The OnePlus One looks a fantastic phone – high specifications and a low price, both beating the Google Nexus 5. But I’m not going to buy one now, even though I was very, very interested.

For those unaware, OnePlus is a new Chinese phone company (but another one, named Oppo, is behind it) but one that doesn’t want to compromise – hence the high specifications. The phone is quite a monster too with a 5.5″ screen (getting perilously close to being a “phablet”) with a 1920 x 1080 resolution. A fast quad processor is on board along with 3GB of memory. It runs the CyanogenMod version of Android and comes in various colours, and both 16GB and 64GB models. You can pick up the 16GB model for £239 or the 64GB version at £269.

There’s no SD card expansion, though, and the phone isn’t water proof, unlike most being released at the moment (so not quite the “no compromise” that is promised).

Since releasing details of the phone they’ve whipped up quite some hype and have done so by doing something that more and more companies are doing these days – slow releases via invitations. In this case they’re regularly running competitions to “win” a handful of invites (with many, many thousands of people entering). One, quite controversial one, made people smash their existing phone (and only if you had one from an exclusive list – all recent phones and all worth more than the OnePlus One) for an invite.

These invites simply give you 24 hours to purchase one – the option to buy is all you actually win. The thing is, they’ve been doing this for months now. The full release should have occurred already but, for whatever reason, hasn’t happened. And still more competitions.

And I’m tired of it now – there’s only so much you can lead your customers on. And I’m not alone – their forum is full of people feeling the same. OnePlus has found that this kind of promotion can only work for so long and they’ve pushed those boundaries too far. So I’ve given up waiting and I’ll look forward to the next Nexus phone release later in the year.