India’s largest wireless carrier Airtel on Thursday, announced a partnership with smartphone startup OnePlus, whereby 50 participating Airtel stores in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore would offer a hands-on experience with the OnePlus 2 to just about anybody who walks in through the doors at those stores from this Friday. The carrier has already listed the 50 stores where the offer would be applicable, and the entire list can be found at the source link at the bottom of this article. Airtel has said that in time, the scheme will roll out to many more cities, with a number of stores in 4G territories being prepped for the OnePlus 2 hands-on demo in the coming weeks. It bears mentioning that Airtel’s LTE network is presently available in over 300 towns across the country, with plans for a larger presence over the course of this year and the next.
As for the just-announced deal with OnePlus, Airtel says that its customers will also stand a chance to get an invite to buy the OnePlus 2 if they were to upgrade to a 4G SIM from their current 3G SIMs. Non-Airtel customers can port into the network and subscribe to any 4G postpaid plan offered by the carrier to be eligible for an invite. Airtel however does mention that owing to the limited availability of invites, they’ll be doled out strictly on a first come first service basis. Currently, only the invited few get a chance to buy the smartphone, which is officially sold in the country exclusively on Amazon for a price of Rs. 24,999 ($380) for the 4 GB RAM / 64 GB ROM variant. The 3 GB RAM / 16 GB ROM variant is priced Rs. 2,000 ($30) cheaper at Rs. 22,999 ($350), but is not yet available for purchase.
As a quick recap, the OnePlus 2 comes with a 5.5-inch 1080p display and is powered by Qualcomm’s MSM8994 Snapdragon 810 SoC (v2.1), which comes with an embedded octa-core 64-bit CPU clocked at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, along with an Adreno 430 GPU. The device comes with a choice of either 3 GB RAM and 16 GB ROM or 4 GB RAM and 64 GB ROM. The smartphone runs Android 5.1 Lollipop out of the box in the form of Oxygen OS 2.0, which just got its second software update earlier in the week, after having received a patch to plug the Stagefright exploit last month. The smartphone comes with a 13-megapixel primary camera and a 5-megapixel secondary camera, and carries a 3,300 mAh Li-Po battery. The smartphone also happens to be one of the first mainstream smartphones to support microUSB 2.0 Type-C connectivity.