Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OnePlus 12 Review: Better Than You Think!”.
All right now that we’re back down to earth. After all of that Vision, Pro launch stuff, I’ve had a chance to go back and repick up some of the things that I was testing that got like interrupted by that week of chaos and there’s some really good stuff, the Oppo findind X7 Ultra design. I really like more than I expected the Zenbook Duo. The full screen dual screen laptop for 2024 is kind of sick and there’s some other stuff. That is better than expected, but the one that stood out to me – maybe the most of the small, is this guy right here, the OnePlus 12.
This may have flown a little bit under the radar. I mean with everything that’s been going on, but it’s gotten some improvements from last year and it is priced very competitively matter of fact. Let’S just start with that $ 7.99, and you also get a free upgrade to the 16 gigs of RAM half terabyte model. For that price, if you pre-order it’s literally already marked down to that on Amazon, so I’ll have a link below Flagship price. Yes, but when it’s competing theoretically against some of the ult phones, 1,000, 1200 $ 1,300, then suddenly it’s kind of in the category of uh.
Dare I say, Flagship killer, so look it’s nearly the same on the outside. They found what they like and they’re, keeping it consistent same shapes same camera bump Circle that kind of melts into the side. With these neural details around it, it’s still Gorilla Glass, 5.
On the back and there’s a new set of colors and textures, but in general you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s nearly the same as last year, or maybe you wouldn’t, but don’t let that fool you up front. This screen is, I think, the biggest noticeable physical difference from last year. It gets way brighter up to 1,600 nits outdoors and it’s hitting crazy numbers now: 4,500 nits Peak HDR brightness. Basically, it’s super impressive and extremely readable outdoors and in any light, but it also gets extremely dim too now. I don’t like that. It’S this curved over the edges, like you, can see the light fall off and the extra Reflections that come with that, but basically from corner to corner this 6.8 in 1440p ltpo Pro xdr display is a real upgrade over last year. So then, the rest of the upgrades to this phone are definitely a case of a bunch of little changes, all like stacking up on top of each other to equal a large difference from last year. Does that make sense like that’s that’s what smartphones are nowadays. I remember reviewing the OnePlus One and then the OnePlus 2, the next year and just the gigantic total shift big Direction.
Changes between those two phones. Nowadays, it’s just about like finding a bunch of clever little things and stacking a bunch of little improvements on top of each other, just make the user experience a little better. So obviously, if you’re going to be a Flagship killer, you got to have the newest chip inside.
So it does it’s the Snapdragon 8 gen 3, not that you’ll notice a whole ton of difference side by side with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phone. But this phone does have much better cooling as well, so it’s giving them some Headroom to play with slightly boosted clock speeds and it’s benchmarking right behind the gaming phones and the s24 ultra in real world use. That just means this phone is super fast, really, really fluid. It’S a smooth phone.
All the time like this is something one plus has done really well for a long time, even with high performance mode being off in the battery settings by default. But speaking of battery, this phone is definitely prioritizing battery super long battery life over, like Ultra high-end performance numbers and getting every last FPS out of the thing and as a result, this is a battery champ. First of all, you just start with a huge Capac. So it’s got one of the biggest batteries ever in a OnePlus Flagship.
It’S now a 5400 mAh battery, that’s bigger than a lot of other phones that are Ultras now and you better believe they’ve kept their trademark super fast charging. Also. So it’s technically a split battery. It’S dual 2700 Milow and it can juice up at 80 Watts wired.
This combination of huge battery awesome battery life prioritization of battery length and Ultra fast charging honestly makes this at least a contender to think about right now for battery champ of the Year matter. Of fact, if you just leave this phone and all of its out the boox settings, meaning not in high performance mode, just regular performance mode by default 1080p, which it is out the box and then just Auto frame rate, you can get two full light days. Out of this phone and then when you finally do get down to near zero, you can charge up to half battery in like 12 minutes.
