Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Can OnePlus get its groove back? A former fanboy’s perspective.”.
This is the OnePlus One when this phone came out in 2014, I was a huge fan not only of the phone itself, but just the company, the brand OnePlus. I was a huge fan up until 2020 when the OnePlus 8 came out and that’s when I started to lose interest. This is the OnePlus 12. This phone just came out and is quite different from this phone over here. A lot’s changed in 10 years, but I want to talk about how this phone makes me feel compared to how this phone made me feel.
The first thing I want to talk about is why I loved OnePlus, so much back. In the day when OnePlus first came out, it directly appealed to people who were in the custom ROM development Community. These were people who were passionate about Android, which at that point was pretty young. They wanted to see what Android could do they wanted to Tinker with it. They wanted to install it on phones, they they wanted to play around and see how far they could push. The software it was really really cool and an exciting time to be in the Android ecosystem and OnePlus immediately took advantage of that. It felt like our brand. It felt like the brand that understood what the custom ROM development Community was trying to do, and that made it immediately appealing.
On top of that, the OnePlus One was also just a really cool phone on its own. It had the best Android processor at the time it had a price that was incredibly low and it had a unique design. Unlike anything we’d ever seen before, that, Sandstone back is still a revelation.
Even today. I I don’t know why every smartphone doesn’t have a Sandstone back, but the number one reason that OnePlus was so important to me was that it felt like I could directly communicate with the company the OnePlus Community forums at the time felt like you had a direct Connection to the brand, it really did feel like you could post a thread on the OnePlus Community forums and then someone working at OnePlus would read it and then actually enact change. Based on that it was a wild time to be a fan of OnePlus.
As the years went by and OnePlus released, more and more phones, it started to become very disconnected from the community. It all came to a culmination with the OnePlus 6t, which launched without a headphone jack, the first OnePlus phone to do so. This flew right in the face of what the community wanted. No one in the OnePlus Community wanted to buy a phone without a headphone jack. By doing this, OnePlus sent a message. We no longer care about what you think, I’m here to tell you right now.
We don’t care me after that. It was only a matter of time before I started to lose interest in OnePlus and the last great OnePlus phone that I bought was the OnePlus 7 Pro which came out in 2019. So it’s been a while fast forward to now and we have the OnePlus 12. This phone is pretty cool.
It looks a lot different than other phones that are on the market right now, especially when you compare it to an iPhone or to a pixel or to a Samsung phone, and it’s it’s got some unique elements to it that make it stand out from the crowd. Such as this really cool flowy Emerald back, it has a texture to it. That’S really nice, it’s not quite the same texture as the Sandstone back of the OnePlus One, which once again, I miss a lot but is still pretty cool and definitely makes the phone stand out from the crop. But it takes a lot more than a cool.
Looking phone to make, someone like me be passionate about it. The OnePlus 12 has a lot of things about it. That just don’t do it. For me, number one is the software back in the day, oxygen OS was basically stock, Android with a bunch of new features.
Added into it – and it was great now oxygen – OS is pretty much just color OS and it’s not awesome. Color OS and oxygen OS, look like Android mixed with iOS and then overlaid with some cartoony things. I don’t know it doesn’t appear to have a distinct identity to it and it certainly doesn’t have anything that draws me in my gripes about the software aside. The OnePlus 12 certainly does have an incredible spec sheet.
It’S got the best Android processor proc right now. It has a great camera spec sheet. It also has one of the most amazing displays you can get, but it takes more than just a bunch of great specs for a phone to be awesome. Look at the OnePlus One, the OnePlus One was so incredible when it came out and as far as specs go it wasn’t really that great I mean yeah. It had the best processor at the time, but the rest of the specs were pretty standard, but the overall package of the OnePlus One, the design, the software, the community, the support all of that played into making that phone so exciting. It wasn’t just spec spec specs. It was everything and that’s something that the OnePlus 12 just seems to lack the thing that most perplexes me about. The OnePlus 12, though, is who is this phone for think about it in the Android world, the Galaxy s24 Ultra is the top-of-the-line best of the best.
It’S for the people who want their phone to do everything. It has the S Pen, it has the best camera Hardware, it has Galaxy AI the best display everything about it is just the best, and then you have the pixel 8 Pro which isn’t the best, but is for the Android purists who want the best camera experience That you can get, then you’ve got something like the nothing phone 2 that phone doesn’t have the best of the best, but it has a very unique design with really cool tricks to do with the glyph and exists for those young consumers who want their phone to Be very fashioned forward and then, of course, once you exit Android, you have the iPhone, which is for all the people who don’t want an Android phone, but this I don’t really know who this is for it’s not for the gamers, it’s not for the photographers. It’S certainly not for Android purists who really wants to buy this phone. Obviously, OnePlus does really well with sales and all that, so I’m not trying to say that nobody wants to buy this phone, but who is the consumer that OnePlus is going after? It’S not really clear from using this phone for any period of time, keeping in mind everything I just said. The big question then becomes can OnePlus, do it again could OnePlus make me, and others like me, feel as passionate about their phones as they did when they launched the OnePlus One? Is it even possible for OnePlus to get its groove back? I am of the opinion that I don’t think it can at least not the way that things are today when OnePlus first came out, it came out during a very early time in the Android World. Things hadn’t really settled the way that they’ve settled now. I think that it was like a lightning in a bottle situation where OnePlus was the right company with the right phone at the right time, and I just don’t think that they could do that again. Even if the OnePlus of today wanted to try and capture that lightning in the bottle again, I’m not sure it could.
The company’s too big it’d have to take too many risks in order to try and be that kind of company again think about it when OnePlus. First started: it was just offshoot of Oppo and they only expected to sell 50,000 phones. That’S right. They expected to sell just 50,000 OnePlus 1es.
They were really going for a niche market and then all of a sudden found them selling a million OnePlus One phones. So the company kind of succeeded in spite of what it was trying to do. It was so small and it had such direct intentions to go for the Android development community that it didn’t have to worry about shareholders and selling millions of devices and appealing to multiple different types of consumers. The OnePlus of today is just too big to be able to do that again.
Making this video has been really cool, because it’s reminded me just how much I love this phone. Just getting the phone made me excited for those of you who don’t know back in the day with OnePlus in order to buy one of their phones, you had to have an invitation to buy one, which means that someone else had to get it, and then they Had to give you an invite to buy it, so just getting the phone wasn’t an achievement and then, when I took it out of the box – and I felt it for the first time and showed it off to my friends and family with them all being like What is that phone? It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before and me explaining it and all that and using it and getting excited about flashing, new ROMs and all those things it really was an exciting time. It makes me wonder, though, is that ever going to happen again. We know it’s not going to happen with this already I’ve. I’Ve already talked about it and I don’t think it’s ever going to happen with OnePlus in general, but is there ever going to be a phone from any company? That’S going to make me feel the same way I did when I got this phone.
I don’t know Android might be too established now the smartphone industry just might be too stale for that kind of thing to happen again, but I want to hear from you guys so jump down in the comments and let me know how you feel about the phone. That’S currently in your pocket and how does it compare to the phone that you love the most from back in the day? I’M really excited to see what you guys have to say so be sure to jump down there there, and I will see you in the next article .