OnePlus 12: What to Expect From the Next OnePlus Flagship
After the OnePlus 12 launched in China, the phone-maker announces a global launch, set for January.
The OnePlus 12 has launched in China, with small cosmetic upgrades, and big internal ones.
The OnePlus 12 launched in China on Dec. 5, giving fans in other countries a good idea of what to expect from OnePlus' next flagship phone. Now the company has revealed that both the OnePlus 12 and its lower-priced OnePlus 12R sibling will launch globally on Jan. 23. That's when we'll find out all the info on pricing and specs configurations for devices released outside China, which OnePlus has been keeping mum about.
This will be the first R-branded line of phones released outside India and China, showing that OnePlus is moving into the global market for midrange phones. With last year's OnePlus 11R priced at the rough equivalent of $480, the company will have a cheaper option to field between its premium-priced, top-end phones and its budget line, most recently the $300 OnePlus Nord N30 5G.
We do know the broad strokes regarding the hardware in the OnePlus 12: Most of the new phone's changes on its predecessor are internal, as it looks virtually the same as last year's OnePlus 11. The biggest external change is that the Alert Slider, the physical toggle to switch between mute, vibrate and ringer settings, has been moved from the right side to the left side. On the back of the white and green models, the circular disk around the cameras is translucent instead of shiny metal (the black retains last year's shiny finish on the disk).
There are also slight camera changes with the OnePlus 12, which boasts a sharper, 64-megapixel periscope 3x optical zoom telephoto camera (up from the 32-megapixel telephoto in the OnePlus 11). The new phone has a 50-megapixel main camera and a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera, similar to last year's handset.
Most of the OnePlus 12's improvements are internal. The phone is powered by Qualcomm's top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, which has performance improvements over last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 as well as on-device generative AI. OnePlus hasn't shared which ChatGPT-like generative AI features, if any, will be implemented in its new phone.
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OnePlus has also boosted the minimum storage to 256GB, which doubles the 128GB in the OnePlus 11. The baseline RAM has been improved to 12GB, up from 8GB. And the phone-maker has increased the maximum for both specs to 1TB of storage and 24GB of RAM, an increase from the 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM in last year's OnePlus flagship. Don't get your hopes up yet, though -- it isn't certain this configuration will be offered outside China.
OnePlus is pushing the margins for phone specs, and the OnePlus 12 outstrips rival premium phones in terms of hardware, like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, which tops out at 1TB of storage and 12GB of RAM. That may not translate directly to superior performance, as Samsung's phones often best OnePlus' numbers in benchmarks -- we'll wait to see if that trend persists when we review the OnePlus 12.
The OnePlus 12 has a 5,400-mAh battery, up from 5,000 mAh in its predecessor. Battery charging speeds on the OnePlus 12 have also been upgraded to 100 watts wired (the OnePlus 11's US version topped out at 80 watts) and 50 watts wireless. The latter is especially impressive, because most phones' wireless charging maxes out at 15 watts, though that likely means OnePlus 12 owners will have to buy a proprietary charger, as popular third-party models don't often rate above 25 watts.