New year, new phones
The OnePlus 12 debuted in China this month. In the next month, at the start of 2024, the phone will see the world in full view, that is, globally!
The phone is dubbed to be “smooth beyond belief” and retains a familiar design as with the OnePlus 11. As a flagship, it of course has your usual flagship characteristics, mainly the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8-series chip (the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in this case), a 120Hz AMOLED screen, and cameras that can challenge DSLRs. As always, the Hasselblad collaboration is there to help improve image quality and scene recognition.
The phone’s launch coincides with the brand’s 10-year anniversary. In China, a special video was created with founder and CEO Pete Lau and co-founder Kinder Liu to discuss the future of OnePlus and how it always aims to create premium and user-centric technology that challenges market conventions and the status quo. It is in their Never Settle spirit.
“Back in 2013, we were a small team, but we had really big ideas about building better products,” said Pete Lau, Founder of OnePlus. “Even though so much has changed since our humble beginnings, just as much has stayed the same. Regardless of how the world has changed around us, our essence as OnePlus remains the same. As long as we hold on to our ‘Never Settle’ ethos, OnePlus will always stay true to its roots.”
The OnePlus 12 features an impressively large 24GB Physical RAM and up to 1TB storage. We can’t wait to see that phones with bigger RAM than most computers dominating 2024, that’s going to be so sweet. Another feature OnePlus brought back was wireless charging which was questionably (and rightfully so) omitted from the OnePlus 11. The phone retains its IP65 water/dust resistance.
As for its display, the OnePlus 12 features a 6.82″ LTPO3 AMOLED panel with 120Hz refresh rate. Green lines are OnePlus’ kryptonite and so to avoid that, they asked BOE to make the displays instead of Samsung. That’s another blow to the company’s manufacturing and quality after its foundries just could not make chipsets right.
This BOE-manufactured panel is said to crank up to 4,500nits of peak brightness for HDR content and 1,600nits on normal use. If you get blinded that’s because you cranked the display to max. You might also need to see if the battery is going down fast. The panel also boasts 2,160Hz of PWM dimming, a feature that reduces flicker (the black bars your cameras see when recording a phone) which reduces eye strain.
There are three cameras once again. a 50MP Sony Lytia LYT808 adapted from the OnePlus Open, a 64MP periscope camera with 3x optical zoom and 6x lossless magnification, and a 48MP Ultrawide with a Sony IMX581 sensor. Yes, Hasselblad’s colour calibration is here to stay.
The phone features a 5400mAh battery with 100W wired charging and 50W wireless. That’s the largest battery currently seen on any OnePlus phone and it’s only going to be larger from here, as 5000mAh is the standard for any type of phone.
Like the OnePlus Nord 3 we reviewed, the OnePlus 12 also has an IR Blaster. It connects via a fast USB-C 3.2 port and also features Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. NFC, 5G, and the optical fingerprint reader are here to stay. As with OnePlus tradition, it lacks a MicroSD Card slot.
The phone is offered in Silver, Emerald Green, and Midnight Black (color names not official globally). In China, the OnePlus 12 is priced initially at CNY 4,299 (~PHP 33.4K) for the 12/256 variant. The global variant of the phone launches January 23rd.
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