OnePlus 5: A reminder that retailer listings mean nothing, and About screens can be faked

OnePlus 5: A reminder that retailer listings mean nothing, and About screens can be faked

Never Settle for dubious online rumors.

So we're getting to the time of year when folks are expecting a new OnePlus smartphone. The number four being considered bad luck in some Asian cultures, the name everyone seems to have settled on is OnePlus 5, and boy is the rumor mill already churning. In the past week a post by OnePlus CEO Pete Lau on social network Weibo, not mentioning the OnePlus 5, and revealing no new information was widely reported to be a teaser of the OnePlus 5.

And now we're seeing reports of the OnePlus 5 being listed at OppoMart, which sounds very official, but actually has nothing to do with the Oppo which makes phones, and which shares some of the same investors as OnePlus.

The storefront uses an alleged OnePlus 5 render which surfaced a few days back, with the watermark photoshopped out, and a spec sheet which could've been easily put together from other OnePlus 5 rumors — Snapdragon 835, 6GB of RAM, 5.5-inch 2K display, dual cameras, and so on. In other words, nothing new.

It's a tactic we've seen many retailers deploy ahead of anticipated phone launches. One or two in the UK were even taking Samsung Galaxy S8 pre-orders before the phone had been announced, and before the final price was known. (In those cases, the initial pre-order prices were completely wrong.)

What's more, a screenshot of an "About" screen, purportedly from the OnePlus 5, has also cropped up on Weibo in the past day, apparently showing a variant with 8GB of RAM. That's entirely possible, especially for spec-sensitive markets in Asia, but screens like that are also ridiculously easy to fabricate and this one comes from an unknown source.

This kind of thing is as old as Android itself, as the good old Android Central build.prop Hall of Shame, from 2010, can attest.

So maybe the OnePlus 5 will look like the images above. Or maybe not. Maybe it'll have 6GB of RAM. Maybe it'll have 8GB of RAM. Either way, a sizeable pinch of salt is recommended for any OnePlus rumors you might be seeing this week.