Following the launch of the all new OnePlus 2 last week, dna's Rajesh D'souza sat down for a tête-à-tête with the Head of Marketing for OnePlus, Karan Sarin over the weekend. Read on to find out what OnePlus has in store.
Mr Sarin, the concept of what a flagship phone comprises has changed over the last year, especially with regards to price and features. What's your opinion on this?
That’s true; if you look at each and every aspect of the phone OnePlus 2, it has superior features but it also feels equally great when you hold it in your hand. The flagship is not just about specs anymore, it's also about the overall experience.
OnePlus has traditionally promoted only one primary phone in markets--do you have plans to launch other variants in different price and feature segments?
So the OnePlus 2 that we are launching on August 11 is a 64GB variant, and we are going to be launching the 16GB variant later in the year. These are the only two variants for OnePlus 2 and this is the only flagship device for this year. There are plans to get another device later in the year but it’s too early to talk about that.
Karan Sarin (OnePlus Marketing Head)
Does OnePlus plan to sell via traditional retail methods, as opposed to invite-only online channels?
The invite model is integral to OnePlus. We believe in that an invite model for a company like us, who is just starting, is the smartest way to scale. Invite model lets us control an inventory and at the same time helps us prepare for the logistics. So, we wil remain focused on online sales channel, given the stage where we're at.
Tell us about the various community-engagement activities that happen for current and prospective OnePlus customers in India. How does this impact and influence the development of future products?
Community is extremely important for us. We believe that we need to continuously keep communicating with our community, so we have a thriving forum. We seek feedback from our users and we build our devices based on that. We engage with them, send advice to them with information and updates, and then we seek feedback from them and use that feedback to build our product. That’s what we believe in very strongly.
Can you comment on the choice to go with Oxygen OS for the new OnePlus 2, and how have customers responded to it?
They have responded very well. We always wanted to build our own OS. We believe that having our own OS, we will be able to customize the experience that our users want. It also enables us to do regular and timely updates and eventually it helps us a lot in building apps and services in the future. So having our own OS is a very important thing for OnePlus.
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