There was recently confirmation that OPPO and OnePlus share a lot in common, so much so that they are releasing the same phones with different brand badges, even if for different markets. But it looks like that won’t be a strategy that the latter will be adopting for clamshell-style foldables. Not only because the OPPO Find N3 Flip will be available outside of China, but also because that’s not the brand’s target audience.
In an interview video posted by YouTube channel Unbox Therapy, OnePlus CEO and OPPO chief product officer Pete Lau says that “the target audience for the first generation folding phone of OnePlus are more like the business elites and technology elites”. He goes on to list a few jobs which one would easily associate with high income earners, before saying that these don’t match with the target users of flip phones.
The caveat is that Lau ends that statement with “at this stage, we don’t have the plan to launch a flip phone”. So there’s still a chance that the company’s position on this will change in the future. It wouldn’t even need to produce one completely on its own, as its increasing homogeny of both OPPO and OnePlus suggests that they could get away with another rebadging.
On one hand, the decision makes some degree of sense. Book-style foldables generally come with a higher price tag compared to clamshells. But on the flip side, it can be argued that the more affordable nature of clamshells would make them sell better. At least such were the figures in South Korea, according to Yonhap News, which reported that pre-order figures for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 and Fold5 were split 70% to 30%, respectively.
(Source: Unbox Therapy / YouTube, Yonhap News)
