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After so many foldable phone concepts, we turn to another trend that’s been big this year: sliding parts. The Vivo NEX has one, the Oppo Find X and Huawei Honor Magic 2 definitely have some. Now OnePlus 7 gets the same treatment, courtesy of Techconfigurations.

They even threw in a penta camera for good measure, but not in the way you think. It’s only a “penta” if you combine the 3 back cameras and the two front cameras, which is a rather typical setup nowadays. Rumors even mentioned a triple camera for the OnePlus 6T for a long while, but OnePlus bailed at the last moment with a dual camera and some software upgrades from the OnePlus 6.

I find it too much trouble to create a moving part for a phone just to integrate a double selfie camera and also make the bezels slimmer. A sliding part could break down with long use, malfunction, get lint stuck in it, or get broken by mistake. Yes, I know it’s cool to slide it out and all, but is it? Various bend tests have shown that such devices are always more vulnerable than regular ones.

Techconfigurations did a pretty premium version of the OnePlus 7 here, but I feel that the time of sliding devices has passed and we’re entering the screen cutout phase.

[via Techconfigurations]