The OnePlus mobile phone, which came to the performance track, finally completed its desire to break the circle.
Text: You Yong
Edited by Zhou Luping
The mobile phone market in the stock competition has not eased up in recent years, although the overall pattern has not changed, and the surviving companies have their own basic plates. But the statistics of each quarter are a reminder that the market has not had the thrill of growth for a long time.
However, in the context of the cold market, people are pleasantly surprised to find that growth has become the main theme of OnePlus mobile phones in the past few years.
In 2023, OnePlus's mobile phone sales will be 285% of its 2022 level, an increase of nearly 3 times. According to our latest information, OnePlus has seen 14 consecutive months of year-on-year sales growth, jumping to second place in the Android online channel. After returning to OPPO, OnePlus has shown strong competitiveness in the performance track.
And OnePlus's way of bucking the trend is no secret, summing up in one word: volume, volume, volume, volume, performance.
In recent years, Pinduoduo has beaten the e-commerce big brothers a little hard to parry with the extremely low price; OnePlus, with its ultimate performance, is replicating the same story in the mobile phone market.
01
Ace 3 Pro, take the performance to the end
Although the mid-to-high-end market has a large number of shipments, more meat often means more wolves, and everyone is almost in close hand-to-hand combat.
On the one hand, it is not like the flagship market, which has a lot of brand premium space, and can pile up materials regardless of cost; On the other hand, it is not as casual as the entry-level market, and you can find segmented users with one or two longboards or new features.
In particular, OnePlus's main young users who love to play games and chase performance have always had a very demanding demand for performance phones in the 3K-4K price range. They are keen to get information on social networks and even know a lot about the performance configuration of many mobile phones. It's hard for mediocre products to win their hearts.
They are like a party with a limited budget but demanding party members, who must not only have a top-level flagship chip to ensure that the performance is powerful enough, but also have a smooth gaming experience brought by a high brush screen, and a large battery to dispel the anxiety of battery life. Of course, the price should also be as cheap as possible.
On June 27th, OnePlus mobile phone released the annual performance masterpiece Ace 3 Pro, this model with a starting price of 3199 yuan unsurprisingly uses the highest level of performance three-piece set: the most advanced chip at the moment - the third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, the most powerful memory at the moment - full blood LPDDR5X (up to 24GB) and the highest flash memory at the moment - UFS 4.0 (up to 1TB).
A good hardware foundation is the foundation of performance unleashing. With these hardware, OnePlus also has its own research and development of "Tidal Architecture", "Memory Genetic Recombination 3.0", and "New Storage Technology". The essence of these seemingly incomprehensible technical terms is to maximize the performance of the hardware. For example, the Tidal architecture is to disassemble the microarchitecture of the chip, build a large model of computing power, and accurately calculate the balance between high performance and low power consumption, so as to achieve smooth and durable heavy-load scenarios such as games. Memory Gene Recombination 3.0 reconstructs the bottom layer of Android memory and greatly improves the efficiency of memory usage.
It may be difficult to have an intuitive feeling just by looking at the data and configuration, and games, as the scene that can best show the strength of performance mobile phones, have always been a big stage for everyone to show their muscles. The OnePlus Ace 3 Pro is equipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and an exclusive custom graphics chip, which achieves 120 fps at the Android native level for the first time to reload games.
In the three super heavy-duty scenarios that can be called "hellish difficulty", the OnePlus Ace 3 Pro can run at full frame rate from full charge to shutdown, multi-task parallel gaming for 1 hour for a long time full frame, and 30°C for 1 hour of smooth full frame for 1 hour of high temperature gaming.
OnePlus's native-level 120 fps technology is different from the traditional MEMC (motion estimation and compensation technology) frame insertion scheme of the independent graphics chip. MEMC is a game that achieves a high frame rate by interpolating frames, which tends to have higher latency, reduced handiness, and very fast battery drains. OnePlus's native 120 fps, in the words of a digital blogger who has already tried it, "the picture latency is even negligible, and it feels like a different game."
And battery life is also the highlight of this upgrade. A week ago, OnePlus held a separate press conference for mobile phone batteries. The attitude of the king of the machine circle has been very clear: this year to start rolling the mobile phone battery.
In the past, mobile phone batteries were limited by material technology, and there has been no great breakthrough and progress, and the capacity of mobile phone batteries basically hovered at four or five thousand milliampere. However, in the case of a significant upgrade in screen and image, the battery has become one of the most painful shortcomings of various mobile phone brands.
"In 2024, if the battery life is not good, it is a fake performance phone". At the beginning of the year, the bold words of Li Jie, president of OnePlus China, are still echoing in my ears. In fact, it is not difficult to simply make the battery capacity, and there are 7000mAh mobile phones on the market, but how to achieve a large battery capacity while taking into account the thinness and lightness is the key.
