The OnePlus One smartphone features top-tier specs at a mid-range price. For $299 you get a phone with a 5.5 inch, full HD display, 3GB of RAM, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor.
But it’s tough to actually get your hands on the first phone form OnePlus. There’s a limited supply of phones from this Chinese startup and up until now you’ve needed to get an invitation to even place an order.
Starting in late October OnePlus will open the doors to everyone who wants to place an order… kind of.
For a limited time, anyone will be able to place an order for a OnePlus One. If the company has a phone in stock, it’ll ship right away. If it’s not in stock then your name will be added to a pre-order page.
OnePlus isn’t placing a limit on how many devices will be available for order, but the pre-orders will only be open for a limited time. If a few people place orders you probably won’t have to wait long to get a phone. If a lot of people place orders the ship dates could get pushed further and further back.
Folks who end up on the pre-order list will be able to cancel their orders for a refund.
While the OnePlus One generated a lot of buzz when the company first unveiled the phone, it’s been in short supply ever since launch which means it’s one of the best phone that not a lot of people actually own.
OnePlus has also generated a bit of controversy from a series of poorly thought out promotional stunts… but in some ways the phone itself is a promotional stunt. The company is selling it for about what it costs to make the phone and hoping to use the word-of-mouth buzz generated by this high quality device as relatively cheap advertising.
But not everything’s gone according to plan. Not only did the company draw complaints from some folks for its promotional efforts, but this week the company canceled one of the projects designed to make the OnePlus One appealing. You probably won’t be able to buy a StyleSwap cover for the back of the phone due to manufacturing issues.
There’s a limited number of bamboo covers that OnePlus will sell… but the company warns that they might not be a perfect fit and OnePlus will provide customers with clear instructions on installing the covers without damaging their devices.
via Droid Life
have they actually fixed the firmware issue for the screen? or does multitouch still not work?
I think there are now other phones on the market that are just as good for the same price. The Mi4, the Huawei P7
The sad thing is that by the time it’s widely available it won’t be the bleeding edge phone it would have been at the time of its initial “release”. This also means that unless they cut prices the difference between this phone and similar phones won’t be as huge as it was.
lmao……sent from my Moto X
are those clowns still not selling phones,,i was there 6 months ago, only I left that mess and actually bought a phone that was actually available to purchase, imagine that. That thing will be a dinosaur before you even get it…
go from win the lottery to get one to pre-order,,LOL people are so easily taken in by scams
Too late, Oneplus. As a cash-in-hand consumer, you have already avoided my purchase for months. I have already bought a better phone.
You just mad because you didn’t get an invite. :O lol
Exactly. What business would want to do that to their customers?
If you have 20,000 units to sell, and 200,000 potential customers, you can get away with doing something like that for the initial batch, as long as there is some sort of expectation given to your customers about when normal sales will commence.
From my perspective, this is what appeared to be a publicity stunt to boost interest while they were busy building inventory. After seeing several waves of invites, it appeared the company was having production issues, and couldnt handle normal sales.
I get the impression that this is a company run by its engineers and designers.
As part of good business practices, ego aside, “an invite” ought not be a requisite to purchasing a product. Granted, some sellers of high-end luxury goods in the process of attempting to create a sense of exclusivity may resort to such tactics; however, the oneplus one is positioned as a more-for-the-money-value product. At the same time, they disappointed quite literally the world by over promising while then under delivering. In spite of all this, since I view these products as disposable goods (you don’t keep these for more than a year) and this item still appears to be the best value in the market, I have held off and still plan to purchase one.
Seriously though. Love the phone.
I just bought one from China where they’re plentiful, however the US market is still reliant on invites and now preorders. Shame about the back covers, I was looking forward to bamboo. Surely if they released exact measurements the community could put together some orders.
I think the issue was more about safely removing the back cover and less about supply.
Fair enough, it does seem like an utter nightmare to remove. What they’ve said on the issue makes me think that the oneplus two or whatever it’s called will have a replaceable back cover but the battery will be hidden below another layer of plastic and therefore harder to replace. Why they think protecting the battery is more important than having it be replaceable I don’t know, how many Samsungs do you see exploding because someone dropped them on a spiky pebble, none is the answer.