First OnePlus owners would have smashed their old phones

It looks sleek, thin and premium, but its price is anything but the latter. OnePlus One smartphone is creating a buzz online as a budget smartphone killer since it was rolled out on April 23, and people are definitely hungry for it.

During its first launch, One smartphone was initially available in countries such as Austria, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Hong Kong, U.S and UK.

Earlier, it was reported that the product is being made available worldwide in the second quarter of 2014, but the company admits it is facing production challenges with the unexpected growing demand for the smartphone.

“Over the past few days, we have been frantically adjusting our production schedule to make sure that as many people possible can buy the One, as soon as possible,” the company writes in its forum.

The company reveals that there is much higher demand for the 64GB in Sandstone Black model than the 16GB in Silk White, so they adjusted their production.

“What we’ve done is dramatically increase the amount of 64GB Sandstone Black models in our production plans, while producing 16GB Silk White as long as they don’t delay the time to market for Sandstone Black,” it says.

The production schedule was revealed as follows: readily available is 100 units for phone smashers; first batch of invites for 16GB Silk White will be from mid to late May; 64GB Sandstone Black in early June and boosted general availability later in June without much trouble getting invites. The new smartphone is presently being offered to lucky individuals who get invites, before it goes out on public sale all over the world.

You heard it right: Phone smashers are the luckiest. It turns out there’s a contest on One phone smashing, which simply requires a video of the smartphone being smashed. The company gets to choose 100 video entries that stood out, with the contestant permitted to buy the smartphone for only $1 as well as three invites to buy the phone.

OnePlus One boasts of specifications such as 5.5-inch IPS LCD full-HD display, 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, 3GB RAM, 3100mAh battery, 4G LTE connectivity, 13MP rear camera and 5MP front-facing camera. It runs on an almost-raw version of Android. OnePlus partnered with Oppo, an electronics manufacturer, to produce the said smartphone.

Reported estimated prices for the OnePlus One smartphone are $299 for 16GB model with no contract and unlocked, and $349 for 64GB model.