If you want to go all the way, full, that’s only going to take about half an hour, it’s just so easy, and on top of all of that there is up to 50 W wireless charging. So if you’ve got a compatible Air vuk charger, you obviously have to buy that separately, but the OnePlus 11 didn’t even have wireless charging at all. So this is a gigantic Improvement. I almost want to get greedy and also wish that there was ch2 support for wireless charging, but I don’t know about you, but ch2 has felt like it’s off to a weird Rocky start, especially this year. It’S been surprisingly uncommon for any phones to support ch2 with the magnets and wireless charging. This is likely because there seems to be a 15 watt charging limit with ch2 for now. So if you want to do fast, wireless charging, you aren’t doing ch2 so yeah, no ch2 Wireless, no magnets, but very very fast charging, either way way better display better chip better battery and also now the cameras have gotten an upgrade. Now, I’m just going to say: cameras have been a relatively weak point for oneplus’s highest end phones for a while. Now we’ve always wanted to call them Flagship Killers, but people love cameras in Flagship phones.
It just hasn’t quite been able to match that highest level. I’D say now: it’s on the acceptable for a flagship level, but it’s not quite beating those yet and that’s still true about this phone now, this main sensor, it is actually very slightly different. Instead of the OnePlus open Sony, lyt t808 sensor, it is the lyt 808 sensor, it’s two more megapixels, it’s slightly wider aperture with the glass in front of it. Nevertheless, basically these OnePlus 12 photos aren’t going to shock you. I’Ve done some side, by-side comparisons. I’Ve even said this before it’s pretty good. Most of the time, it’s pretty sharp it’s a little contrasti than the OnePlus open. The HDR effect looks fine it just. It falls apart a little too quickly as soon as there’s adverse conditions, especially low light, but here’s the thing just for the context of that. It’S not that far behind we’ve already tested this, because we did the blind smartphone camera test last year with 20 of the best smartphone cameras in the world and in that test was the OnePlus open, so yeah there’s a lot of software involved with these cameras, but Basically, this extremely similar camera system in the standard light photo. It had the third highest ELO rating behind the two pixels, then in portrait mode it was also top 10, but in low light it was fifth from the bottom right around the Sony and below the Razer. So in summary, yeah the camera system is new, it does have new hardware, it has a new zoom and everything, but all together it is just like a lot of the other stuff, I’m showing you a little bit better than last year and that’s going to be Good enough for a lot of people actually most people most of the time, but if we want to consider it Flagship it’s just.
There is a little bit of a gap till it reaches the best, but I’ll tell you what they keep. They even more keep stacking. It up there are so many little things about using this OnePlus phone that I really like. Like I love that I can specifically Force any app. I want to be at whatever frame rate. I want like there’s literally a list of every single app on my phone and by default. You’Ve probably noticed all the mapping apps like ways and Google Maps they always even on every other 120 HZ phone. They always always override and run at 60 HZ.
But on this phone I can just fix it. Just give me all the frames please. I also love that this phone has an infrared blaster, one of the least common features in the world of a modern smartphone alongside like a headphone jack but yeah. It literally lets you turn on and off and control appliances remotely without having to find the remote like this TV here or or a stranger TV.
I don’t know it’s the little things. I love that this USBC Port not only supports basically the fastest charging. We’Ve ever seen on a phone in the US, but also also supports extremely fast data transfer speeds.
This is a USB 3.2 gen, 1 Port, the names and and generations are horrible. At this point, and Incredibly confusing, all you really need to know is that this has basically the best data speeds available from a USBC phone. So if you get the right cable, you can get large files like videos on and off of the device, real, quick and then a lot of you will probably love that this new screen supports High pwm dimming.
If you’ve never heard of this before it might not even matter to you, but there is a select fraction of the population that is specifically sensitive to the flickering that becomes visible at super low brightness. With a lot of these smartphone OLED displays to the point where, like it, causes headaches and eye fatigue, so some smartphones, including this one, are now addressing it with super high pulse width modulation. Basically, they still flicker on and off to get that lower, perceived brightness. But much much faster than the human eye can perceive 2,160 HZ in this phone’s case, so it still appears liquid, smooth at all brightness levels, which is awesome if you use your phone in the rain or when it’s wet. You probably already know how chaotic that feels. Like there’s memes about it like it, it just seems to kind of act on its own when there’s water droplets on the screen, but this phone claims that, with a new technology called aqua touch, it will totally remain as usable as ever, even with water all over The screen now, you might have seen the ads for it. It might sound ridiculous, but it actually works. It’S not perfect, obviously, but you can definitely feel that it’s dramatically more responsive to the point where I can actually type things on this wet phone screen where I just would not want to do that on any other phone without this kind of feels like magic. I am very impressed and then there’s even just extra little tiny things on top of that, like 12 or 16 gigs of fast Ram, that’s sick, futureproof, um, also Dolby Atmos with spatial audio support great. It also has great haptics, like all this tiny stuff adds up to be a great overall experience, but it’s not perfect right.
