OnePlus is the company that everyone loves to hate. Many tech enthusiasts, who OnePlus is targeting, weren’t too happy with their invite system with the OnePlus One, and later the OnePlus 2 and OnePlus X in 2014, and 2015 respectively. However, as co-founder Carl Pei has stated several times, as a start up they can’t afford to order thousands and thousands of their devices to be made ahead of time. And the invite system allowed them to stagnate their growth a bit. The OnePlus One was one of the most popular smartphones in 2014. Even though it was a bit tough to get the device in the early going. The OnePlus 2 continued what OnePlus started, and that was bringing a flagship device with the latest specs to the market for a reasonable price. It was a bit more expensive than its predecessor, but still under $400 for a 64GB variant.
At Mobile World Congress, co-founder Carl Pei is there speaking with the press, as executives tend to do at trade shows such as this. When talking with CNET today, Pei noted that the OnePlus 3 will be launching “by June”. Now we’re unsure if that means it will become official by June, and then released later on – as we typically see in the mobile industry these days. Or if it will actually be available to purchase by June. There was also no word on an invite-system returning with the OnePlus 3. Recently the company made the OnePlus 2 and OnePlus X invite free “forever”.
Pei also noted that the US market will be a very important market for them in 2016. Also adding that we will see much more “traditional marketing” from the company in 2016 with the OnePlus 3. We’ve seen a lot of innovative marketing from the company, situated around their invite system in the past year or two. It’ll be nice to see a bit more of a traditional marketing approach for the OnePlus 3. Pei did not mention anything further about the device. But we can pretty much guarantee that it will have the Snapdragon 820 processor, likely 3GB or 4GB of RAM included and be priced around what the OnePlus 2 was, if not slightly higher. As was the case with the OnePlus 2 when compared to the OnePlus One.