OnePlus just announced its latest flagship with a formidable back-panel lighting system and up to 1TB of storage

Forget the leaks and rumors; OnePlus has now confirmed how the OnePlus 16 will look and what storage options it will offer at launch.

The smartphone manufacturer has already opened reservations in its home market. All that’s missing now is an announcement that confirms the strongly rumored specifications and a launch date (most likely in October).

So what has OnePlus actually confirmed?

In the latest announcement, the company confirmed three official colorways. These include Tomorrow’s Starlight, a light finish with a fingerprint-resistant silk glass texture, and what the company’s president calls the “Interstellar Light Effect.” 

It is meant to be a face-down notification indicator that alerts the user to incoming calls, messages, and other notifications.  

The other two colors are Dark Forest (the classic deep-black or dark-gray look) and Mars Masterpiece (a salmon-pink shade in the shared pictures). The overall design of the handset’s rear panel is quite similar to the OnePlus 15.

What about the storage and memory options?

Storage and memory have also been confirmed. They’ll span four tiers, from 12GB of RAM paired with 256GB up to 16GB paired with a full terabyte of storage. That aligns with how smartphone makers operate in China, giving prospective customers plenty of options.

Everything else is still in the rumor territory. Leaks point to Qualcomm’s newest flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro (2nm), which could be paired with LPDDR6 memory. The phone could also feature a co-processor for managing the refresh rate and frame interpolation.

Reports also point to a 9,000 mAh battery, a significant jump from the OnePlus 15’s 7,300 mAh, which already offered around 10 hours of screen-on time. The jump in the battery capacity could push that to 12 to 13 hours of screen-on time. However, we won’t be able to experience it here in the US, as the company has officially exited the market. 

Despite that, it’s worth keeping an eye on the OnePlus 16, as the handset could set a benchmark for what mainstream Android flagships can truly offer in 2027.