OnePlus wants more

Now it’s up to TV, automotive and PC’

Pete Lau, CEO and co-founder of OnePlus, is a kind of Asian Steve Jobs. He has a similar obsession with details and the desire to challenge much larger and more powerful giants of technology. His company, founded at the end of 2013, is today among the top five brands in the West in the field of high-end smartphones and in India it was the first place until a few days ago, causing the envy of a giant like Huawei. With one difference: the OnePlus models cost half of those of Samsung, Apple or Huawei and are often more powerful.

In the role of David fighting against the many Goliaths, Lau is at ease. The company, 1500 people around the world, still sells online, devotes little space to traditional marketing, focuses on one model per year which is then updated with a second version: a past as vice president of the Chinese multinational company OPPO, the CEO of OnePlus is famous for the fussiness in design and for wanting to control every phase of the design and realization of smartphones. In five years it has succeeded in the miracle of carving out a space where it seemed impossible to get it, also thanks to the close relationship with the Bbk, multinational with based in Dong-guan which is among the largest in the world in telephony.

Now Lau has decided to expand. But not in the field of telephones, but in that of televisions, automotive and computers, just as all the others point to folding telephones.

About the folding smartphones…

OnePlus has been considering the idea of ​a folding phone for over a year. But they have not yet found a way to build a device really valid in the eyes of their users. When they do something, anything, they always pay a lot of attention to the utility that that can have for a person. They try to solve complex problems with simple solutions. In summary, for OnePlus the folding phones do not represent the next generation of smartphones, for now they are niche devices and these will remain in the near future. Not only because the costs are too high, but also because they basically don’t do anything different than a traditional smartphone, they don’t offer features that can make a difference.