The legend of the OnePlus brand just grows ever more even without any real advertisement – certainly not in traditional media. It was just last week that the startup launched its second generation flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 2, which kept the controversial ‘invite’ system that the company’s first generation flagship smartphone, the OnePlus One, came with initially. What started off ostensibly as a ploy to manage inventories, has turned out to be a marketing masterstroke for the brand, and has become a trademark of OnePlus’ marketing strategy, even though it’s not exactly without its fair share of critics.
Coming to the OnePlus news of the day and the whole point of this article, the long line of reservations is now reportedly two million strong, meaning over two million people are presumably waiting in line just to get their hands on what is turning out to be one of the most elusive and hence, much coveted smartphones of the year. Which is quite a feat, considering that we’re only talking about a seven day period here, since the reservations were opened on July 30th – a couple days after the launch of the device on July 28th. Announcing the news on Twitter, the company’s official account on the microblogging site @oneplus posted, “Over 2 MILLION reservations for the #OnePlus2. Thank you for your overwhelming support!” along with a screenshot of the company’s invite page. The number of people in the waiting line was already nearing a million after just two days of opening up registrations. The lucky few will start receiving the invites for the 4 GB / 64 GB version from the 11th of this month onwards. The 3 GB / 16 GB version will reportedly be made available later for $329.
As for the OnePlus 2, the smartphone features a 5.5-inch Full HD 1080p display, and is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8994 Snapdragon 810 SoC (v2.1), which comes with an embedded 64-bit octa-core CPU clocked at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, and an Adreno 430 GPU. As mentioned already, the device comes with a choice of either 3 GB RAM + 16 GB ROM or 4 GB RAM + 64 GB ROM, and runs Android 5.1 Lollipop out the box, in the form of the company’s proprietary Oxygen OS. The smartphone includes a 13-megapixel primary camera and a 5-megapixel secondary camera. The phone carries a 3,300 mAh Li-Po battery and is one of the first mainstream smartphones to support microUSB 2.0 Type-C connectivity.