OnePlus 12, the Flagship Killer of 2024, has several exciting features. OnePlus has improved the overall performance and efficiency of its latest smartphone, which is powered by a high-performing SoC with a new cooling system. All these features, performance, and efficiency come with just a $799 price tag.
In this article
Features | Design | Display | Shooters | Customizable refresh rate | IR blaster | Aqua Touch | Alert Slider | Performance | Gaming | Cooling system | Battery optimization | Connectivity | Sound | OxygenOS 14 | Colors and Variants
Get the $1,300 Galaxy S24 Ultra’s Performance only at $799 with the OnePlus 12
Features
OnePlus 12 has incorporated several new features that may blow your mind. Being a $799 smartphone, OP 12 offers a flagship-level user experience. These are the things you may want to know before getting the OnePlus 12.
Design
Starting with the design, OnePlus finally found its sweet spot when it comes to design. The circular chrome-railed camera module melts on the aluminum frame. Has Corning® Gorilla® Glass 5 at the back with a satin finish. This feels good in the hands. Clicky buttons and the Alert Slider are positioned nicely.
Display
OnePlus 12 has a 6.8-inch ProXDR display with LTPO (1B colors, 120 Hz, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and ~90.8% screen-to-body ratio). Resolution is 1440 x 3168 pixels (~510 ppi density). Supports 100% Display P3, 10-bit Color Depth. The screen is protected by Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus 2. In the box, the phone comes with a pre-installed screen protector as well.
Here is something interesting, the display can generally go up to 1,600 nits brightness, but it can also go up to 4,500 nits HDR brightness whenever needed. On a bright sunny day, this display is incomparable. Not only does the OP 12 offer great brightness, but the screen also dims down to 70 nits with 2,160 Hz PWM dimming. This prevents users from experiencing nausea and/or fatigue while using the phone for a long time in a low-light condition. PWM dimming keeps the color accuracy intact even in a completely dark room. Popular flagships also use PWM dimming but at 480 Hz (approximately). OnePlus did a solid here.
Shooters
OnePlus 12 has a partnership with Hasselblad for their primary shooter. Good image quality is ensured by OnePlus if not better. The selfies are sometimes washed out with over-exposure, but the portraits are nice to look at. Night photography offers good color accuracy. However, videos suffer from focusing if there is a sudden change in the lighting. Apart from that, video stability is decent.
Primary shooter
OnePlus 12 has a 50 MP Sony LYT-808 wide-angle sensor as the primary camera (f/1.6, 23 mm, 1/1.43″, 1.12 µm, multi-directional PDAF, and OIS), 64 MP 3X periscope telephoto camera with 120X digital zoom (f/2.6, 70 mm, 1/2.0″, 0.7 µm, PDAF, and OIS), and 48 MP ultra-wide camera with 114° FOV (1/2.0″, 0.8µm, and PDAF). The Op 12 also has an Accu-spectrum Light-color Identifier, a 13-channel multi-spectral sensor, to identify light conditions around you. There is an anti-glare coating on the primary camera. OnePlus states related to the anti-glare coating that “ALC anti-glare coating and higher FWC, ensures razor-sharp, richer photography.” The shooters offer Hasselblad Color Calibration, Dual-LED flash, HDR, panorama,
Video: 8K@24fps, 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30/60/240/480fps, Auto HDR, gyro-EIS, and Dolby Vision.
Selfie shooter
OnePlus 12 has a 32 MP wide-angle (f/2.4, 21 mm, 1/2.74″, and 0.8 µm) selfie camera. Features include Auto-HDR, panorama, Video: 4K@30fps, 1080p@30fps, and gyro-EIS. Features also include face unlock, Nightscape Selfie, Selfie HDR, Time-lapse, Dual-View Video, and Screen Flash.
Customizable Refresh Rate
In most of the flagship smartphones Waze, Google Maps, and a few apps do not support higher refresh rates. OnePlus 12 comes with a customizable refresh rate. This allows you to choose a refresh rate from 60 Hz, 90 Hz, or 120 Hz based on your preferences for specific apps. Apart from the customizable refresh rate, OP 12 also comes with a dynamic refresh rate from 1 Hz to 120 Hz. How cool is that!
IR Blaster
The IR blaster is a great feature to have on your smartphone. You can use your smartphone to turn up the volume of your TV or control the temperature of the AC without searching for the remotes.
Aqua Touch
OnePlus 12 has a customized display chipset with the HyperTouch algorithm to trigger Aqua Touch. Aqua Touch allows you to use your phone seamlessly even if there is water on the screen. The fingerprint sensor and all other touch-based operations work smoothly due to Aqua Touch. You will be able to use your phone on a rainy day without experiencing any weird touch-related behavior of the phone. Flagship phones, such as Galaxy S24 Ultra and iPhone 15 Pro Max often have issues with touch sensitivity when the phone is wet. Per OnePlus, Aqua Touch is 90% accurate. However, OnePlus does not encourage you to swim with OP 12 in a pool even though OP 12 comes with Aqua Touch and IP65 certification for water and dust resistance.
Alert Slider
The Alert Slider is probably the best feature OnePlus offers to their smartphones. Alert Slider lets you choose between different alert modes, such as Ringer, Vibration, or Silent. You can even check the status of your current alert mode by seeing or simply touching the position of the slider.
