The past year has seen a ton of new brands pop up in the field of smartphones. While most incumbents like HTC, Sony seem to be having trouble making a profit in the increasingly aggressive smartphone business, there are plenty of mainland Chinese startups that think they can do better. Companies like Oppo, Xiaomi and now OnePlus are doing a David and Goliath recreation in the Android smartphone market. OnePlus is the latest entrant into the ring and its first shot at an Android smartphone was the cleverly titled OnePlus One. The phone had some rough edges, but overall it was a surprisingly good first product from a brand no one had ever heard of. even in early 2014.
This year OnePlus has started its second entry by launching the OnePlus Two. What the company lacks in interesting product names, though it seems to have made up for with its ability to design and build a pretty compelling mid to high-end Android smartphone. The new phone’s price list and specs mean the OnePlus 2 covers a wide range of the Android phone market, aiming squarely at the premium mid-range all the way to almost flagship phones from other manufacturers.
OnePlus even plays into this by calling the Two a ‘2016 flagship killer’, meaning it has specs that are equal to or better than phones launching in the coming months. So is there any truth to OnePlus’ bombast? Well yes and no. OnePlus operates on a unique business model where it sells incredibly low volumes in small batches, sometimes as few as a few thousand phones. They do this with a reservation system in which potential buyers sign up and wait to receive an invitation to buy the company’s phones. While many may balk at this somewhat unorthodox process, it’s no different than people who physically stand in line for days outside the Apple Store, waiting for the latest iDevice.
What this process allows OnePlus is to sell phones with components that aren’t yet available on the scales needed for giants like Samsung and Apple to put out phones that sell a few million units in a month. This means that for the price you pay for them, OnePlus phones are anywhere from a few months to almost a year ahead of the curve, technologically speaking, compared to the competition.
While in the desktop space, innovation and even advances in clock speeds have slowed to an incremental pace, in smartphone hardware, a year is a lifetime. This means that OnePlus phones are, at least technologically, as good as anything you can buy from Samsung or HTC in the next six months. The problem is that a high-end phone is about so much more than what’s inside. Build quality, fit and finish, and materials also matter just as much, if not more. This is where the OnePlus falls down, with a sticky body and sticky plastic back that’s anything but high-end. This can be partly remedied by the great selection of OnePlus 2 covers, but people who want a truly iconic feel from their smartphone will have to look elsewhere.
