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At first, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that threw plans and schedules into chaos. Now the tech industry is facing yet another crisis, one that could affect anything that has an integrated chip, which is almost all electronics these days. Although smartphone companies are less forthcoming about it, insider sources reveal some reshuffling of schedules and products behind the scenes. One of those is OnePlus, which already canned some North American OnePlus 9 configurations because of the chip supply shortage and might even be canceling the OnePlus 9T for the same reason.

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The choice of processors has always been one of the biggest criticisms of the smartwatch market, particularly with Android Wear, now Wear OS. Even today, most models run on very old silicon, even while a newer option has been available for almost a year now. Better late than never, as they say, and OPPO is finally catching up with the OPPO Watch 2, the third smartwatch to run on the latest Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform.

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The line that divides OnePlus and its distant cousin OPPO is becoming thinner and blurrier. Not long after OnePlus CEO Pete Lau took up a key position in OPPO, OnePlus announced that it would be using OPPO's ColorOS instead of its own HydrogenOS for Chinese models. It didn't take long for the two companies' software teams to merge, and the first fruits of this unification of OxygenOS and ColorOS can be found but not seen in the new OnePlus Nord 2.

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Although Samsung seems to have the lion's share of the niche foldable phone market, it might not be the only noteworthy game in town soon. A couple of new foldable devices are rumored to be launching within the next 12 or so months, but, ironically and unsurprisingly, Samsung will also benefit from those indirectly. Its display panel business will be the one providing foldable screens for these phones, and those screens might even boast fast refresh rates usually seen on conventional phones.

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The past 18 months have been somewhat unstable for the smartphone market, especially if you take into account the market shares. In addition to the chaos that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the whole world, Huawei's ongoing US sanctions also caused a reshuffling among the world's top smartphone makers. The first quarter of 2021 saw Huawei absent from the top five for the first time in years. Now Xiaomi has taken its spot in the second quarter, becoming the world's number two smartphone maker for the first time in its history.

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OnePlus revealed today that they'd be expanding their software update and support system for new devices and old devices back to OnePlus 8. To make this happen, OnePlus is "working on integrating the codebase of OxygenOS and ColorOS." According to OnePlus OxygenOS Product Lead Gary Chen, this is a change that users wont likely notice on their phones - meaning there'll be no major change to the software UI, for now.

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Chinese Android phone makers have been known for heavily modifying Android user experiences, but they have been less aggressive about those changes in recent years. Of course, they still have modified systems and custom apps, but, admittedly, some of those bring true value on top of vanilla Android. One of the most recent trends among these companies is extending RAM capacity by appropriating data storage (ROM) space. This RAM Expansion technology is coming to some of OPPO's phones, like the flagship Reno 5 series, but only in select markets.

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Despite a few blunders here and there, OnePlus remains one of the darlings of the smartphone market. That image, however, seems to be slowly disappearing thanks to one too many missteps in the software department. That may have been one of the primary reasons, or at least the public justification, for OnePlus' "merger" with OPPO. The fruits of that joint effort probably won't be felt until months or even years later, as the case of the OnePlus Nord N200 5G seems to prove.

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This week might have been one emotional roller coaster ride for OnePlus fans. The company debuted the OnePlus Nord CE 5G as expected but made a blunder in asking OnePlus 7 owners about their experiences with a non-existent feature. It then surprisingly announced the OnePlus Nord N200 5G before it announced a sort of merger with sibling and rival OPPO. The latter event may have generated a lot of concern and questions among OnePlus fans, but the company is putting at least one doubt to rest, reassuring international OnePlus users that it will be sticking to OxygenOS, at least for the foreseeable future.

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OnePlus and OPPO are merging their R&D teams, and bringing the two companies closer together as OnePlus co-founder and CEO confirms that the phone-makers will now "further integrate." OnePlus will continue to operate as a separate brand, Lau insists, though it's expected that the new organizational setup will be a shortcut to more cost-effective development.

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Wear OS by Google got a fair bit of positive media coverage a few weeks ago thanks to Google's announcements at its I/O 2021 developer's conference. But while the software is getting a massive upgrade, at least later this year or maybe even next year, it remains the case that all but one Wear OS smartwatch are running older Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear processors. Smartwatches to be launched later this year might finally change that and the OPPO Watch 2 could be leading the fray.

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Once upon a time, pre-releases of Android's next version were available only to a limited few. Of course, Google's own Nexus phones, later Pixels, had first dibs on any development version but some big names in the Android empire also boasted that preferential treatment. Almost like a testament to Android's more open development strategy, a number of manufacturers have all but simultaneously announced the availability of Android 12 beta for some of the phones, some companies you might not have expected to just that early into a development preview in the first place.

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