OnePlus Co-Founders Talk About Plans for India, OnePlus 5T Camera, and More

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OnePlus is one of a kind. In just a few short years, the Shenzhen, China-based startup managed to capture 12 percent of the high-end smartphone market and amass a worldwide following. It’s experienced outsized growth in India, and in a wide-ranging interview with Gadgets 360, OnePlus co-founders Pete Lau and Carl Pei of OnePlus underlined the region’s strategic importance.

Mr. Lau called India’s smartphone market “very, very important” for OnePlus and said that the company’s working to “localize” its smartphones for the market. One example is in the selfie camera, Mr. Lau said:

“When you turn on beautification, our algorithms for India, for China and for North America and Europe are all different, because people in different regions have different standards of beauty […] It uses the SIM card and phone number. It can tell through the phone number, so it’s not the colour of the skin. If it’s a Chinese person who lives in India, they will have to use the Indian beauty standards,” Lau replied.

OnePlus thinks those features will practically sell themselves. “In India we’ll do some basic traditional marketing like airport billboards and theatre ads, but it’s not going to be our main marketing strategy,” Mr. Lau told Gadgets360. “As an example, if you have theatre ads, when OnePlus users watch a movie, they will feel really good to see their phone in the ad.”

Mr. Lau also touched on the release of the OnePlus 5T, OnePlus’s decision to swap the secondary rear camera’s telephoto lens for a low-light sensor, and how that lens will improve with time:

“We see that the user demand for low-light photography exceeds that of optical zoom. This is a feature that we didn’t talk about during the launch because it’s coming later, but in social apps, when you take a video it’s going to use the secondary camera so you can get better video in low light. These apps compress the quality of video […] You don’t need to use the very high-resolution camera so you can use the better low-light camera. The app doesn’t need to change. It will work automatically. This feature will come in a future OTA update.”

It’s all in OnePlus’s go-getting spirit, Mr. Lau said. “[Our] direction will always be to implement the latest and greatest technology, as well as focus on our products. That will never change.”