Google’s Cardboard VR headset is cheap and affordable, with its price usually somewhere between $20 and $30. Granted, it’s not as stylish as Samsung’s Gear VR, Facebook’s Oculus Rift, or Carl Zeiss’s VR One headsets, but some consumers care more about functionality at a budget-friendly cost and will sacrifice style for function.
Well, Chinese manufacturer OnePlus has been in the news with its OnePlus One smartphone that sold at an affordable price ($322, unlocked) with its cinematic-quality 4K video recording (not mere Ultra HD, which some have confused with quality). Now, the company is back with a Google Cardboard clone giveaway of sorts.
The new giveaway means that users can get the Cardboard VR clone for free, but there is just one caveat: you’ll have to pay shipping, which is around $5 for American customers. Just to inform you, OnePlus’s Cardboard VR model contains the latest tweaks to Google’s Cardboard version unveiled at Google I/O last month, with a thicker design for durability, 20% reduction in width, and a new dirt/oil-resistant film that’ll make it more sweat and human interaction-resistant than before. OnePlus’s Cardboard VR will work with smartphones up to 6 inches in display size.
OnePlus says that the company’s decision to sell its Cardboard VR clone for OnePlus says that the company’s decision to sell its Cardboard VR clone for $0 plus shipping is “an initiative. plus shipping is “an initiative.
We aren’t making any money by offering OnePlus Cardboard. In fact, we are losing money with each one.” The goal of the company is to increase its fan base, get some recognition with consumers who would otherwise not even know much about OnePlus.
As you can imagine, this deal is too good to pass up. How good of a deal is it? It’s such a good deal that OnePlus has already run out of Cardboard VR clone models for purchase. This doesn’t mean that OnePlus won’t have another giveaway, but the current Google Cardboard VR giveaway is out of stock for now.
OnePlus’s giveaway is on the heels of the company’s announcement of its OnePlus Two smartphone, scheduled to debut in a matter of weeks. The OnePlus Two will feature a USB Type-C port and charging, an octa-core, Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor (v. 2.1), and other industry-standard features (with the company’s DCI 4K video recording likely to return).
OnePlus says that its OnePlus Two will not have the affordable $322 that its first-generation model had.
