OnePlus to open up 100 OnePlus Stores

OnePlus is considered to be one of the most-watched Chinese OEMs in the Android landscape today, with the company doing more than say, Xiaomi, to market its smartphone collection to customers who don’t live in Asia and don’t have access to China (in the US, for example). At the same time, however, OnePlus is looking to make it in an overcrowded market where high-end Android OEMs are getting their devices in consumer hands in local retail stores both in China and the US — and there are no OnePlus stores in sight. Well, a new report from China says that the company will be bringing 100 OnePlus Stores to India. The company has partnered with IDEA Cellular to make it happen.

“Our partnership with IDEA Cellular will offer our customers easy access to touch, feel, and experience the OnePlus 3 before making a purchase decision,” said OnePlus India general manager Vikaas Agarwal. To sweeten the deal, IDEA Cellular is offering India customers double their usual data for 12 months while also discounting the price of the 10GB deal to the price of 1GB (of 4G data, that is). OnePlus Stores will allow the Chinese OEM to sell its phones locally so that consumers can see the OnePlus 3, hold it, touch the touchscreen, check out the camera, and get to explore the Oxygen/Hydrogen OS (possibly the hybrid OS soon) as well as the dark mode for the device that I think every Android OEM should bring to their skinned Android versions.

OnePlus Stores will put the Chinese OEM on equal footing with other OEMs in India, a country that seems to be dominant in tech news these days. Lots of OEMs are setting up shop in India, with everything from manufacturing to sales. Samsung has decided to advertise and market Tizen, its own homegrown OS, in the country, with Samsung having picked up 3 million sales of its Tizen-powered smartphones in 2015. With a country of over 1 billion people, OnePlus would do well to gain a foothold in the area in order to make itself a formidable rival to other Chinese OEMs in addition to world-renown OEMs like Samsung.

This is a sweet deal for customers in India who’ve been waiting to jump on the OnePlus 3 bandwagon and pick up what may prove to be one of the most disruptive Android smartphones of 2016. The OnePlus 3 features a 5.5-inch, Optic AMOLED display, a quad-core, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 6GB of the latest LPDDR4 RAM, 64GB of internal storage, an 8MP front camera, 16MP back camera, and a 3,000mAh battery with fast charging. The OnePlus 3 can go from 0 to 100 in just 73 minutes, making it faster-charging than 2016 Android flagships such as the HTC 10 and slightly faster than even Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5 from 2015. The OnePlus 3 costs $399.99 in the US.

We hope that the OnePlus Stores in India are just a start of what OnePlus does to woo worldwide customers (in other words, we’d really like to see OnePlus Stores in the US one of these days). Let us know if you’d like to see the OnePlus 3 up-close before buying it.

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