Pei also mentioned that Indian consumers don't need products tailored to them, and can tell quality products apart themselves.
It seems not everybody thinks Indian consumers need products to be 'tailored' to the local market. In an interview with Digit, OnePlus Co-Founder, Carl Pei, said he doesn't subscribe to the notion that Indian consumers are different from their American counterparts and need product customisations tailored to the local market. In addition, Pei also said that while OnePlus had tried some other product segments, it has scrapped them all and will focus on smartphones. Read the complete interview below..
1. OnePlus has always been looked at as an enthusiasts brand. Do you plan to change that and cater to the mass market?
Always makes it sound like we’ve been around forever, but it’s been less than two years! Our goal has always been to put great products in the hands of as many people as possible. In any industry, early adopters are always the first to adopt the best products, and that’s why we have such a great fan base. We’re proud if this fact.
From the start, we never had a volume or market share goal. We simply weren’t satisfied with what was available, and wanted to create products good enough for ourselves to use. For some, going mass market means creating a $100 smartphone. We’ll never do that. If we ever become mass market, it’s going to be because we have the best products, not the cheapest products.
2. Before the OnePlus 2, no one really tackled the Snapdragon 810's heating issues effectively. Can you take us through the process of how you tackled it? Was there a point where you considered other SoCs?
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 is the best processor for this generation of flagships. You can see people settling with the 808, but in reality, there’s still a performance gap.
We have taken many precautions to prevent excess warming on the OnePlus 2, and our engineers have worked closely with Qualcomm’s to integrate and fine-tune both hardware and software. On the hardware side, we’ve layered both thermal gel and graphite sheets across different areas of the phone. This ensures that warming generated from the processors will dissipate evenly, as opposed to being concentrated and leading to performance issues. On the software side, we’ve built up quite an engineering team in Taipei over the past year. Our Performance Lab has invented a bunch of ways of managing CPUs more efficiently, and we have filed patents for these technologies. This is the real magic behind why the OnePlus 2 is one of the best performing 810 flagships. We’ll be going through this in more depth at a later time.
3. MediaTek's new Helio processors are pretty competitive. Does OnePlus have plans to use them?
To be honest, we haven’t thought much about this. As in all our product decisions, we want to look beyond numbers and specs and see what the real benefit to the user experience is. Never say never!
4. The expected second phone from OnePlus this year, will that be a trend going forward? Two phones per year?
Let’s just say that OnePlus 2 will be the only flagship phone for 2015. We believe in making few but great products and will never bloat up our product lines.
5. Also, can you give us more info on the next phone? Like the target market, expected specs or price range? Will it be a smaller (dimensions-wise) device?
What phone? 😉
6. It took OnePlus some time to enter India, but now it's amongst the most important markets. What challenges did you face here?
Expansion into India actually happened far earlier than we thought it would because of the enthusiasm we saw from Indian users on our forums. They were extremely vocal and found ways to get the device to India before we were able to officially ship, ranking India 7th in traffic to our site. This response from the community was the reason we did everything we could to officially launch in December 2014.
Since launching, we managed to carve out a strong positioning and brand recall due to us focusing on products and users first. This has lead to strong user loyalty and word of mouth. Among other factors, a strong global brand positioning and a great local team helped us in swift execution of new ideas and to quickly gain acceptance.
The invite only model in the beginning was perceived as a hindrance but over time, more and more Indian users are understanding it and increasingly becoming comfortable with our sales model. The other challenge was the supply constraints and service issues faced in the beginning but the initial bottlenecks have since been resolved.
7. How does the Indian market differ from others you sell in?
I believe that differences in geography are fading with the growth of social media and the consumer internet. Today, trend conscious people around the world are more and more similar.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that Indian consumers are different from their American counterparts, and need product customisations tailored to the local market. Consumers, irrespective of geography, are smart enough to tell a great product apart from an average one. This is especially true with our user base consisting of people who want the best product without compromise.
8. About OxygenOS, while there are changes there, it has stuck to more of a stock Android appearance till now. Will this change in future?
We are acutely aware of the needs of our customers. Today, Material Design features a great user experience. But does it mark the end of the advancement of human-computer interaction design? Probably not. There are always ways of improving things.
At the same time, it’s easy to add things, but hard to actually improve things. With OxygenOS, we have been trying to achieve balance by practicing both addition and subtraction.
9. Despite the better invite system this time, people have still complained about it. Are you looking at other methods for selling OnePlus phones in future?
We believe that the invite system allows for reduced risk of inventory. Inventory risk remains crucial for all companies dealing with hardware, especially smaller ones like ourselves. So we definitely see ourselves selling through the invite model going forward too, as we firmly believe that the long term health of our business is far more important than short term growth.
10. Lastly, you have shown the inclination to make other products than just smartphones. What can we expect going forward?
It’s true that we’ve had a bunch of new categories in development, but luckily, they have all been scrapped. The decision to initiate R&D on those categories were done at a time when we were young and unfocused. We believe that only extreme focus can yield hero products, and focusing on a bunch of categories will only lead to mediocrity.
It’s easy to make a good enough product, but it’s the final 10% that makes all the difference.
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Prasid Banerjee
Trying to explain technology to my parents. Failing miserably. View Full Profile
