- OnePlus brand ambassador Robert Downey Jr. was photographed holding a OnePlus 8 Pro while on the set for a commercial, despite the fact the phone hasn’t been announced yet.
- Two leakers indicate that the OnePlus 8 series of phones will officially launch on April 15th.
- If you want to know more about the specs for the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro, be sure to check out the most recent, and most comprehensive, leak from last month.
- Visit BGR’s homepage for more stories.
Smartphone leaks come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s not often that an A-list celebrity is the source of the leak. As you may know, Robert Downey Jr. became a brand ambassador for OnePlus last year, appearing in commercials and posting photos of himself on social media with the OnePlus 7 in hand. It appears that the deal he made with OnePlus is ongoing, too, as a now-deleted Instagram post showed him with what seems to be a OnePlus 8 Pro.
The pictures appeared on the Instagram profile of photographer Sam Jones (host of the fantastic interview show Off Camera, which you can watch on Netflix). As 9to5Google notes, the pictures appear to have been snapped on the set of an ad shoot, and after realizing his error, Jones took them down. You will not find them on Jones’ profile any longer, but an RDJ fan page did manage to snag them and rehost them before they vanished:
As you can see, while the triple-camera array looks similar to that of the OnePlus 7 Pro, the sensors that once were below the camera have been moved to the left side of the array. This is incredibly close to the design that we saw all the way back last October, when CashKaro and Steve Hemmerstoffer (@OnLeaks) teamed up to bring us renders of the unannounced device. It’s not quite one-to-one, but the general design was basically spot-on.
Aside from Iron Man’s accidental leak, we also might have gotten confirmation of the launch date. On Friday morning, prolific leaker Max J. tweeted out an image that featured the silhouette of a smartphone (presumably the OnePlus 8) and a date: April 15th. This lines up with previous reports of a mid-April launch:
(Concept image – for illustration purpose only) pic.twitter.com/jFBKvJ3RB2
— Max Jambor (@MaxJmb) March 13, 2020
Hours later, another leaker, Ishan Agarwal, claimed on his Twitter account that “OnePlus will officially announce the launch date and event details of the OnePlus 8 series on March 23rd, at least in India.” He still believes that the launch will take place on April 14th in India, but says that April 15th might be the global launch day.
Both Ishan and Max have been useful resources for leaks in the past, and with Robert Downey Jr. to back them up, it’s clear that we’ll know more about the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro sooner rather than later.