Let’S be real, no phone is perfect, but at least I can say about this phone that also the downsides are also a couple small things like I for one. I’Ve already talked about this, but I’m kind of over the curv displays so this one keeping that it’s not a deal breaker like you might even argue it’s a little more character to this phone in the world of 2024 smartphones, but it definitely has its downsides from The glare to the light falloff to the drop test, durability, but okay, fine they’ve gone curved, but then the fingerprint sensor underneath is also still a pretty average Optical sensor, doesn’t feel like it’s been upgraded in years and then for having the new Snapdragon 8 gen. 3 chip inside which a lot of other flagships do this phone, doesn’t really have any of the AI features like at all, and this is something I wanted to keep an eye on with all these phones coming out with this chip early in this year, which is Okay, Qualcomm puts out a new chip, small performance gains, small efficiency gains, but also huge new AI capabilities and this phone kind of just skipped the AI part. Now not that that’s a disaster, but those were some genuinely useful features.
The only one I found on this phone is in the photo editor and it’s called AI palettes, but it’s just like a color overlay. I don’t even really think there’s that much AI going on with this at all. So none of that generative fill crop correction. None of that magic, editor stuff, none of that auto, live transcription of phone calls or live translation of phone calls.
None of that, like speaker, labels in The Voice app none of the auto summaries in the browser. Anything like that, it’s just none of it. It’S not on this phone and then also random bug. I don’t know every time, I’m in the overlay browser and I reach up to my favorite little alert slider on the OnePlus phone and change modes.
It opens a search box like to find in page. I don’t know why they shouldn’t be connected, but it does it every single time, but maybe the biggest legitimate downside of this phone when you’re, comparing in it to the other flagships it’s going up against is it’s promised fewer years of software update support now, I’ve already Gotten a pretty major software update since I started testing this phone, big camera improvements and Bug, fixes and stuff like that great, but they are only promising only promising four years of software updates and 5 years of security updates. Now that’s fine! A lot of people only plan on keeping this phone for 3 or four years, maybe 5 years before I’m moving on to the next one. But in the world of the flagships, the pixel, the Samsungs of the world, even the iPhones, giving you six or seven years of software updates – this is just notably behind on that. Maybe OnePlus didn’t think it was worth the extra resources.
It doesn’t think people care that much about it to actually spend money on it to put the resources in, but yeah four or five versus seven. So is this a Flagship killer? Well, that just depends on your definition of a flagship. Doesn’T it? I think this is probably the most compelling thing about.
This phone is going to be how competitively priced it is because it’s very similar in a lot of ways to let’s call it s24 Ultra right, but I’ve seen this phone. The 16 gigs of RAM half terabyte version for $ 8.99 on their site, but if you pre-order it, you can get that for $ 7.99, but they’re also advertising it in a lot of places for $ 6.99, because they’re apparently just giving you a 100 bucks for A trade in of any phone in any condition, so, if you’re going with $ 6.99 and this phone starts at 1,300, bucks then yeah. That is a damn good deal. So yeah i’ just be looking at.
What’S important to you like. If I would say if camera is really important to you or if long-term software support is actually super high on your list or if any of those AI features looked really compelling or really interesting, that you’d want them, then you’d probably end up going with one of Those other flagships, but for everything else, like for performance for a great screen for incredible battery super fast charging Ultra smooth, like this phone is, is better than you probably think, oh and on top of all that OnePlus also around the same time, has released this phone Right here it looks almost the same, but this is the OnePlus 12r, and this is just a a budgeted TI budge, tized, a budget version, even more so than this phone already, just basically cutting a few Corners, a few corners on the camera right. It’S a Snapdragon, 8 Gen 2.
Instead of the Gen 3. There’S no wireless charging things like that: it’s uh IP 64, instead of ip65, whatever it’s a slightly trimmed down version, again: 500 bucks, I’m just saying so. If these phones weren’t already on your radar, they probably should be thanks for watching catch. You guys in the next one peace .