This time, OnePlus cooperated with Contemporary Energy Calmer (ATL) to launch the industry's first high-performance battery for high-performance mobile phones, the "Glacier Battery", which replaces the traditional graphite anode with a silicon carbon anode with an energy density of 763Wh/L. The battery capacity of the OnePlus Ace3 Pro has also been increased to 6100mAh. The key point is that compared to the OnePlus Ace 2 Pro's 5000mAh graphite anode lithium battery, the OnePlus Ace 3 Pro's battery volume is 3% thinner, while the battery capacity is increased by 22%.
With a large-capacity glacier battery, Snapdragon 8 Gen3 and a 1.5K oriental screen, coupled with the blessing of the SUPERVOOC S power management chip, OnePlus Ace 3 Pro's DOU battery life test exceeded 2 days for the first time, and it can achieve "one charge in two days, two days at a time".
This scene is not unfamiliar. In October 2023, OnePlus and BOE jointly pre-researched 2 years in advance, invested a total of hundreds of millions of R&D funds, and released the Oriental screen, so that the domestic screen also achieved 2K resolution. This screen has also been used in several subsequent products of OnePlus.
From cooperating with BOE to launch Dongfang Screen, to now cooperating with Ningde New Energy to launch glacier batteries with silicon carbon anode. OnePlus is stepping up cooperation with the domestic supply chain to promote the implementation of more new technologies in performance mobile phones, and also promote the industry to accelerate involution at these levels.
02
From mobile phones to game-disruptive watches and tablets
Domestic mobile phone brands have basically completed the expansion of categories, most of them started with mobile phones at the beginning, and then developed to tablets, watches, and even PCs and smart screens.
As the entrance to sports and office entertainment, tablets and watches have also become a major entrance to the Internet of Everything, which can effectively create an interconnected ecological experience.
OnePlus, which performed fiercely in the mobile phone market, finally entered the tablet and watch market. On June 27, OnePlus officially released its first tablet, the OnePlus Tablet Pro and smartwatch, OnePlus Watch 2.
Regarding why OnePlus wants to enter the tablet and IoT track at this time, Li Jie also revealed that behind the entry into the IoT track is that after OnePlus's user base has increased, more and more users have the demand for these products. Moreover, one of OnePlus's current main user groups, college students, has been frequently using tablets in their daily life and studies, and is even replacing the role of PCs.
Performance will become OnePlus's most powerful weapon for category expansion. One trick is eaten all over the world, and OnePlus began to use the most familiar style of play, to "rectify" the watch and tablet market.
OnePlus Tablet Pro is equipped with Qualcomm's contemporary flagship processor, and it has also become the first Android tablet equipped with Qualcomm's third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform.
OnePlus Watch 2 is equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 and Hengxuan 2700 dual-core combination, which supports independent eSIM, bringing a fully intelligent experience comparable to that of a mobile phone through the strongest chip in the same class, the largest memory and the fastest response speed.
When the extreme performance is transplanted to the tablet and watch categories, OnePlus still has a lot of imagination in the development of new categories.
However, for OnePlus, tablets and watches will be a more difficult bone to gnaw on than they are familiar with in the mobile phone market. On the one hand, the volume of these markets cannot be compared with mobile phones, but the competition is very cruel; On the other hand, OnePlus has been working hard for seven or eight years before switching to the performance mobile phone track, and has a good user base and brand tonality, while in the new category of tablets and watches, the mind needs to be re-established. But OnePlus's idea of making products still makes the outside world see the confidence to break through.
03
The user needs the volume king
Involution is not a joyful word in the workplace, but in the cruel business world, volume or competition is the norm that pushes the market forward.
New energy vehicles are a typical example. The vigorous development and rapid progress of domestic brands in recent years have not only made traditional fuel vehicle brands breathless, but even Tesla is sweating.
The same goes for the Android market. Only by constantly competing and constantly providing more extreme products around user needs can we survive. Brands like OnePlus have carried the banner of performance in the past few years and brought many product surprises to users. It is also under the involution of these manufacturers, in many visible and invisible places, that changes leading the industry are quietly occurring.
From the popularization of large memory to cancel 8GB, the stacking texture to cancel the screen plastic bracket, and the industry's first Oriental screen, to this generation and Ningde New Energy cooperation to launch the industry's first high-performance battery glacier battery, Android's first 120-frame native "Genshin Impact" experience. Step by step, every involution of OnePlus actually brings changes in the industry.
Only volume can keep the mobile phone market from being occupied by mediocre products; Only volumes can allow more users to experience the performance and configuration of the flagship, and accelerate the popularization of flagship technology and configuration.