SHENZHEN, China—As "chief product manager" at phone maker OnePlus—or, as the sign on his office says, "decision daddy"—CEO Pete Lau gets picky about the design of his company's phones.

In a visit to OnePlus's Shenzhen HQ, we saw the new red OnePlus 6 ($529.00 at OnePlus Canada) and got an exclusive look at dozens of designs OnePlus ultimately discarded. The red phone is, of course, gorgeous. The best way to experience this is to look for yourself, in our video below:

Walking with Lau through the company's prototypes, we saw some interesting paths not taken. The first OnePlus 5 prototype, for example, had a strange vertical seam down the middle designed to look like a car hood. But that idea was quickly set aside.

We saw phones with headphone jacks on their bottoms and phones without jacks; OnePlus decided to stick with the jack in the end. We saw models with single main cameras and dual cameras; OnePlus has gone with dual cameras. Their backs had subtly different curvatures, a measurement Lau has said he pays particular attention to. A few phones had particularly large, plastic "radio windows" across their metal backs for LTE signal reception. Lau hated those, and pushed engineers to collapse the radio window into the space between the dual cameras.

The OnePlus 6's "silk white" and red colors were selected out of dozens of potential back plates, as well. We spied one with a very similar color gradient to the Huawei P20 Pro, which a OnePlus engineer said they did "just to show we could." Other back plates had subtle designs that showed up under reflected light. We didn't see any different textures, though—nothing like the old OnePlus sandstone or wood backs, which have been relegated to add-on cases.

OnePlus will continue to innovate next year, as Lau revealed exclusively to us in a fireside chat at Mobile World Congress last week. In the video below, watch him tell us that OnePlus is looking at US carrier relationships and working on a 5G phone.

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