My OnePlus One #1

Question: What do you get when 1 + 1? 2? Wrong! *sorry, lame joke*

I think as of now, many people who are surveying smartphones have heard of this brand. Since Chinese brands are selling well these days, the competition might be bad for individual companies but fantastic for consumers who want to get the best value. Brands like Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and Vivo are sold almost everywhere in Malaysia. But one brand is emerging from this cluttered saturated market, One... Plus? *pun intended*

With all the hype their flagship killer, OnePlus have been criticized a lot, not for the product itself, not for software. Some say they made "The best phone that nobody has" since it is almost impossible to purchase the phone when it was released back in April 2014. I totally agree that the invite system is not a very good way to sell a product no matter how good it actually is. It is really too bad since they probably lost many potential customers who were interested but couldn't get any invites. Most praises come from the specs: price ratio since this phone costs only $299 for the 16Gb and $349 for the 64Gb model.

OK, enough of the introduction. Let me start recollecting my journey to get this rare piece of art. It all started with MKBHD. I am a big fan and watched all his videos on Youtube. So when he praised this phone and went on about how great it is, I was interested in knowing more. Then I registered myself into the OnePlus forum to find that I was not alone, there was already a Malaysian OPO Fan Club there, now even has a regional forum despite not distributed officially.

I went on to read a bunch of reviews from other websites and also had fun chatting with a bunch of people at the fan club. Then one fine day, must have been my lucky day, I received a message at the forum offering an invite. I immediately got familiar with the procedures and purchased the item. Then comes the difficult part, getting the phone to my hands. If you are getting this phone the most important thing you must know by now is that it is not officially available in Malaysia, at least not yet. This means that in order to obtain the phone, the phone had to be flown half way around the world to me.

Stay tuned for the next post as I explain each step in detail.

lalanandaFRY
29/11/14