to continuing to produce affordable smartphones to reach more customers, as confirmed by the company’s CEO Pete Lau. In other words, we’ll see OnePlus Nord-like, or even cheaper than that, smartphones in the coming days. And the good news is that we’re already hearing from various sources that OnePlus has already started working on OnePlus Nord-like affordable smartphones. At the beginning of this month, a mysterious OnePlus smarpthone with Snapdragon 660, which is a mid-range processor, and 4GB of RAM was spotted on the GeekBench benchmark site, which, of course, gave birth to speculations that the mysterious smartphone could be the successor to the Nord.

But it seems that OnePlus is working on not one but two affordable smartphones. A reliable tipster dug what appears to be OnePlus proprietary code and found that the company’s upcoming affordable smarpthone will be powered by Snapdragon 460 that has the codename SM4250. The proprietary code also has mentions of Snapdragon 855, Snapdragon 865, and the Snapdragon 765G.  While the tipster didn’t give us any details on the rest of the specs of what he claimed to be OnePlus’ upcoming budget handset, since the SD460 is designed to power entry-level smartphone(sub-$200), there is a strong possibility that OnePlus will release a dirt-cheap smartphone, something that the company never brought it to the market yet.

Upcoming budget smartphone from OnePlus comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 SOC (SM4250). pic.twitter.com/q9Dy5qIMdj

— Nithin Prasad (@_the_tech_guy) August 22, 2020

However, the sub-$200 smarpthone should be taken with a grain of salt at this moment and, therefore, you should not be too excited about it. Rest assured, we’ll keep you updated if we get more information on the Snapdragon 460-powered smartphone.