OnePlus used to be a bit of an Apple. Regimented, focused, and broadly charismatic, the phone maker revealed its devices bit by bit and always controlled its message. But as we’ve been chronicling in recent months, the company’s communications are now all over the place.
Some of OnePlus’ recent attempts to broaden its appeal have worked out well. The low-cost Nord line vastly boosted OnePlus sales in the US. (Our most recent review on that front is the Nord N200 5G, and it’s pretty good.) With the new Nord 2, which won’t be sold here, alas, OnePlus is experimenting with the Mediatek Dimensity 1200 chipset’s customization package, which may provide better performance than similarly priced Qualcomm processors.
But you might not know that OnePlus is developing interesting products, because it’s lost control of its story. After merging some operations with its sister firm, Oppo, the company delivered a muddy, confusing narrative about how those changes will affect phones from both brands. And a trademark filing for a OnePlus Pad—presumably the company’s first tablet—is fueling plentiful discussion without a word from OnePlus’ publicity team.
Now the company also has to contend with an AnandTech story showing that the OnePlus 9 Pro has been throttling popular applications, including Chrome and Twitter, for the sake of heat and battery management. This makes benchmark results a bit out of whack depending upon which app you’re using to test.
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Several industry experts—Adam Conway from XDA, Andy Boxall from Digital Trends, and Cam Bunton from PocketLint—have pointed out that this is more a communication issue than a technical one. As the AnandTech story observes, no actual phone users noticed this. There haven’t been complaints that the OnePlus 9 Pro is slow—just the opposite.
OnePlus could have gotten out ahead of this inevitable discovery with the message of “OnePlus stops apps from draining your battery for no reason.” Or it could have had a toggle for EXTREME mode vs. Optimized mode and defaulted to Optimized—OnePlus fans love that stuff. Instead, it gave XDA’s Mishaal Rahman a rather stiff response about how the optimization “helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption.”
I can’t help but feel that an earlier OnePlus might even have taken the opportunity to change the conversation on benchmarking phones entirely. It could point out that synthetic mobile benchmarks haven’t represented the full picture of user experience for quite some time; note that Android is behind Windows in offering realistic, application-based benchmarks; and say that the 9 Pro offers a “burdenless” real-world experience, maybe with some charts of web page loading times. But so far, OnePlus is not doing any of those things.
Will this affect OnePlus’ sales? The company’s fandom has always been a big part of its success. Keeping up good messaging going keeps the fans happy, which in turn raises its profile over competitors like Motorola, TCL, and ZTE. In the hyper-competitive budget mobile market where its Nord phones live, a bit of continued mystique can go a long way, and its absence could hurt OnePlus’ bottom line.
Am I expecting too much from OnePlus’s storytellers? Let me know in the comments.
Meanwhile, OnePlus founder Carl Pei is making earbuds under his new Nothing brand name, and trying to recapture the classic OnePlus magic, trickling out a feature or a detail at a time. “Will you cover the price of the new earbuds as a standalone story?” his PR team asked me. (Yes, we did.) That’s old-school OnePlus, stretching out the story to grab news cycle after news cycle. But at the same time…they’re earbuds. I can’t get that excited about earbuds. Do earbuds have fans as passionate as phone fans? I bet they do; I’m just not one of them.
What Else Happened This Week?
- Qualcomm and Asus announced a $1,499 phone for “Snapdragon Insiders” that Qualcomm wants to make clear is the best Snapdragon experience possible, but also not better than any other phone on the market.
- 36 states sued Google for monopolizing the Android app store market with Google Play. This is a more interesting case than the Apple monopoly one because it raises the question: What if it’s perfectly possible to load other app stores, but nobody bothers to do it? That’s called a natural monopoly.
- The TCL 20S shows 4G phones are alive and well in the US, putting a challenge out to low-cost 5G phones: Do you really need 5G? Maybe not. Next month’s Fastest Mobile Networks results will tell us more about the current state of 4G and 5G.
- It looks like Mobile World Congress attracted about 20,000 in-person attendees, but we don’t know how many of them were locals enjoying €21 tickets.
