OnePlus 5T is confirmed… but the only official spec is a 3.5mm headphone jack

Rumor has it that OnePlus will launch a new phone called the OnePlus 5T soon. It’s expected to have similar specs to the OnePlus 5, but a new design with an 18:9 display and upgraded cameras.

Up until now we’d only heard about the phone through leaks. But an official post in the OnePlus forum today confirms that the OnePlus 5T is real… and that it’ll have a headphone jack.

Actually, the post was nominally about the company’s decision to stick with headphone jacks at a time when other device makers are launching premium phones without them. It’s only at the end that the OnePlus 5T gets a name drop. The company also sorta/kinda confirmed the phone’s existence in a tweet yesterday.

So officially the only thing we know about the phone is that it’ll have an analog audio port. But if the rumors are correct, it’ll have a Snapdragon 835 processor, up to 8GB of RAM, up to 128GB of UFS 2.1 storage, dual 20MP rear cameras, and a 2160 x 1080 pixel display with slim bezels.

As for the headphone jack, OnePlus has taken a fair amount of flak in recent years for its “Never Settle” tag line, because the company constantly seems to settle on leaving out features like NFC, wireless charging, or high-res displays in an effort to hit the sweet spot between price and performance.

But it’s nice to see a company deciding that being able to make a slightly thinner phone by omitting the headphone jack is a user-hostile move in 2017, at a time when the vast majority of users still say they occasionally plug in a set of wired headphones.

The war on headphone jacks isn’t entirely over yet: Samsung and LG are still producing top tier phones with headphone jacks as well. But Apple, HTC, Google, and Motorola have omitted them from their latest flagships (although Motorola still offers mid-range and entry-level phones with headphone jacks).

It remains unclear whether companies that have dropped the jack will eventually decide to bring it back… but as iPhones continue to fly off the shelves despite the lack of a headphone jack (and most likely not because of it), it seems increasingly likely that they won’t. What remains to be seen is whether holdouts like OnePlus will continue to use the headphone jack as a differentiating factor or if eventually most phone makers will drop the jack.