Chinese startup OnePlus made a name for itself last year with the launch of the OnePlus One smartphone — a device with high-end specs at a mid-range price. Despite limited supplies and a kind of annoying invite-only system, the company managed to sell about a million phones in 2014.
Now OnePlus officials tells Bloomberg the goal is to ship 3-5 million phones in 2015. That includes the OnePlus One, but also next-gen phones which will launch in the second half of the year.
The OnePlus Two will be the company’s new flagship phone when it launches in the third quarter of 2015. There aren’t many details, but if it’s anything like last year’s phone, expect a speedy processor, a good screen, and a decent camera for a price that’s about half what you’d pay for an unlocked flagship phone from Samsung or HTC.
OnePlus is also said to be working on a “cheaper model” which will also be available before the end of 2015. Rivals including Xiaomi and Motorola have had a lot of success in recent years by offering phones with relatively modest but respectable specs at low prices. It wouldn’t be surprising to see OnePlus follow suit, which means the company’s product line would probably consist of a phone with top-tier features at a mid-range price and a phone with mid-range specs at an entry-level price.
Part of the reason OnePlus is selling phones for low prices is because the company sells its devices at or near the price it costs to build them, and doesn’t make much money on hardware. Eventually the plan is to make money by selling software and services.
One Plus Two Equals Zero. With other words – good luck trying to actually buy one of these things.
Sure it is lmfao
“Eventually the plan is to make money by selling software and services.”
haha, no thanks. Sounds like either they want to follow in Samsung’s footsteps, and start their own crappy appstore. Or they want to follow in Archos’ footsteps, and charge money for software updates.
I’m not familiar with Archos’ policies, but I always thought it would be nice if you could have the option of buying an OS upgrade without the bloatware. Sort of like what the Google Edition phones offer. That would benefit the consumer and give the manufacturers an incentive to get upgrades out for a longer period of time.
Archos was more about selling enhanced functionality so for instance you could buy a video player from them but if you wanted support for MKV files you’d have to pay £20 to unlock that. Then again this was a long time ago…
Actually it was a little more slimey than that. They advertised features on their products that were still in development, and then launched the product without several of those features. Months later they would sell firmware upgrades to include support for those features.
I owned an Archos 5 (the original generation one, before they started using Android). They announced the product initially as supporting FLAC audio, and a few other things. I bought the Archos 5 specifically for FLAC playback, but the feature was missing. A few months later they offered the feature for $9.99.
I’ve never bought an Archos product since.
I dont mind they selling the next gen of hardware that full of bloat but as long is developer friendly, Android enthusiasm like us who gladly to flash a custom ROM on top of it to make it bloat free. Most important make it cheap for every year flagship refresh like 64GB at 349$.