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Can you believe there was once a budget Android brand that had people queuing up for the opportunity to buy their phone? A brand that seemingly came from nowhere to inspire the kind of adoration we'd only ever seen from the iPhone in the past. To see which phone I'm talking about, please enter your invite code to continue watching this video. Nah, I'm just kidding. But can you imagine this was the central genius of the OnePlus 1 a decade ago? $299 for a phone with flagship specs and software tailor made for Android Power users, only because of the need to wait for an
invite code, you can't buy it yet. It's straight out of the Eric Kartman School of Business. In the 2001 South Park episode, Cartman Land, the character buys his own theme park and delights in telling people, "You can't come." Creating an unintended aura of exclusivity that ironically sees the 10-year-old hailed as a marketing genius. Now, I'm not drawing any direct comparisons here, but the scarcity, arguably artificial scarcity of the OnePlus 1 was a major part of its early success. You couldn't just plop down your 300 bucks and wait for your phone to arrive in the mail. Instead, you had to engage with OnePlus on social media, enter contests, or follow coverage on blogs to earn that coveted invite code.
And all of that was crucial in sustaining interest in OnePlus for its first messy year of existence. OnePlus started as the dream of Pete Laauo and Carl Pay. Lao was a senior executive at OPPO and Pay worked under him as an international markets manager. The OPPO connection to OnePlus is at once crucial but also kind of opaque. During the early days, OnePlus was keen to handwave away any talk of a connection. Nevertheless, over the years, OnePlus shipped more than a few phones that ended up being basically repurposed Oppo designs. So, let's just say there was more than likely some OPPO money in OnePlus from the beginning and leave it
at that. Another connection to Oppo came in the software of the OnePlus 1. It was the first to ship with Cyanogen OS, a fully approved licensed version of Cyanogen Mod, the community favorite custom Android ROM. Now, Pete Low worked with the Cogen guys and bring their stuff to a special limited edition version of the Oppo N1, one of the first phones with a mechanical flip camera system. Cogen was a natural match for the OnePlus 1. It brought with it plenty of eyeballs to the first product from what was a completely new and unknown brand. And the people it would be attracting were just the sort of folks who would be into this kind of phone.
High-end specs, ultra competitive price, and direct online sales. It was a strategy Google had successfully executed a couple of times already in the early 2010s with the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5. And when the phone arrived in April 2014, it did so at around half the price of its Android rivals. The HTC1 M8 would set you back around $600. The other one was yours for around half that. There's a reason this was dubbed a flagship killer after all. And picking this thing up just over a decade later, it's surprising how unassuming it actually looks. Perhaps that makes sense for a brand that was just starting out. But the lack of any overt branding on the front, typical for Android phones at
the time, gave it an enigmatic quality. As you might imagine, being made largely of plastic, the OnePlus 1 is ridiculously light by today's standards. There were no 5G radios or extra-l large capacity batteries or wireless charging to worry about, after all. What does feel pretty spacious by modern standards, though, is the display, a 5.46 in panel that's actually fairly large because that diagonal measurement is over a 16x9 aspect ratio. And that panel still isn't too bad under daylight a decade on in that it's just about usable fully maxed out. It's a 600nit IPS panel which beats the HTC and Samsung flagships of the
time on paper. Bezels notwithstanding, this phone is in the same ballpark as a Google Pixel 8 Pro or S24 Plus. And when you compare it to OnePlus's present flagship a decade on, the difference is much more in weight than it is in footprint. The 12 with its metal, glass, bigger batteries, and heat sinks is a hefty beast. On the inside, you've got a load out of specs that reads like a smartphone nerd's wish list in mid 2014. A Snapdragon 801, one of the last great 32-bit SOC's from Qualcomm, paired with a roomy 3 gigs of RAM and up to 64 gigs of storage. I've got the Sandstone Black version here, which exclusively carried the more generous loadout of storage.
Again, both of these specs were a step above where you'd expect to be, even in a flagship tier phone of that time. Physically, this unit right here isn't in bad condition, though it's definitely seen better days. Plenty of wear on the display's smudgeres olophobic coating, as well as one or two scuffs on the reflective trim and sandstone back. That sandstone back is a bit more tacky feeling than I remember it being a decade ago. But at least it hasn't fully succumbed to rubber aversion like some similarly aged matte plastic devices. And how about that? Capacitive navigation keys down below here. Though if you preferred, you could use software navigation instead. Rounding off the spec sheet, you've got a 3,100 mAh
battery. Pretty big for the time. Though its performance in both life and charging speeds is hard to quantify after more than a decade of use. And yeah, given when this thing launched, we're still well within the era of 3.5 mm headphone jacks and micro USB for charging. OnePlus fans would need to wait another year for the OnePlus 2 to emerge as one of the first offering type-C and another two years for the OnePlus 3 to debut with Dash Charge. I distinctly remember how the OnePlus 1 went from this weird oddity that somehow came with Cyan out of the box to being the must-have Android phone of 2014. A lot of that came down to the unique ways OnePlus spread hype around its first phone. The invite system served the dual
purpose of allowing OnePlus a little bit of wiggle room to match supply with demand, important for a smaller player, while also bringing in a little bit of that artificial scarcity. The OnePlus 1 was the best deal in mobile tech in 2014 if you could buy it. But actually being able to buy it was half the battle. However, as much as the phone itself was pretty great and the invite system successfully sustained interest in the brand and its product through that crucial first year, OnePlus's first year in the market was also pretty messy. First early production runs of the OnePlus 1 were turned away at European Customs for playing fast and loose with the design of the C mark around the back
here. A rookie error for any company conducting international business. And between language and cultural issues, OnePlus ended up badly fumbling a couple of its launch promotions during which it solicited what I can only describe as various antics from its fans in order to obtain an invite code. The Smash the Past promo invited folks to destroy their older generation smartphones in exchange for a OnePlus 1 invite. A pretty dumb and wasteful idea that would have been quickly nixed by any sane international marketing person. and a selfie photography contest around the same time resulted in more adverse publicity when the company tripped over itself and accidentally did a sexism.
