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OnePlus One Revealed: a CyanogenMod Smartphone
An anonymous reader writes "Spec-wise, OnePlus One will go toe-to-toe with the latest flagship phones like the Galaxy S5, HTC One (M8), and Sony Xperia Z2. In some areas, it even surpasses them, and at a price point of $300. The One has the same 2.5 GHz Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC SoC as the Samsung Galaxy S5, build quality similar to the HTC One (M8), and the large 3000+ mAh battery and Sony camera of the Xperia Z2. It also runs CyanogenMod 11S, which is based on Android 4.4."
It's being sold direct by the Chinese manufacturer:
OnePlus
Unit B 9/F. Lockhart Centre
301-307 Lockhart Road Wanchai
Hong Kong Central
Hong Kong
Cutting out markups by US retailers can only lower the final consumer price. Units will ship directly from China most likely, and most US consumers will be surprised when they receive bills from the shipper for US Customs clearance. It's unlikely they will be able to get away with checking the "Gift" box on the customs forms for 10 million phones.
MicroSD uses a cheap n-wire serial interface. Embedded FLASH, especially that which is used for XIF, is parallel and much much faster, and more expensive owing to the larger packages with higher numbers of pins for parallel interfaces.
I see you've dealt with Verizon billing before too.
Maybe that's a problem waiting to be fixed? Not everything needs extremely fast storage and I'm guessing the biggest storage capacities demanded by some people are caused by audio, video and photos. Since digital cameras can now record full HD video and use Micro SDXC cards, I'd say that one way to lower the cost and increase the capacity at the same time would be to include both "slow" and "fast" storage.
Something like Project ARA could give the choice to users. Add a cheaper unit that contains 256GB of slow storage and 16GB of fast storage or add a more expensive unit with 64GB of fast storage only. The OS would be able to decide for itself if a storage is fast enough for a given task (JPEGs and AACs go to the slow storage, the apps go in the fast storage, etc).
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The Nexus 5 is subsidized by Google so that it's sold nearly at cost or possibly even below it.
Google's business model here is that it gets people into the Play Store ecosystem, which is where Google really makes their money on Android.
OnePlus has no such business model, which is why they're limiting access to the device via their invite system.
One additional worry bead about this price point is that it means they're likely not funneling much money to Cyngn (Cyanogen, Inc) to support this device. For various reasons (mainly, the Cyngn guys being notoriously difficult to work with), Cyngn-backed devices get little to no community input on CyanogenMod builds.
As an example of what happens when you don't pay Cyngn much for a device, see the Oppo N1. Once Cyngn got what they wanted (experience with taking a device through the GMS certification process), they deallocated most engineering resources for the N1, which has since then received minimal level of support effort from Cyngn. The end result is stuff like location services being broken for 2 months straight in CM11 nightlies. Nearly everyone who bought the CM edition of the N1 switched to Omni, which is maintained on that particular device by three guys (disclaimer: I'm one of them) in their spare time. That's how badly Cyngn deprioritized the device - three guys in their spare time are investing more into suppporting the device than cyngn is. (Admittedly, we're making better use of our time too - see below.)
I expect users of the OnePlus One will see the same with the next Android version beyond 4.4 on the OnePlus - the team at Cyngn take the "no bug reports against nightlies" rule VERY seriously, and the results of that show in the quality of nightly builds that are maintained by them. (Many of the community-supported devices are supported by maintainers who have a thread on XDA, where they'll hear if a device has a major issue. The end result is that most people have a high expectation of quality even from nightlies due to the "community maintainer pays attention to what's going on" workaround, but you won't see that from Cyngn-backed devices.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"MicroSD uses a cheap n-wire serial interface."
Uh, no. While it's true that SD cards offer backwards compatibility with MMC, modern cards transfer using a 4 bit wide parallel bus, and it's not nearly as simple as the SPI mode. With regard to your argument, have you ever looked at the flash chips in an SD card? Last I checked, they use the same memory dies as the "embedded" packages, and add the cost of an SD controller and more complex packaging. On the host side, there's the cost of an SD controller (although that's probably "free" with the SoC) and socket.
More specific to the original point, if a phone already has 16G of flash, the cost of upping it to 64G is minor - the parallel interface you mention is already there, and the difference in packaging costs between 16G and 64G chips is likely zero.
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In the USA customs on phones and similar mobile computing devices is 0%. Unless they come from Japan and have a 16 bit or larger CPU, then its something outrageous like 200% which I assume is some ancient 1980s calculator tariff thats still hanging around. If you do not require a formal entry, typically there are no customs duties or charges at all. Formal entry is not required for packages sent by mail carrier with a value $1500, unless they are in a special category like munitions, produce, etc, etc. Even with a formal entry this category doesn't have any duty but your customs agent will typically charge a % for handling the paperwork. DHL used to charge me 0.25% I think, its been more than I year though so I can't remember exactly. This isn't true for most western countries, the EU has VAT and local sales tax, Canada has a national sales tax, many other countries have crippling duties. In short, drop shipping to the USA is not a problem and won't add duties. I used to do a formal entries of this kind of merchandise about once a month when I had this going www.pengpod.com .
Well Duh! Why do you think Apple for instance doesn't allow SD cards in their phones?
I'm frankly surprised not many other people here seem to be all over the lack of an SD slot.
For $50 bucks more you get the 64GB model, and forget about it.
What do you need an SD slot for exactly? Do you routinely SWAP cards? Maybe you do.. but I NEVER have. If it had an SD slot, I'd buy a 32GB or 64GB card and then forget about it.
So buying a 64GB phone... amounts to the same difference for me.
I like having my entire music collection, my entire photo library and 1 or 2 movies with me just in case
This seems contrived to be an amount of data designed to fit precisely more than the 64GB built in yet be less than the 128GB you can add to, for example, and S5.
I mean, why only 1 or 2 movies? Why not all of them? And just your photos, not your hundreds of hours hi def home movies?
Is it because if you wanted your 500 DVD rips, then even a 128GB sd card won't meet your needs?
Or is it just that you need precisely 128GB of storage; and if a phone came with 128GB of storage but no SD slot, what then? Would it meet your needs or not?