OnePlus hasn’t done a great job keeping a lid on the 3T. For the past week or so, both it and Qualcomm have been seeding social media with glimpses of the upcoming smartphone, finally taking the official wraps off the device today, a mere five months after launching its latest flagship, the OnePlus 3.
Those worried about the company cannibalizing its still fresh handset rest assured – the OnePlus 3T won’t be eating into the 3’s sales because it will be killing the device entirely. As the new handset is unleashed on the world, the hardware startup will be end-of-lifing its predecessor.
And it’s not hard to see why. For starters, there’s the fact that the new phone is, at its name implies, an upgrade to the existing line, bringing an even more impressive set of specs to the already well-received phone. And then there’s the fact that it’s hard to imagine the company’s dropping the 3’s $399 MSRP any lower to make room for the 3T’s $439 asking price.
The short lead time will sure irk those who rushed out to pick up the three, but for hold outs, there are some really solid hardware upgrades on board, starting with the already announced bump from Snapdragon 820 to 821 (at 2.35GHz), bringing it up to speed with the Google Pixel. That increased processing power is coupled with a more than generous 6GB of RAM.
The battery has been bumped up as well, now at 3400mAh, a 13-percent increases over the 3, coupled with the company’s proprietary Dash quick charging technology, which promises a day’s worth of power with a 30 minute charge – same as with the last one.
The 3T will be available with either 64 or 128GB of storage (on the gunmetal version) when it launches November 22 here in the States. It will be launching on the 28 in Europe with a gold colored version arriving soon. While the OnePlus 3 is going away, those who purchased one will still be getting the promised Nougat update according to schedule, along with all future updates, which will happen at the same time for both handsets.
If you want to make something cool, don’t give it to geeks first. Google Glass learned that the hard way.
Despite Snapchat’s best efforts, Robert Scoble still got a hold of a pair of the Spectacles camera glasses. He’s the enthusiastic tech blogger above who shot a nude selfie wearing Google Glass in the shower that came to embody the gadget’s cursed brand. He even admits to me that it was smart that Snap Inc didn’t send him a pair.
A SpectaScobles selfie was the exact opposite of Snapchat’s plan. That’s why it didn’t deliver any review units of Spectacles to bloggers, or send them to tech celebrities who usually get early beta access to new products.
If it did, that would have forged a perception of Spectacles as a serious device meant to be painstakingly reviewed instead of casually played with as they should be. And it would have positioned them for serious adults and early adopters, instead of the typical teens that make up Snapchat’s core user base.
So instead, it suddenly dropped a goofy vending machine full of Spectacles on a beach boardwalk in LA, near a national park in Big Sur, California, and a roadside tourist trap off Route 61 near Tulsa, Oklahoma. Snapchat lovers scrambled to get there quick and stand in long lines in hopes of scoring a pair.
There are several reasons this was brilliant:
Artificial Scarcity – People love exclusivity, but with an air of egalitarianism. By not openly selling them online or in a permanent brick-and-mortar store, and instead making their availability extremely limited, somewhat random, and only for those willing to stand in line, their perceived value skyrocketed. Sure, people are selling them on eBay for huge markups at $800 to $2000 dollars. But the point was anyone with $130 and some luck could don the glasses.
Geographic Clustering – Snapchat itself blew up in LA high schools, becoming a hit with a densely interconnected group of teens long before the press picked up on the phenomenon. Facebook actually started quite similarly, only being available at a few elite colleges like Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford. Spectacles were also launched like this. Beyond making everyone else a bit jealous, it limited the chance of someone being the only person in their area using the product. For Snapchat and Facebook, that meant people actually had friends to use the app with. And for Spectacles, it means there will still be hype left to exploit when they hit the east coast and abroad.
Buying As An Experience – When was the last time the acquisition of a product felt as momentous as owning the product itself, and that moment wasn’t annoying? Sure lots of people stayed up late to order their Apple Watch and tweet what configuration they got, though I wouldn’t call that fun. People got excited about their place in the waitlist to use the Mailbox email app, yet the eventual rollout was anti-climactic. But the googly-eyed Snapbot vending machine, dropped in scenic locations, with an augmented reality try-on screen, got almost as much coverage as the videos you make with Spectacles.
Snapchat isn’t the only one realizing big, flashy press conferences and early access for journalists aren’t the only way to release a product.
Facebook cut back on glitzy launch events following one it threw for Facebook Home, which immediately flopped. And after Sean Parker’s video app Airtime bumbled its 2012 launch extravaganza with broken demos featuring celebrities like Jim Carrey, its 2016 relaunch had no event attached.
Snap Inc CEO wearing Spectacles, shot by famous photographer Karl Lagerfeld for the WSJ Magazine
And poor Google Glass. It tried to normalize wearing a computer on your face by handing it to the least fashionable people around, bloggers and app makers. It needed people to look cool wearing it, or at least not super weird, before anyone cared what the reviews said and the apps did. That’s why the first memorable photos of Spectacles weren’t shot by Scoble, but by famous fashion photographer Karl Lagerfeld.
Scoble concludes that the Spectacles Snapbots “make a lot more sense than the way Google rolled out Google Glass to developers and nerds.”
For people who feel that we are a little bit too connected these days, Kickstarter project Light Phone was promising a respite. It was scheduled to ship in May this year, but has seen a number of setbacks. This week, the company issued a statement. It says that while it missed its goal, it hopes to start shipping late this month.
Light Phone’s goal was to be the opposite of a smartphone. Including a 2G SIM card and the ability to take and make calls only, the phone aimed to have three weeks worth of battery life on a single charge.
Tiny, pretty, and with a three-week battery life. What’s not to love?
The company suggests “A few limitations in our initial user experience goals due to some iOS restrictions” is the reason the device is shipping late, but the company has received some criticism for how it has handled its Kickstarter campaign, too. It hasn’t posted any public updates since August last year, instead opting to post updates exclusively to its campaign backers. Not a big problem for backers, of course, but a bit iffy to those of us who were following the company’s progress from the sidelines.
The company came under fire for only offering a dated cell technology for the telephony side of the phone, suggesting that relying on 2G may have been a poor solution. In some countries, the 2G network is scheduled to be switched off soon. “Australian 2G is being switched off on 1st December 2016,” one backer writes, referring to the first round of switch-flicking during a 9-month shutdown process of 2G networks down under. The Light Phone company, in turn, offered to refund backers in countries where the phones would no longer be usable.
When the Light Phone was first announced about 18 months ago, it seemed like a novel and interesting idea. At $100 per device, it’s undoubtedly cool, but the device is also entering a spectacularly competitive space. You can pick up a no-name quad-band phone for a seventh of the price, and most carriers will let you turn off SMS functionality altogether, if you feel passionate about only receiving phone calls. That raises the question; who is the Light Phone actually for?
I look forward to trying the Light Phone out and learning what it feels like to live a life without fending off the barrage of social media notifications. Realistically, however, if this was a problem someone was passionate about solving, they’d have found a way of turning off the notifications or get a no-features burner phone already.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the design and the general concept, but it can’t be denied that creating a phone is a complicated process. On top of that, the types of radios used in mobile phones is heavily regulated throughout the world. The icing on the “hmm, is this gonna work” cookie: in telecoms R&D and manufacturing, a $400k budget (the amount the company raised from Kickstarter) to bring a product to market is an incredibly daunting prospect.
Either way, Light Phone is an incredibly inspiring company; it takes some serious focus and dedication to bring a complex product in this space from cocktail napkin to brick-and-mortar shops. The company is bringing a fresh pair of eyes to the humble mobile phone, and I’ll be cheering them on from the sidelines.
