The past year has seen a lot of new brands appear in the field of smartphones. While most incumbents like HTC, Sony seem to be struggling to make a profit in the increasingly aggressive smartphone business, there are plenty of mainland Chinese startups who think they can do better. Companies like Oppo, Xiaomi and now OnePlus are doing a David and Goliath recreation in the Android smartphone market. OnePlus is the latest entrant into the ring and its first shot at an Android smartphone was the cleverly titled OnePlus One. The phone had some rough edges, but overall it was a surprisingly good first product from a brand no one had heard of, even in early 2014.

This year OnePlus has started its second entry by launching the OnePlus Two. What the company lacks in interesting product names, though, it seems to have made up for in its ability to design and manufacture a pretty cool mid-to-high-end Android smartphone. The new phone’s pricing and specs list means the OnePlus 2 covers a wide range of the Android phone market, targeting the premium mid-range right up to almost flagship phones from other manufacturers.

OnePlus even plays into this by calling the Two a ‘flagship killer of 2016′, meaning it has specs that are equal to or better than phones launching in the coming months. So is there any truth to OnePlus’ bombast? Well yes and no. OnePlus operates on a unique business model where it sells incredibly low volumes in small batches, sometimes as few as a few thousand phones. They do it with a reservation system in which potential buyers register and wait to receive an invitation to buy the company’s phones. While many may balk at this somewhat unorthodox process, it’s no different than people physically queuing for days outside the Apple store, waiting for the latest iDevice.

What this process allows OnePlus to do is sell phones with components that are not yet available on the scales necessary for giants like Samsung and Apple to put out phones that sell a few million units a month. This means that for the price you pay for them, OnePlus phones are a few months to nearly a year ahead of the curve, technologically speaking, compared to the competition.

While in the desktop space, innovation and even advances in clock speed have slowed to an incremental pace, in smartphone hardware, a year is a lifetime. This means that OnePlus phones are, technologically at least, as good as anything you can buy from Samsung or HTC in the next six months. The problem is that a high-end phone is much more than what’s inside. Build quality, fit and finish, and materials also matter just as much, if not more. This is where the OnePlus falls down, with a plasticky body and plasticky back that’s anything but high-end. This can be partly remedied with the large selection of OnePlus 2 covers, but people who want a truly flagship feel from their smartphone will have to look elsewhere.