Rumors of the OnePlus 11 have been heating up in recent months, and the latest news directly from the brand is that it’ll be hosting a launch event in China in just a few days time. The event is set for Saturday, December 17, at 14:30 China Standard Time (which is 1:30 am EST). The question is what the brand will reveal at the show, as the company’s teaser on the Chinese social media network Weibo doesn’t explicitly refer to the OnePlus 11.

A machine-translated version of the post says, “New direction, new action, new future” and says we’ll be seeing new OnePlus products. There’s no direct mention of the OnePlus 11, which is odd for the brand if this is its big phone launch. Last month, the company’s Weibo account referred to its next phone as the OnePlus 11 in a post around the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, so it’s strange that OnePlus wouldn’t do the same here.

We often see consistent teasers from OnePlus ahead of big launches, so we believe this is a separate event. It’s expected that OnePlus will first reveal its next-gen phone in China before bringing it to worldwide markets at a later date, but December 17 is also remarkably early. Earlier this year, OnePlus used a similar method, but it waited until January 2022 to reveal its OnePlus 10 Pro.

Adding to this, OnePlus has also confirmed this event with a matter of a few days to go. Often we see OnePlus announce its events with a long lead-up time, and with this being confirmed around three days before launch, we don’t think that it'll be big news like a new flagship phone. It may be that we see a teaser for the OnePlus 11 during the Chinese event, but we think it’s unlikely to be the full reveal for the next OnePlus phone.

The OnePlus 11 is expected to feature a 6.7-inch QHD+ AMOLED display, up to 16GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, a 5,000mAh battery and 100W charging. We don’t yet know how much it’ll cost, but leaks have suggested we’ll see the return of the alert slider feature, which the brand dropped from the OnePlus 10T.