Today using a unique and interactive Virtual Reality stream, OnePlus officially launched the much anticipated OnePlus 2, the follow up to last year’s amazingly successful OnePlus One. The launch was hosted in the OnePlus offices by co-founder Carl Pei and through various points in the presentation, you ended up in large public areas, meeting rooms, break rooms and various other parts of the offices. Finally, when it came time to reveal the OnePlus 2, a product video was shown followed by some detailed hands-on of the new phone. The phone will be available starting August 11th and will ship to the US, Canada and the European Union on those dates. To get one you of course need an invite, which has been revised over the OnePlus One invite system.
All-in-all I have to say I was very impressed with the launch VR. It was certainly unique and I found myself spinning about several times in my living room as people behind the camera would talk. You could then turn around to see them. Very cool… and kinda trippy.
Most of what was announced on the OnePlus 2 we already knew thanks to a steady leak of features over the past few weeks. Surprisingly what we don’t know is the price.
OnePlus 2 VR Launch
That hasn’t been announced yet.
Processor
The first feature that was announced by OnePlus on the OnePlus 2 was the processor that will be powering the phone. It will be a Snapdragon 810 v2.1. This processor is an eight-core, 64-bit architecture processor and is able to support things like 4K video, exceptional battery life and coupled with the Adreno 430 GPU. What isn’t clear is the processor speed. According to Qualcomm, the 810 can run as high as 2.5GHz but to save battery life, it could be throttled back a bit.
Storage
The OnePlus 2 will have 64GB of storage on board. There will be a 16GB version available in a few weeks.
Camera
The rear camera will be a 13MP OIS camera while the front camera will also be 13MP. The camera software built into OxygenOS, the version of Android that OnePlus has been building in-house, will have the ability to shoot up to 50MP images from the rear camera. The camera also uses lasers for faster focusing, especially in low light.
Connector
If there was any doubt if USB Type-C was going to be “Apple only”, remove that doubt now. The OnePlus 2 will have the latest USB standard which has a huge number of benefits for users. First, it doesn’t matter how you insert the connector into your phone, it is universal unlike the MicroUSB standard. Second, the throughput of the Type-C supports the USB 3.1 standard and can output of up to 20v and 100w of power and it is bi-lateral so you can charge a device while a peripheral device is connected to it.
OnePlus 2
The OnePlus 2 is the first phone to announce the Type-C connector as it’s connector and while they may not be the first to market, it will certainly set the standard for other manufactures to quickly adopt the standard.
Fingerprint Scanner
This week OnePlus announced that the OnePlus 2 will have an advanced fingerprint scanner for bio-metric security. The company is promising that it will be superior to TouchID from Apple which is generally considered to be the standard for the industry. How exactly they will do this is a great question. Will it be on the front? Will it be on the back? It’s unclear but clearly mobile device security is an ever increasing need for both consumers and businesses.
RAM
In a recent blog post, One Plus confirmed that the OnePlus 2 will have an impressive 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. This is really key in combination with the Snapdragon 810 processor because it can actually take advantage of all that RAM. This is mainly due to the 64-bit architecture of the chipset. The LPDDR4 will run at 1.1v, less than DDR3 (think better battery life) and will have throughput of 32GB/s. That will be plenty powerful for any Android app you put on the phone. Period.
Price
The OnePlus 2 16GB unit will be $329 while the 64GB will be $389. This is just slightly more than the OnePlus One. The
