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Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus plans to discontinue its budget OnePlus X smartphone as the company pares down its product lines to give all of its attention to its upcoming flagship OnePlus 3 handsets.
The end of the OnePlus X phone line was revealed by Pete Lau, CEO of the company, in a recent interview, according to a June 15 story by HotHardware.com.
The OnePlus X sold well enough, but selling budget-priced phones is a tough task in a crowded global market, and the company wants to center its marketing on its premium “true flagship” models, Lau said. “We still gotta make money at the end of the day; it’s just a matter of how you do it and how much you want to make,” Lau added.
OnePlus recently dropped the price of the OnePlus X handsets to $199 from its $249 original price, according to its Website. The OnePlus X features a 5-inch Full HD display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of memory, 16GB of on-board storage (which is expandable with a memory card up to 128GB) and a 2,525mAh lithium battery. It also includes a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, an 8MP front-facing camera and a dual SIM card option.
The company on June 14 launched its latest flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 3 (pictured), in a glitzy online virtual-reality event, which for the first time didn’t require buyers to have an “invite” from the company to obtain one of the new devices. In the past, each new OnePlus smartphone model release required an invite to help the company gauge manufacturing and shipment needs, according to an earlier eWEEK story. The company has dropped the former invite system for all future releases.
The latest OnePlus 3 phone features a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and Adreno 530 graphics processing unit, 6GB of LPDDR4 memory, a 5.5-inch Full HD optic AMOLED touch-screen display, a 16GB auto-focus rear-facing camera with dual optical image stabilization technologies and an aluminum unibody for strength and durability.
The 4G LTE phone also includes 64GB of on-board storage, 4K video capabilities, an 8GB front-facing camera, a non-removable 3,000mAh battery, quick charging capabilities and a fingerprint reader for security. The handset runs on the OnePlus OxygenOS operating system, which is based on Android 5.1. OxygenOS allows users to customize on-screen gestures, buttons, quick settings and more.
The new OnePlus 3 is the fourth smartphone from the company, which has been selling its handsets since 2014.
OnePlus uses rich-looking materials and finishes to build its handsets and then offers them directly to consumers. Its original OnePlus One smartphone went on sale in April 2014 and sold more than 1 million units, according to the company. The phones are built to take on Apple’s iPhones, Samsung’s Galaxy S6 devices and other premium phones from the world’s top manufacturers.
The company’s earlier OnePlus 2 model now sells for $299, down from $389 when it debuted in the United States in August 2015. The OnePlus 2 smartphone has 64GB of internal storage, 4GB of LPDDR4 memory and is wrapped inside an aluminum-magnesium alloy frame that features jewelry-grade stainless steel accents. It includes a Full HD 5.5-inch In-Plane Switching (IPS) LCD display, a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, an Adreno 430 graphics processor and up to 64GB of on-board eMMC 5.0 flash storage.
The OnePlus 2 also features 4G LTE capabilities, a SwiftKey keyboard that learns words that are chosen often by users, a fingerprint scanner for security, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 3,300mAh lithium polymer battery, a USB Type-C charging port and dual SIM card slots that support two nano SIM cards.