Earlier in the week, Hong Kong-based startup OnePlus launched its second generation flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 2, amidst a great deal of hype and fanfare, and has already received a giant thumbs up from the online Android enthusiast community. So much so, that within the first couple of days of launch, the smartphone had already drawn almost a million registrations for invites, which will allow one to purchase the much-coveted smartphone, positioned by the company as the “2016 Flagship Killer”. That number by now, has swelled to well over a million. While the hardware specifications and the look and feel of the device belies its $329 price-tag, the brand and its offerings are still believed to be fairly niche, targeting hardcore technology enthusiasts in general, and Android aficionados in particular.
Having introduced the phone to the media a few days back, OnePlus, on Friday, held a series of public events in a number of cities in an apparent effort to spread the word amongst the uninitiated and to interact with its strong fan-base. In New York City, the event was held smack bang in the middle of Times Square, and kicked-off at 4 PM EST. The event drew a larger-than-expected crowd of the OnePlus faithful and curious, inquisitive onlookers, many of whom had never even heard of OnePlus prior to Friday. Most who had queued-up for the event though, knew all about OnePlus and its last year’s original ‘Flagship Killer’, the OnePlus One. While many in the crowd were existing users of the OnePlus One, many others were reportedly considering chucking their current devices for the OnePlus 2 once they get their hands on an elusive invite.
As a quick refresher, the OnePlus 2 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 octa-core CPU clocked at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, and an Adreno 430 GPU. The device 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.