Performance
OnePlus has earned the title “Flagship Killer” for providing flagship-phone-like performance on their smartphones with a lower price tag. The performance of the OP 12 is way better with the Trinity engine, which communicates with different parts of the device simultaneously. Trinity engine performs tasks including preloading apps based on your use case, closing apps that have not been used for a while, defragment memory, and so on. We have some data to compare the performance of the OnePlus 12 and the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Benchmark 6 Multi-core scores
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: 7,249
OnePlus 12: 5,368
Benchmark 6 GPU scores
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: 15,134
OnePlus 12: 14,175
The above scores show that OnePlus 12, being a $799 phone, performs really close to a $1300 flagship phone having the same SoC under the hood, Snapdragon® 8 Gen 3 Mobile. OP 12 also has fluid animation while switching between apps, opening/closing an app, and scrolling through apps. Regarding this fluid performance and animation, OnePlus states “seamlessly blending flagship hardware with state-of-the-art software optimizations, OnePlus 12 is smooth beyond belief.”
Gaming
Gaming on the OnePlus 12 is actually on another level. Powered by the Snapdragon® 8 Gen 3 Mobile Platform, which includes Qualcomm® Kryo™ CPU and Adreno™ 750 GPU, OP 12 handles intense games flawlessly. The LPDDR5X RAM and Trinity engine also help to enhance gaming performance.
For gaming, OnePlus included a secondary core processor, Pixelworks X7, which implements hyper-rendering. Hyper-rendering increases game resolution, adds additional frames (via adaptive frame booster) to the gameplay, and extends the dynamic range.
Cooling system
OnePlus 12 has aerospace-grade thermal performance gel with the largest vapor cooling chamber on a smartphone in 2024. OP 12 has a 38,000 mm2 heat dissipation area to release heat from the front and back of the phone. There is an in-built power management chip with 14 temperature sensors to keep the battery and the entire phone cool and optimized.
Battery optimization
OnePlus 12 has a 5,400 mAh Li-Po (dual-cell 2,700 mAh, non-removable) battery. OnePlus optimized their battery consumption really well in OP 12. You can get up to 47 hours with minimum-medium usage, 19 hours of YouTube playback, 10 hours of GPS navigation and maps, or 3 hours of Genshin Impact gaming with stable frame rates on a single charge. You can squeeze around 72 hours with a full charge while running up to 6 chosen apps in the background. However, OnePlus stated that “due to factors such as different app strategies, machine aging, network environment, and personal usage habits, the experience may vary.”
If that is not enough, you can recharge OP 12’s battery from 0-50% in 12 minutes and 0-100% in 26 minutes with Smart Rapid Charge via 80W wired charging. You can also charge OP 12 with a 50W wireless charger (does not support Qi-wireless charging). Surprisingly, the OnePlus 12 comes with a 100W charging break in the box.
Apart from that, OnePlus also mentioned that after using OP 12 for 4 years daily, you may left with a 4,350 mAh (approximately) battery capacity. Even with this battery capacity, OP 12 will provide a full-day battery life without any issues.
Connectivity
OnePlus 12 comes with 5G connectivity. On top of that, you will get WiFi7 (Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/6e/7, tri-band, and Wi-Fi Direct) and Bluetooth 5.4. Therefore, OP 12 is just as good as any other flagship smartphone in this department. Worth mentioning that, OP 12 has antennas on all sides of the phone to ensure seamless 5G and WiFi connectivity under all circumstances.
This phone also has several sensors including GPS (L1+L5), GLONASS (G1), BDS (B1I+B1c+B2a), GALILEO (E1+E5a), QZSS (L1+L5), and NavIC, along with NFC.
Sound
OnePlus 12 supports Dolby Atmos with spatial audio. Sound quality is better than the previous OnePlus models. However, there is room for improvement.
OxygenOS 14
OxygenOS 14 has given OnePlus 12 many added functionalities. You can swipe up to trigger one-handed mode, press and hold the fingerprint sensor to access the quick launch menu (also can use assigned actions), lift the phone closer to your ear to automatically answer calls, and so on. When you use a full-screen app, OxygenOS 14 reduces the volume and vibration intensity for calls and notifications. OxygenOS 14 instantly kills apps that use too much battery. There is anti-peeping, which keeps your notification brief if the front camera of OP 12 detects someone who is looking at your screen (might use a bit more battery juice, but negligible). Sadly, there are no AI features included in this phone yet, even though Snapdragon® 8 Gen 3 Mobile supports Qualcomm® Hexagon™ NPU with “virtual assistants, GPT chatbots, stable diffusion, LLM, and more with upgraded Micro Tile Inferencing.”
Colors and Variants
Color options include Flowy Emerald, Silky Black, and Silver. OnePlus 12 has 4 variants to choose from. They are: 256 GB 12 GB RAM, 512 GB 16 GB RAM, 1 TB 16 GB RAM, and 1 TB 24 GB RAM. Supports UFS 4.0.
Please note that you will be getting 4 years of software and 5 years of security updates on this device.
Wrapping up
OnePlus 12 can be your day-to-day smartphone if you prefer productivity and performance over brands at a reasonable price. This phone comes with hands full of features. However, AI integration would have been great. Nevertheless, as a Flagship Killer, the OnePlus 12 is the best.
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