OnePlus: T-Mobile Helped Boost Sales 249 Percent

In a wide-ranging interview, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau suggests new features and fantasizes about smaller phones.

OnePlus's first US carrier launch was a huge hit. On the fringes of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui last week, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau told me that US sales of the OnePlus 6T in its first 30 days were up 249 percent over the OnePlus 6. The 6T is sold by T-Mobile here in the US.

"The team now are all really happy," Lau said in Chinese through a translator.

The new sales figure comes as OnePlus deploys its new OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition, a variant of its 6T phone accelerated with 30-watt charging and 10GB of RAM. The McLaren Edition is available for $699 unlocked in the US, while the more standard model is $580 at T-Mobile, or $24.17/month.

The OnePlus 6 sold more than a million units globally in its first 22 days, but the company hasn't broken out US sales for that unit, so we can't do a direct comparison.

And yes, that sales boom is coming without a headphone jack.

"It was a very painful decision, but we can't satisfy everyone," Lau said. "As you know, as the screen gets bigger and bigger, with a bigger battery, it limits the space [inside the phone.] Compared to the OnePlus 6, the OnePlus 6T's battery size is bigger even though its power consumption is lower, so it has longer battery life."

That led to a discussion of how phones are getting bigger—and to Lau and I agreeing that we'd love to see a smaller, high-quality phone if we could. Battery, once again, is the barrier. The tiny Palm Phone has equally tiny battery life, after all.

"If we can solve the battery problem, we would definitely make a smaller one," he said. "I see a lot of demand for this kind of size. But looking at the industry, the technology of batteries hasn't changed too much over all these years."

What's Next? Green Screening

The Snapdragon 855 enables 5G modems and new camera features, so I asked Lau which of Qualcomm's new innovations most excited him. Obviously, 5G was top of mind. At the show, he said OnePlus was working on a 5G phone with the EE carrier in the UK. For the US, if OnePlus sticks on the same path it's taking with EE, it's more likely to roll out a 5G phone on T-Mobile or Sprint than on AT&T or Verizon. That's because like EE, T-Mobile, and Sprint are using frequency bands below 6GHz, which Lau said are easier to build for right now.

"The whole industry knows that it's easier to build for sub-6 than for millimeter wave," he said. "I also believe that next year we'll find a solution for millimeter wave."

Lau confirmed to us what AT&T VP Gordon Mansfield said a few months ago—that for the first generation, there will have to be custom 5G phones for each carrier's network.

"It's just at the door of the 5G era; [right now] it can't be like 4G, where you have one device that goes for all the carriers. Each carrier will have a different model," Lau said.

The advanced camera features Qualcomm showed "have a lot of value," Lau said. He said he's most excited for a potential green-screening feature, which lets you magically remove the backgrounds from photos.

"When I get back to China, I'll talk to them to find out the details of how we could achieve that," he said.

Further out, he said, 5G will first improve mobile gaming, and then means more of your data will be in the cloud—which means that data security issues will be even more relevant than they are now. Using BlackBerry and Apple as examples of secure mobile vendors, OnePlus is auditioning security partners right now, he said.

"We're looking for a partner; we want to give people a perception that if you work with this company, then you're secure."

The company isn't working on AR or VR headsets, but its smart TV project is coming along, Lau said. That said, he's giving that team plenty of time to experiment with ideas of how to make a smart TV "burdenless," in OnePlus parlance.

"We don't have a launch date now. We will not launch until we think it's ready and perfect," he said.

About Sascha Segan