We’ve tracked the rise of OnePlus in the Android space for a while now, with one caveat – the phones aren’t available for purchase in Australia. There was some hope today that this might change with the appearance of a oneplus.com.au website, but it seems it’s an unauthorised effort.
We did a little bit of investigation on this, and we’ve decided the site is definitely not a OnePlus property. OnePlus have since confirmed it’s not authorised by them, and further the site’s operator is using the OnePlus name without permission.
The site proclaims it’s time for OnePlus, then admits “we need your help” and asks you to register your interest. “The more people we get on board, the sooner we’ll bring OnePlus down under”, it promises. Further, it also seeks expression of interest from retailers who want to sell the phone.
Firstly, the domain name appears to be registered to an individual rather than OnePlus, according to the WhoIs record. Now, this isn’t in itself cause for concern – that individual may be acting as a local agent for OnePlus in an attempt to drum up interest.
Of more concern is that the website appears to hosted on a free hosting platform named weebly. OnePlus has its own web hosting infrastructure and really shouldn’t need to find a free Australian web host. Given this, you should probably be a little careful with the information you submit lest it fall into nefarious hands.
Even if OnePlus were looking at the Australian market, it’s worth remembering that, over three generations of flagship phones, OnePlus is yet to produce a handset that supports all Australian 4G/4G+ bands. That’s needed before the phone comes to Australia, lest any distributor wind up with some pretty upset customers.
We asked the site’s operator to get in touch with us, it seems that while Simon is not operating with OnePlus’ blessing, perhaps he has the best of intentions. Simon claims to have sent a formal proposal to OnePlus, but it seems that OnePlus might not have received it, or perhaps they’re not entertaining the idea.
We approached Carl Pei at OnePlus about all this, and his reply was fairly succinct:
https://twitter.com/getpeid/status/795897870918381573
We’d love to see OnePlus come to Australia and embrace our LTE bands, but only time will tell whether it’s this effort that brings OnePlus here, or whether they decide to do it themselves in the future.
It would be in Australia if our telcos didn’t have to be special and use uncommon frequencies.