The Shenzhen Unicorn — Week in China Magazine

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OnePlus Two

A sizeable quotient of the techno-hip crowd in the US and Europe is counting down the days to the launch next week of the newest Android mobile phone by China’s OnePlus. It’s called the OnePlus Two and follows a little more than a year after the 18-month-old company’s first phone, the OnePlue One, went on sale in the US and Europe. With barely a nickel to spend on marketing and promotion, OnePlus insouciantly dubbed its OnePlus One a “flagship killer” claiming it delivered similar or better performance than Samsung, LG and HTC Android phones costing twice as much.

The tech media swooned, and buyers formed long online queues to buy one from the OnePlus website, www.oneplus.net, the only place the phones are sold. In little more than six months last year, OnePlus sold over one million phones.

The new OnePlus model is rumored to be built around a new top-of-the-line Qualcomm processor, and features a larger screen, an upgraded in-house version of Android software, fingerprint recognition. Price? Around $300. It will be available, as was the OnePlus One for most of the last year, on an “invitation-only cash-upfront” basis to prospective buyers. How to get a coveted invitation remains something of a dark art. New OnePlus owners are given a certain number of invitations to send to whoever they please.

The July 27th launch will be an online event broadcast in virtual reality. OnePlus manufactured and is giving away a cardboard virtual reality viewer said to be as good or better than the ones sold by Google for $20. The viewers have been flying out the door for the last month.

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