OnePlus Marketing

Remember how excited I was about the announcement of the OnePlus One phone? I was excited to the point where I watched the Chinese video stream and followed with the translations on the forums. But less than a week after, I'm officially burnt out by the marketing of the product.

A week prior to the phone release announcement, the OnePlus team posted several messages teasing about the phone and how one might get one of the first 100 OnePlus One phones. And before that, there were posts about how this phone will change how phones will be made. The OnePlus would post positive comments about the phone without giving away many details about the phone. All of this hype lead to a phone that still contains capacitive buttons on the button which is basically a waste of space; it is a gigantic phone (bigger than HTC One and longer than the Note 3).

And note, the invitations to purchase has yet to be sent out to any potential consumers. It seems like numerous forum members are getting tired of the marketing for the OnePlus One. They have lost potential customers by not taking advantage of all of the hype they once had. (OnePlus even advertised that the phone was under Sony's Xperia Z1 but that turned out to be a lie when the OnePlus One is wider...) The timing of the announcement could have been better in my opinion. And the Phone Smash promotion is a terrible idea in my opinion. It just doesn't feel like a commendable thing to do for one of the first promotions to do as a company. Now it looks like it will be about a month before people will get a hand on the phone through the regular invitation method.

But at $300 for the 16GB version, the high performance spec'd phone is a bargain. And the sample photos from the camera look amazing. But can it fit in your pocket? Or more importantly, is the massive size of the phone usable?