OnePlus 5: Sometimes Settle?
“Never Settle” has been the motto of the smartphone brand OnePlus, releasing one “flagship killer” per year to back that up. Ever since its inception with the OnePlus One, it has garnered a lot of praise by the users and the critics alike. But that praise starts to fade as it slowly shifts to become a mainstream brand that it once wanted to kill.
Money Matter$
If there was one thing that separated the OnePlus phones from the rest, it was the price. No other smartphone manufacturers provided top of the line specs with an affordable price tag such as OnePlus. Sure there were other Chinese brands but they fell short on some place or the other and most of them were sold only in China.
But with each iteration of their smartphones, their prices have been rising steadily. I’m no one to complain, after all prices of components increase every year but it also makes OnePlus dissuade by not following its affordable path it created itself.
What once was affordable is suddenly in the midst of affordable and expensive.
Check this out, when OnePlus One was launched, it had the price tag of $299, roughly less than half the price of then Samsung’s flagship S5, which was launched at $649.
Fast forward to 2017, the OnePlus 5 is around $500 while the S8 sits at $749. Sure it is still cheaper, but S8 has the infinity display, something OnePlus 5 doesn’t have or any other distinguishing feature that it could boast about.
Though $500 cannot get you an S8, what it can get you is another flagship by a much reputed company — the LG G6.
The Journey
OnePlus came to business back in December 2013. The OnePlus One was their first smartphone and it was well received among the users and the general reaction was mostly positive. The One had few tricks up its sleeve it could boast about- a never seen before sandstone finish, Cyanogen OS, top tier specs and most importantly an affordable price tag, all enclosed in a single device.
With the One, OnePlus targeted the enthusiasts, the people who cared about the specifications as much as the price.
Later they launched the OnePlus 2, that’s when the trouble began. It received mixed reviews — The positives were the same as the One, while the negatives were because of it’s decision of not including NFC, justifying their move not as cost efficient but as their OnePlus One users weren’t found to be using NFC (Yeah, so much for a flagship killer).
That was just the start, which was followed by more controversies. From a sexist competition targeting women to contests like “Smash the past" making people break their phones quite literally to get an invite, OnePlus has come a long way. The most mature thing it did was getting rid of it’s annoyingly frustrating invite system.
Never Settle, eh?
“Never Settle”, the motto that OnePlus has surrounded itself.
Never Settle meaning while rest of companies settle in some way or the other, they somehow never settle. OnePlus somehow manages to create this strange amount of hype for its every launch and most certainly manages to never live up to it.
The Verge recently went to Shenzhen, China to cover the ‘Making of OnePlus 5' in which they say that:
“they (OnePlus) don’t have resources or supply chain for technological advancements”.
That means they don’t have the required R&D to create something new. On talking about the technology breakthroughs, Pete Lau(CEO) said:
There is one thing creating a full screen display on the front. Our resources were limited at the time and we weren’t able to incorporate this element in this flagship. We started thinking about using a dual camera last year. However at that time, we feel that the cost to educate the market about the technology was too high. For this we have Apple to thank for educating the market about the dual-camera.
In simple words, they don’t want to take 'risks’. They wait for other companies to use a new technology in the market, and once it becomes successful, they copy it and incorporate it in their flagship. The reason that they give for not taking any risks is ‘they are a small company’. That would be true unless that company wouldn’t be almost 4 years old and shared all kinds of R&D and product designs with their parent company Oppo (more on that below). Besides no small company pays an American model and actress to appear in its ads and launches(Emily Ratajkowski) and so many Bollywood celebrities here in India.
With every smartphone launch, never has OnePlus left an impact like “Wow that’s an amazing smartphone”, their wow factor has always been “Wow what a smartphone at such an affordable price” which is quickly changing. You know a company is running out of ideas when they show a half minute slide demonstrating their “new and improved” vibrating motor (seriously?)
OnePlus ❤️ Oppo
Oppo is OnePlus’s parent company. If you’re getting to know that for the first time, prepare for a roller coaster ride.
OnePlus was founded by Pete Lau (CEO) and Carl Pei, both former employees of Oppo among others. OnePlus didn’t have a manufacturing facility of itself so they manufactured their phones at Oppo’s facilities.
Just when OnePlus was formed, Oppo launched a smartphone dubbed the Oppo N1 that had CyanogenMod as its OS, and what OS did OnePlus One on-board?
That’s right — Cyanogen OS.
It’s not over yet.
The Dash Charge feature that OnePlus has been so proud of, given by their slogan “A day’s power in half an hour” is nothing but a rebranded VOOC Charge — Oppo’s own proprietary quick charging technology.
It’s not their fault though, after all they (Oppo and OnePlus) along with Vivo are owned by another company called BBK Electronics so some transparency is expected. From OnePlus One ripping off the Oppo Find 7a to OnePlus 5 ripping off the Oppo R11 which ripped off the iPhone 7 Plus, it doesn’t take a genius to know they share product designs as well.
iPhone 7 Plus?
OnePlus was known to be an enthusiast brand, listening to the tech community and providing uncompromising features without burning a hole in one’s pocket. But soon as their OnePlus 2 device didn’t sell like hot cakes, they shifted their focus from the enthusiasts to the general audience by launching the OnePlus X. As soon as that didn’t sell as well they went back to their target audience by launching the OnePlus 3, then the 3T.
Since OnePlus 2 and OnePlus X were a commercial failure, OnePlus has failed to provide software updates and recently stated that it won’t.
With OnePlus 5, OnePlus plans on pleasing both the enthusiasts as well as the general public, but in a way both the communities feel betrayed. People buy OnePlus because they want to stand out of the crowd dominated by Apples and Samsungs and experience something different.
“Is that the iPhone 7 Plus?”
That’s something no OnePlus 5 owner wants to hear, but if one does, they sure would feel betrayed by a company they trusted and put their hard earned money on.
The Camera Bump
It’s not just the design that has been copied. Currently there are 3 kinds of dual-camera setups found in smartphones:
- iPhone style — where the secondary camera is a telephoto lens, allowing you to click portraits like DSLR by focusing on the subject and blurring out the background.
- Huawei style — one RGB lens and one monochrome lens for a better color reproduction.
- LG style — where the secondary camera is a wide angle lens, allowing you to capture more field of view.
OnePlus went with the iPhone style camera. If the camera hardware wasn’t enough, they even ripped off the iPhone’s camera UI.
OnePlus bet big on the camera. The dual-camera setup is supposed to be the highlight of the OnePlus 5, but word from reviewers speak otherwise. Pairing up with DxOMark didn’t quite help OnePlus as they hoped. Just announcing the dual-camera setup without building much hype around it could’ve helped, after all things fall when expectations don’t meet reality.
Hope?
Price is what distinguished OnePlus from other manufacturers. Something that OnePlus has started to forget. What was once its USP is now slowly becoming its Achilles’ heel. If OnePlus stops its price hike beyond $500 and provide good if not the best specifications each year that still feels like a good bang for your bucks, we have a winner. Heck! LG launched the G6 with last year’s Snapdragon 821 SoC, I don’t see anyone complaining. We’re in 2017, lags are a thing of the past, people trust real life performance rather than benchmarks (which our OnePlus 5 was recently spotted cheating on).
If OnePlus takes note of all these and try to be ‘different’ instead of being the ‘same’ it can be a game changer. If not, it would either find itself a grave on the pages of Wikipedia or get acquired (something what happened to Nextbit) sooner or later.
So next time, “Don’t believe the hype!”