Five years ago, OnePlus stepped into the smartphone market with eight premium models, gaining tens of millions of users worldwide.
Five years later, OnePlus announced its entry into the smart home industry, aiming to produce smart TVs.
OnePlus is not the first smartphone manufacturer to venture into smart home technology, nor will it be the last. The reason for entering the smart home industry is simple: 5G and AI technology are the future directions, and the connection between people and home life will become increasingly “seamless”. OnePlus, dedicated to sharing a tech-driven lifestyle, is understandably stepping into the internet smart home field as an explorer.
Looking at the domestic smart home market, most brands focus more on building the entire smart home “ecosystem” while neglecting the uniqueness of each component (product), overly pursuing cost-effectiveness at the expense of product quality, or ignoring user experience leading to low consumer satisfaction, or lacking an expansive internet mindset that hinders significant achievements, and failing to pursue excellence.
Creating premium products is precisely OnePlus’s strength. As long as OnePlus continues to adhere to the “premium flagship” strategy in the smart TV industry, applying its smartphone experience to smart TVs, capturing market share in the smart TV sector should not be difficult. Before the smart home wave truly opens up, if it can accumulate users first, provide high-quality services, and strengthen its smartphone business by interconnecting smart home products with smartphones to build an ecosystem, it will essentially control the two most important entry points in the 5G era.
As the primary entry point, OnePlus has already excelled in smartphones, with tags like “premium, uncompromising, smooth, and user-friendly” deeply embedded in the brand, which remains the soul of OnePlus today.
So why does OnePlus choose smart TVs as its entry point into the smart home market?
According to Liu Zuohu, today’s user life primarily encompasses four major internet application scenarios: mobile, home, in-car, and office, with the home scenario being particularly important. However, it is currently at a relatively primitive stage. OnePlus hopes that through OnePlus TV, users can experience a complete internet user experience in the home scenario and enjoy “a better tech-driven life”.
The importance of the home scenario is self-evident, with the center of home entertainment undoubtedly being the TV. However, in the past, viewers could only watch pre-arranged content, leading to the decline of traditional television. Now, smart TVs return the greatest content choice power back to users, allowing television to return to family life.
In this context, it is not surprising that OnePlus’s first smart home product is a TV. From a consumer perspective, creating a good TV product requires balancing “hardware + software + cloud services”: hardware is the carrier, software determines the experience, and the core is cloud services.
What is OnePlus’s competitive edge in making TVs? We can look at it from three aspects: product, brand reputation, and users.
From the product perspective: Looking back at OnePlus’s smartphone products, the hardware has always been top-notch, the software experience is fast and smooth, and the design features many textures and details, consistently pursuing a burden-free user experience. It is said that OnePlus will collaborate with some partners in the future to explore the interaction improvements between TVs and smartphones. OnePlus’s brand “exploratory spirit + premium philosophy” will undoubtedly extend to TVs, and we can anticipate that OnePlus TVs will perform well in design, picture quality, software interaction, and smart experience.
From the brand reputation perspective: OnePlus has launched eight flagship products over five years, gaining tens of millions of users globally. The first product entering the Indian market, OnePlus 1, received a high rating of 4.3 on Amazon, ranking first in the smartphone category. It consistently ranks among the top in the PCMag 2018 Reader’s Choice Awards for user satisfaction in North American smartphones; in Finland, OnePlus was the top-selling smartphone brand for the entire year with carrier Elisa; this year’s OnePlus 6 has repeatedly broken records, becoming the highest single-day sales smartphone product in Amazon India’s history, reaching one million units sold globally within 22 days. The “Today’s Headlines 2018 Smartphone Industry White Paper” in China also shows that OnePlus 6 has the highest user satisfaction among Android flagships.
Adhering to a strategy of only producing flagship premium products and maintaining a good reputation globally is also a competitive advantage for OnePlus TVs.
From the user perspective: The OnePlus community has over 5 million registered users from 196 countries, providing a large fan base and high conversion potential, which will also significantly benefit OnePlus’s global expansion of its smart TV product line.
Combining these three aspects of competitive advantage, OnePlus sees smart TVs as the entry point into the smart home market. Everything seems so logical yet filled with opportunities and challenges: the arrival of the 5G and AI era is the right timing; five years of flagship premium manufacturing experience is the right place; the deeply rooted brand philosophy of “not compromising” and exploratory spirit is the right people; and the exploration of new smart TV design, picture quality, software interaction, and user experience is both a legacy and a challenge.
Perhaps five years ago, we did not pay attention to the emerging OnePlus smartphones, nor did we expect it to emerge as a dark horse in five years, not challenging Apple, nor chasing Xiaomi, but focusing on exploring flagship premium products and gaining tens of millions of users worldwide through its products. However, five years later, as OnePlus TV embarks on a new journey, it aims to explore “a better tech-driven life” for consumers, this continuation of “not compromising” holds great promise for the future.
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