Perhaps these early blunders aren't too surprising considering OnePlus's explosive success compared to its relatively humble initial goals. In an interview with Digital Trends in 2015, Carp said that while initial sales goals have been set as low as 50,000 units, the OnePlus 1 eventually exceeded 1 million sold. OnePlus was growing way quicker than had been expected and in doing so some growing pains were to be expected. The relationship with software partner Scien was also not exactly dramaree. According to reports from XDA at the time signed what were apparently conflicting deals with OnePlus and Indian OEM Microax which presented legal roadblocks when OnePlus eventually came
to launch in India and eventually led to the two parting company. While all this was up in the air, OnePlus started building its own replacement Android software. Oxygen OS for the global market and Hydrogen OS for China. And in late 2014, the relationship reached the point of no return when SAN CEO Kurt McMaster dumped OnePlus via email, according to court documents unearthed later in 2014. All of which left OnePlus 1 owners in the slightly unique position of having two software tracks ahead of them. one with Scen, the other with OnePlus and Oxygen OS. So much of OnePlus's success in the years that followed centered on Oxygen OS. And so it's fascinating to think about how differently things might have unfolded
had that Scan partnership endured. I guess we'll never know. So the model I have here came fresh from eBay with Scioen OS 13.1 pre-installed based on Android 6 Marshmallow. And although this is sort of official firmware for this phone, it still has very much of a custom ROM feel to it. Just about everything to do with the UI can be tweaked. Whether it's the lock screen mods to completely change the layout of that part of the phone or custom soft keys or theming more generally. Using this phone a decade on takes me back to the age when Android's out of the box experience felt quite limited. Yet, Android was so open that you could just slap a ROM on there. And if you could think of doing it
on a phone, chances are someone had built a custom version of CM that had that baked in. As for using the OnePlus 1 today, your options boil down to various versions of Scen's successor, Lineage OS. The most up-to-date version of Lineage OS is version 21 based on Android 14. Although this version is an experimental build for the OnePlus 1 that has many basic capabilities not working and various security features disabled and you'd need to repartition the phone's internal storage to siphon off additional space for the larger ROM which is probably not worth the trade-off. So instead I went with Lineage OS 18.1, the last official version for this phone. And performance here on this barebones version of Android isn't terrible at all. I think
compared to other phones of this era, the 3 gigs of RAM definitely helps. A common issue with phones like the HTC1 M8 on more recent Android versions is that they're just too weighty for the 2 gigs of RAM these phones tend to have. So, this phone on this buildup lineage is still a 3-year-old experience, but it's just about up to date enough for the latest apps and usable for basic things like browsing and video. And that single 13 megapixel camera around the back actually not too bad in my experience considering its age. The biggest difference compared to most phone cameras we have today is the lack of any advanced multiframe processing techniques to do decent computational HDR. But out and about in daylight, despite shots looking a bit grainy,
these would be perfectly fine for day-to-day photos you put on social media or whatever. and newer ROMs even included dedicated night mode that held up pretty well in my experience, too. The OnePlus 1 was a truly unique phone for its time. This thing emerged back when phones were simple enough that you could get all the high-end hardware most people needed and sell for a little over $300. No multi- camera setups or 5G radios or inscreen fingerprint to worry about, just a generous spec sheet and a low price. Of course, since then, the market has moved and OnePlus has had to move with it. Any niche player in the smartphone space eventually has to
go mainstream to continue growing. And that's the move OnePlus made towards the latter part of the 2010s with it merging the popular Oxygen OS into Oppo's Color OS and losing early pioneers like Carl Pay who went on to found nothing. The OnePlus of today is a very different beast. A fullyfledged, publicly acknowledged subbrand of Oppo. in many ways, just another big smartphone brand. And as good as its current offerings like the OnePlus 12 and OnePlus open are, there's still a small part of me that misses the good old days of top specs, low prices, and that never settle attitude. That's it for now. Share your OnePlus 1 memories down in the comments, and stay tuned for more retro coverage coming soon. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.
