OnePlus have been slowly teasing us with leaks and hints of the upcoming release of their first phone, the OnePlus One. Finally it seems that they have told us all they are going to before release and have started the countdown to the release date.
Just hours after announcing Canada and the USA as the final two release countries OnePlus changed the landing page of OnePlus website to show a countdown which demonstrates that the OnePlus will be announced on Wednesday 23rd April at 4pm AEST. They then proceeded to post on their forums (how they do all their announcements) a countdown competition thread in a last ditch effort to increase awareness and interest in the OnePlus One. Every 50th post on their forums receives a OnePlus travel mug, and the 5,001st, the 10,000th, and 50,000th posts receive a OnePlus One.
One the flip side of the coin there’s a feeling of disappointment amongst Australians, when the final two release countries were announced.
As you can see, Australia is nowhere to be seen. While the image does state that these are the final “release countries and regions” and one could read into “regions” that Hong Kong could be our region, with Hong Kong acting as a major shipping hub for the Asia Pacific region – Google Play ships their hardware out of Hong Kong. But, my realistic hat is telling me that this is most likely referencing the UK, because the UK is a collection of countries, or a region if you will.
Fortunately, here in Australia we’re used to missing out on product releases and have worked out many ways around these area restrictions. Ausdroid have posted in the past on how to get devices like the Chromecast into the country before, or you could wait to see if importers like Mobicity start to stock the phone. But, if not, on Wednesday the 23rd, if you’ve decided that the OnePlus is your next phone, it will be time to apply that to shipping a OnePlus One here. Personally I am going to use either ShipItTo or Comgateway but either way it’s time for us all to get our mail forwarders sorted out so that we too can experience the OnePlus One.
Will you go to the trouble of using a mail forwarder or will you simply skip it and buy a phone available here?
