Would Chinese Smartphone Maker OONE Stand a Chance in Domestic Hi-end Market with its Flagship Product OONE Oneair?

With the boom of Chinese smartphone market and increase of market shares in low-end market, several domestic phone makers like ZTE, Lenovo and Huawei made forays into the more lucrative high-end smartphone arena, which has been occupied by foreign brands like Apple and Samsung. Shanghai-based smartphone maker OONE recently released a 3,299 yuan (around $530) flagship product OONE Oneair to continue this endeavor.

Enabled by Android 4.2.2-based custom UI, the smartphone features 5-inch display with a 720×1280 pixel resolution, 2GB RAM and 8-megapixel front and rear camera. The product is a 5.67mm ultrathin smartphone with a weight of 99g and an extremely slime design. It is available in three colors of blue, ivory white and champagne gold.

Although the company did not disclose the hardware specs of OONE Oneair, it is reported that it will be powered by MT6592 octa-core processor clocked at 2.0GHZ.

The first batch of 60,000 sets are now open for preorder on the company’s official website. Several other e-comerce sales channels like Tmall and JD will be added in the future. Deng Anming, vice president of the company, said OONE planned to open physical retail stores in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the second half of this year.

The high price of OONE may attributed in part to costs on design, in part to costs on its custom operating system, which is adapted to habits of Chinese users by CyanogenMod, a firmware developer for Android devices. It is reported that CyanogenMod will share the revenue with OONE based on shipment amounts.

As the trend of budget smartphone with high-end specifications is on the rise, Chinese smartphone users are offered more options than ever to enjoy smartphones with high performances at an affordable price. In addition to the more established budget smartphone makers like Xiaomi, Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and OPPO, lots of new brands mushroomed to tap this market, such as OnePlus and IUNI. All these smarphone makers offers handsets that are not too shabby for its price tag of around 2,000 yuan, or even lower. In this case, OONE Oneair must offers more stories to attract the price-sensitive Chinese users from its cost-effective rivals.

image credit: OONE