OnePlus will officially unveil the OnePlus 5T smartphone on November 16th, and it’s expected to be available for purchase starting November 21st.

Like the company’s last few launch events, you’ll be able to watch the keynote online. But if you want to check it out in person, OnePlu is also inviting the public to a launch event in Brooklyn.

There’s just one catch: you’ll have to pay $40 for a ticket.

Update: The OnePlus 5T is official. It will be available starting November 21st for $499 and up, and money raised by ticket sales to the launch event will be donated to the developers of F-Droid, an app store for free and open source Android apps.

@evleaks

On the one hand, the move sort of makes sense. Tech event keynotes have arguably been a form of entertainment for the geek crowd for years. But for the most part you’ve only been able to watch online unless you were a member of the press or a tech industry person invited to attend in person.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were members of the public who would be willing to pay to attend an Apple or Google keynote, for example.

On the other hand, what OnePlus is doing is basically asking people to pay to attend a massive advertising event for a device the company is hoping to sell to those same people.

I guess we’ll find out soon whether there’s a market for $40 tickets to see the launch of a phone from a less well-known company (and a phone that’s expected to be an incremental update to an existing model, at that).

The OnePlus 5T is expected to feature a 2160 x 1080 pixel display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, up to 8GB of RAM, up to 128GB of storage, 20MP dual rear cameras, and a headphone jack.

The OnePlus live event will begin at 11:00AM Eastern time on November 16th. You can watch online at oneplus.net/event or visit the same page starting November 8th to try to snag a ticket… if you think that’s something you want to do.

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