Oppo, the Chinese handset maker that looks like they’re going to be the next HTC (and I mean that in a good way), has just announced the Pioneers Program. The company is asking people who love mobile technology more than life itself to submit a photo themselves, along with a small essay, for a chance to be one of the first 10 people to own the N1. Small catch, you have to pay $99 if you’re selected, but that’s far better than what the final retail price of the device.

Why is the N1 special? It’s not the first 5.9 inch phone, that honor goes to the just announced HTC One Max. It is, however, the first Android phone that I can think of to feature a 13 megapixel rotating camera. Instead of putting both a front and rear facing camera on a phone, Oppo decided to put one really high quality 13 megapixel sensor on the top of the device that you can swivel around. The rest of the phone is impressive too: Snapdragon 600, 2 GB of RAM, and full CyanogenMod support, though details are pending on how exactly that’ll work.

Circling back to my bold claim that Oppo is becoming the new HTC, by that I mean they’re becoming a company known for listening closer to their users. Oppo’s Android customizations, called “Color”, were first known as “Fire Fly” on the Oppo Find 5. Updates were being pushed out every other week, and Oppo developers were chatting away in their online forums, telling people what’s changed, what’s been fixed, and so on and so forth.

HTC used to be like that, but they lost their way in an attempt to catch Samsung.