OnePlus will make its much coveted invites available for sale on eBay, as part of the online retailer’s ‘Giving Works’ CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) project. For those out of the loop, one needs an invite to even get a chance to purchase the company’s latest flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 2. As for this new initiative announced by OnePlus on its official blog, the company says it will be auctioning off 100 global invites on eBay, the proceeds from which will go to the UNICEF Tap project, which aims to provide clean drinking water to children around the world who do not have access to the same. Bidding is live on the official eBay store of OnePlus at the time of writing this article. These invites however, will be valid only on oneplus.net, and OnePlus asks its potential customers to double check whether the company ships directly to the country of their residence.
Explaining its decision to ‘sell’ invites, the company reasons that many invites were being sold online for profit anyways, prompting it to take the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach. Especially for a cause, as 100 percent of proceeds will go towards the aforesaid UNICEF project. The auction will reportedly work exactly as normal, and all bids will be for the 64 GB Sandstone Black version of the OnePlus 2. Once the auction process ends, the invites will be send directly to winning bidders via Email on the 10th of this month. Unlike regular invites, these ones will have longer shelf lives and OnePlus will allow one week to claim the invite as opposed to one day. The winning bidders will also have a month to buy the smartphone using the invites they’ve won at the auction.
OnePlus 2 happens to be the follow up for last year’s highly successful maiden release for the company, the OnePlus One. The new flagship smartphone was launched on July 28th and comes with a 5.5-inch full HD display panel. The device is powered by Qualcomm’s MSM8994 Snapdragon 810 (v2.1) SoC, which has an embedded 64-bit octa-core CPU clocked at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, and an Adreno 430 GPU. The smartphone comes with an offer of either 3 GB RAM + 16 GB ROM or 4 GB RAM + 64 GB ROM, and runs Android 5.1 Lollipop out the box. 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.