OnePlus 3 is due this June and the company’s CEO Pete Lau is sure it will be the most “worthwhile” smart phone to buy this year. According to reports, some OnePlus phones have already started receiving the Android Marshmallow update, the start of more timely software updates from now on. This will be important for users as the experience with the phone gets better. Lau got talking about the update — which he considers a milestone — and more details about the phone and his company at the SURGE conference in Bengaluru, revealing just as much about himself as OnePlus.
To begin with, he’s obsessive — to the extent that he spent over three months getting the curvature of OnePlus 3’s back just right. It needs to feel good in the hand, he explains. Such is his fixation with perfection, one story goes that he smashed a logic board — when he was heading Oppo’s Blu-ray division — because he wasn’t happy with the circuit design. Lau eventually left Oppo to start OnePlus with a six-member team that built the beloved OnePlus One smart phone. Within two years, they had grown to a team of 700 and sold over one million OnePlus One smart phones worldwide. He had the foresight of sticking to an e-commerce and invite system to keep making money despite slender profit margins, and create an effective distribution system.
Lau was quoted as saying – It’s really easy for anybody to make a phone with a lot of high-end specifications, but what’s important to us is the quality of user experience. Customer should get a really solid and concrete user experience. So, what do users really need or want isn’t just specifications, it’s experience — how it feels when you use it.