OnePlus has just announced its new flagship phone, and it went mostly as expected. Snapdragon 810? Check. 3300mAh battery? Check. Awkward fingerprint sensor? Double check. NFC? Umm... wait, what? That's right there's no NFC in this "2016 flagship killer." We asked OnePlus what the deal was, and get this, OnePlus' PR confirmed there's no NFC in the OnePlus 2 and said it's because people don't use it. It's all your fault!

Just to be completely clear, here are the words OnePlus used when we asked about the apparent lack of NFC.

"We heard from a lot of users of the One and saw most of our users weren't using NFC."

I don't think OnePlus is necessarily lying in the above statement. It's plausible that a lot of people don't use NFC, but how many of those people do you have to talk to before you decide to just dump a feature that almost every other phone in the world has? The only modern Android phones I can think of off the top of my head that don't have NFC are Motorola's budget offerings, the Moto E and Moto G (and that might not be true for much longer).

The lack of NFC means you won't be able to use apps that pair devices or transfer data using NFC to negotiate a connection. Android's NFC-based device setup feature won't work either, but you can at least sign in manually to accomplish the same thing. Wireless payments with Google Wallet/Android Pay just won't work at all, though.

While I don't know this for sure, I'd speculate that OnePlus' drive to shave a few bucks off the cost of the hardware made them too eager to omit NFC. Not everyone uses it, but NFC is certainly popular enough that people will miss it.