OnePlus‘ success was nothing short of a miracle. In an overly saturated smartphone market dominated by Samsung and Apple, a no-name startup dared to challenge
OnePlus’ success was nothing short of a miracle. In an overly saturated smartphone market dominated by Samsung and Apple, a no-name startup dared to challenge the status quo with a premium smartphone at half the price. The company has grown a lot since then but, aside from a short drone stint and wireless earbuds, it hasn’t grown out of its mobile roots. Founder Pete Lau, however, thinks now is the right time to brings its magic to another saturated, and some may say dying, market: TVs.
There is no shortage of smart TVs. In fact, almost every new premium TV these days have some “smart” feature or another, from Internet streaming to integration with smart assistants. Lau, however, thinks TVs, even smart ones, are all still too traditional and that there’s a missed opportunity to truly rethink the TV.
Speaking to Business Insider, Lau enumerates some of the advantages he believes the OnePlus TV will be able to offer. That ranges from casting photos and videos from smartphones, showing calendar events and departure times, and more. In other words, it would offer a seamless integration with smartphones and visual feedback for smart assistants.
Sounds familiar? That’s because we already have things like Amazon’s Echo platform, including the display-toting Echo Show. There’s also Google Home, Google Assistant, and Google Chromecast. There are even some smart TVs with Google Assistant built-in via Android TV. For Lau, however, those aren’t enough and wants to make the OnePlus TV the center of the household rather than as an extension of a smart speaker. The exec was also coy about which smart assistant will get to live inside that smart TV.
The big question is whether it will be able to perform the same trick it did in the smartphone market. After all, OnePlus wasn’t exactly known for some industry-leading innovation. It is best known, instead, for taking those existing innovations and packaging them in an affordable product. That said, if it is indeed able to pull that off without cutting corners on screen resolution the way it did with the OnePlus phones, it could very well make lightning strike twice indeed.
