Hong Kong-headquartered smartphone vendor OnePlus has revealed that the company expects to sell one million smartphones in India by the end of the year. The company has already sold over a quarter of a million units of its first generation flagship, the much heralded OnePlus One, since it was launched in the country last December. OnePlus has also disclosed that India is already its third largest international market after the US and Europe, and the fourth largest overall, including its home base of China. India is currently the third largest smartphone market globally, after China and the US, with shipments of over 19.5 million smartphones in Q1, 2015.
OnePlus has already launched the 4 GB / 64 GB version of its latest offering, the OnePlus 2, at Rs. 24,999 (around $390) in the country, which is keeping in line with the phone’s international pricing of $389. The handset will be available for sale in the country from August 11th exclusively on Amazon India. However, OnePlus will persist with its invite-only model, which has drawn a lot of flak from admirers and detractors alike, but has worked wonders for the company from the marketing point of view. The 3 GB / 16 GB variant meanwhile, is scheduled to launch later in the year, at a price of just $329.
Speaking after the launch of the OnePlus 2 in the country, Mr. Vikas Agarwal, general manager, OnePlus India, told the PTI (Press Trust of India) that the company intends to continue selling the OnePlus One alongside the just-released flagship, presumably at a reduced price. “India is an important market for us”, he said. “Outside of China, it is already the third largest market for us, after the US and Europe. We expect to sell one million units of OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 by December. From day one, we’ve prioritized our product and our community above all else. We carefully listened to our users’ feedback and incorporated suggestions in building the OnePlus 2”.
Coming to the hardware specs of the OnePlus 2, the smartphone features a 5.5-inch 1080p display panel, and is powered by Qualcomm’s MSM8994 Snapdragon 810 SoC (v2.1). The chipset comes with a significantly underclocked 64-bit octa-core CPU, with a maximum frequency of 1.8 GHz, which is a significant downgrade from its original avatar, where the Cortex-A53 cores were clocked at 2.3 GHz. The chipset also comes with an embedded Adreno 430 GPU. The OnePlus 2 comes in two different variants – one with 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 64 GB of storage and another with 3 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage. The device comes with dual SIM, dual standby, runs on a 3,300 mAh battery and comes with USB Type-C connectivity. The device features a fingerprint sensor which can carry up to five different profiles and is said to be nominally faster than Apple’s SenseID. The OnePlus 2 also features a 13-megapixel primary camera on the rear and a 5-megapixel selfie-cam on the front. The rear-facing primary camera on the device comes with a 1.3 micron sensor, laser autofocus, dual-LED flash, f / 2.0 aperture, RAW image support and Optical Image Stabilization, and can record 2160p (3840 x 2160) videos at 30 fps.