OnePlus News Daily Dose #16: OnePlus TV release, smart assistant, wrapping up MWC and more!

Mobile World Congress may be ended, but the residues of it are still vibrant. For OnePlus, it is not only about showcasing next gen techs, but also strengthening the bonds with others partners and reaching to the community.

Yesterday’s night was full of fun and zeal. OnePlus invited their partners for a little gathering, to have “fun over a few drinks and some finger food”.

This is yet another look of what happens behind the scenes, where you see people like YouTubers, Qualcomm’s president, and Pete in the same room, just chatting with friends.

The team also organized a separate event for the Spanish OnePlus community. OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei led the occasion, and took part in a Q&A session.

When asked about AI usage, Carl mentioned that the scene detection and enhancement while taking pictures are nothing new in the domain of photography. Rebranding everything under the AI moniker is somewhat weird, according to him.

This is a very interesting topic across the whole tech industry. We’ve always been transparent and honest with you – we use what is technically AI in things like our camera’s scene detection. But that technology has existed in the camera industry for well over a decade if not longer.

We think of AI as having to be something truly advanced or clever, like a super assistant. 5G will make that a reality and we’ll look back at this era of AI and see how basic things were.

At OnePlus we also focus on what we do well – we’re not trying to create everything from thin air – there are companies who make services better than we do, so we partner with them rather than trying to make our own version for the sake of it.

Google is pushing its Assistant really hard; OEMs are even launching new phones with dedicated Google Assistant button. Looks like OnePlus may eventually follow the same trend.

Carl also voiced in favor of offline presence, so that general consumers can experience the phones before buying.

Offline partnerships are important for us because they give people a chance to try out OnePlus devices in real life before they buy.

Spanish readers, head over to this thread to know more.

https://twitter.com/getpeid/status/1100899424740495365

CEO Pete Lau, on the other side, was tightly occupied with news agencies. When questioned about the recent FDI policy on ecommerce in India, he told Economic Times:

We are studying the new requirements but hope that the policy makers will not erode the unique advantage that have been created in the connected online space in India, purely for the sake of expanding offline presence.

India is a big market for OnePlus. The Chinese OEM largely caters the premium smartphone segment in this country. He also commented about their marketing strategy:

The Indian market is competitive and unique to other markets because of lot of discounts and promotions by players in the industry. It is most difficult to persist when the temptation to follow the rest in the environment.

OnePlus is also planning to scale up their R&D centre in Hyderabad. Lau said PTI that they are  focusing on the creation of a steady pipeline from India.

We have recently opened up OnePlus R&D centre in Hyderabad. This will become OnePlus largest centre globally in the next three years. Looking forward to India R&D centre, you can expect 300-500 people to be part of the team.

Talking about assembling and supply chain management, Pete expressed that reducing external dependencies would be the key to scale up.

As the largest OEM (original equipment maker) in the premium segment, we very much want to and see ourselves as having influence to help bring supply chain for build out of premium flagship devices to make that supply chain more complete. That’s good for OnePlus and India and the entire industry. As our supply chain is further developed, we will then be interested in exploring the opportunity for export.

Reader may recall that OnePlus has plans to enter in the TV market. The Shenzhen based OEM created a massive hype with the first announcement of OnePlus TV.

We want to bring the home environment to the next level of intelligent connectivity. To do this, we are building a new product of OnePlus’ premium flagship design, image quality and audio experience to more seamlessly connect the home.

We call it: OnePlus TV.

Trusted Reviews interviewed Carl on their future plans and roadmaps of this TV. He did not disclose much on the pricing or the functionalities, but emphasized on “smart features”.

We think that the future is a multi-screen future. People are no longer tied to a phone itself, but rather the services they use. For instance, Netflix for watching something, or Uber for getting somewhere. It’s only a screen that follows their needs wherever they are, and delivers their needs in the fewest steps possible.

They **may** launch the smart TV in this year.

We might not have all the answers for how this category will evolve, but we’re going to take a shot at it this year. We’ll release it when we’re ready. We’re not as tied to a fixed cycle for it, as it’s our first product in that category, and we just really need to get it right.

In another world, HydrogenOS users in China are getting a nifty feature on their OnePlus phones. The company has introduced various storage plans in their cloud for storing photos.

The new option can be accessed from Settings => Cloud sync (well, it’s Chinese equivalent). Current plans are as follows:

• 50 GB, ¥5.99/month
• 100 GB, ¥8.99/month
• 200 GB, ¥14.99/month
• 1024 GB, ¥49.99/month

Users can pay via WeChat for now. Alipay support will be there in near future.

The feature is only available in Beta channel. HydrogenOS stable users will get it later.

That’s it for today. Ciao!

Follow @PiunikaWeb

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.