Ten years, that’s how long OnePlus has been around. Boy, time really flies. I vividly remember being floored by the OnePlus One, the first time I got my hands on it. The OnePlus 2 was the first OnePlus phone I fully reviewed. The OnePlus X made me feel like it was way ahead of its time. The world wasn’t ready for it.
OnePlus will continue to take forward strides in the coming years, even branching out into newer categories including audio, but over the course of time, as it grew, a few things were let go. Because change is the only constant, maybe. Carl Pei left the company at a very strange time. And while no company is built by one person, rather it’s a team effort, Pei’s departure leaves a gaping hole in OnePlus’s otherwise impenetrable armour. But this piece isn’t about him. He is doing great, doing what he does best, making cool products and marketing them well.
This piece is about another big gaping hole that OnePlus has been unable to patch even though its product and marketing teams will have you believe otherwise. No, not the cameras either, although OnePlus still needs to prove its Hasselblad partnership actually amounts to something more than just customary branding exercise. Maybe look at Vivo for some inspiration. Or, Oppo. Even Xiaomi feels miles ahead in mobile photography, even if the rest of the package needs some serious rethinking.
Post Covid, there’s been a tectonic shift in how big tech, and consumers, perceive software. OpenAI of course has a lot to do with it. ChatGPT has single-handedly done for software, what iPhone did for hardware almost two decades ago. And now, smartphones have joined the race. Wait, that is a little misleading. Smartphones have been toying with AI for years. You could talk to your smartphone to get things done without moving a finger, before. But when you look at them, and ChatGPT now, you’d chuckle at the very thought of what we were doing with AI, even a couple of years back. That is the nature of things. They get better. In this case, they got better, fast. So fast, that generative AI is ready to replace the Google Assistant (Bard), Alexa (remarkable Alexa), and Bixby (Galaxy AI). (And if reports are to be believed, even Apple is prepping to launch a supercharged Siri sometime around WWDC 2024.)
But Samsung getting into the game with its latest Galaxy S24 series is perhaps the big shot in the arm that generative AI needed to go even more mainstream. (We have a full length piece here on how this also gives Google an opportunity to get better at its own game.) Basically, with one move, Samsung stopped the specs-war. Someone had to do it, things were getting really out of hand. I mean, what good is a high AnTuTu score and 120Hz refresh rate when half your games don’t support it, or even worse, your smartphone can’t play them because the brand you bought it from has put a cap on it to prevent it from overheating. Not to mention, an open market means, everyone has access and so, almost every phone starts to look the same. Hardware is great, but it’s also boring. The same reason why most smartphones are boring these days.
Galaxy AI and Samsung’s renewed focus on offering its consumers useful and longer-lasting software is a big differentiator for this year’s Galaxy S24 series. Its new phones are eligible for seven years of updates (that said, we’ll see how that pans out for the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus with Exynos 2400). But even without those numbers which are impressive no doubt, the Galaxy S24 series injects some much-needed excitement into the industry. Not because it has the fastest Qualcomm chip on the block, the strongest Gorilla glass, the brightest display from Samsung yet, and tons of megapixels on the camera front, but because of a bevy of “smart” things that it can do with them to wow you and surprise you.
But how does it all connect to the phone that OnePlus is launching today, well, it does because the 12 is to OnePlus what the S24 is to Samsung. It will be the best phone that OnePlus makes today. It will have a swanky glass and metal design, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with intricate cooling, and a big battery with wireless charging. But it will also have virtually the same software look and feel as a gazillion other BBK phones and – if reports are to be believed— just four years of software updates.
That software was once a big differentiator for OnePlus phones. OnePlus in fact used to harp a lot about how having a separate team for global OxygenOS [from China HydrogenOS] back in its heyday allowed for both creative flexibility and quicker update rollout. Even if many of those updates were ridden with bugs, the community embraced it and put it on a pedestal, higher than Samsung. Ten years later, the tables have turned. Samsung is making great software and putting generative AI conveniences into phones taking almost the same hardware and making it more desirable.
There’s little doubt that the OnePlus 12 will generate great buzz and rave reviews. It will also sell well enough. But unless OnePlus seriously undercuts Samsung in pricing, the Galaxy S24 has a leg up over the 12, by a big margin.
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