OnePlus 12 Review - Phone of the Year ALREADY?

It's easy to get caught up in Samsung's new cycle this time of

year

, but I think the recently announced OnePlus 12 deserves just as much attention. I'm going to say something a little crazy here, but I think this

phone

will be available in mid-January 2024. It

already

has a very good chance of becoming the top three smart

phone

s of the entire

year

, let me explain first of all. I mean it comes with a proper box. I mean it's mostly a waste of space since this whole insert at the top is filled with brochures afterwards. brochure as if we were still in 2002, but under the phone there is not only a USBC cable but also a top-of-the-line 100W charging brake that sweetens the deal, and the phone also comes with a pre-applied screen protector, which no longer It's something that's assumed and as we get into this phone, I just want you to keep the price in mind because while I'll be comparing it to phones like the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra and the iPhone 15 Pro.

Max, unlike phones that They cost $1,200 plus this one costs $799 and so not only does it pass, it absolutely nails the six core pillars of a great smartphone design battery screen software speed and camera, but that one comes with a problem so here's what it looks like the phone and to be honest I love the confidence with which they designed it. You have this chrome rail on the sides that then melts into the back. You've got a matte marble texture that feels a little tacky but looks Ultra Premium and then a separate glossy marble on the cameras, which is even combined with a bit of shimmer, this thing has the character of one of those crazy Edition phones.

Collector we unboxed in the rarest phones videos, but it's not a plus like previous OnePlus phones, it's nicely curved. Rounded, comfortable, and has an alert slider at the top, which I see as appealing as a way to turn off the phone while it's in your pocket, but I don't think I'd ever use it with the phone in my hand since. there's no way like that, yeah there you go, it's easier than just tapping a virtual button on the screen, however the phone actually solves a separate problem I've been having, you should have tried it at some point using a touch screen when your screen or your fingers are wet and you noticed that even a single drop of water is enough to make your phone think there is another finger on the screen and all hell to get loose.

Well, the OnePlus 12 has Aqua Touch, which is a custom display chipset that pays very close. attention and I can differentiate between the two now it can still cause occasional screen twitches like that, this is not your new diving buddy and sometimes the fingerprint scanner doesn't work when the phone is wet, but it's there in a 90% to be able to ignore it. that water that, as someone who catches up on the world's latest Pokemon news while taking a shower, feels so liberating, it's like we're finally, after 10 years, really getting the full benefit of our phones being waterproof. water, thanks Miler, the only thing that stops this.

The thing that makes the design absolutely top notch for me is that the phone is not the prettiest from the front, the top corners look a bit like ears due to the way the screen curves to the sides and also you have that classic frustratingly oversized bottom bezel. I get a little more each year as more and more competition starts to take it out, but now is where the phone starts to really separate itself with battery pill number two, it seems like battery life is one of those things that almost all manufacturers consider. I'm just afraid of giving you too much, they'll gladly give us twice the screen resolution or five times the camera resolution we need, but not the battery, maybe companies are worried that you won't keep updating if your battery stays good or because God forbid.

They may have to make the design 0.1mm thicker to accommodate it, regardless the 1plus 12 is one of the few standouts and I rate it for the fact that it comes with a 5,400mAh battery. They have gone from Z wireless charging capability to now with extremely high support. 50W wireless charging that can fully charge that huge battery in under an hour, although it requires a dedicated OnePlus charging stand to get that speed, so I'll probably stick with my standard CH charger, it has reverse wireless charging to top up the your friends' phones, but you also know that the 100-watt charging Breck we have in the box can take your phone from 0 to 100 in 26 minutes, so compared to current iPhones or even new Samsungs, The battery experience here is next level.

It's all topped off with a very important final extra layer on battery health, realizing that this is very fast charging and for such a powerful phone with the potential to generate a lot of heat, the company has also incorporated a Separate power management chip that effectively decides at any given time. time using data from 14 temperature sensors around the phone plus one in the charging block as well, actually, exactly at what speed to charge to ensure the battery stays at the optimal temperature to receive the charge quickly but also not get as hot as To damage the battery now, every battery loses capacity over time, but OnePlus says that this mechanism, combined with some very cool software tricks I'm using, makes battery deterioration the slowest it's ever been, which which means even after 4 years of daily use they say this phone will still perform like a new phone with a capacity of 4350 Mah so it will still easily last a full day which is absolutely crazy if true as well yeah, I mean, if you want to watch an update video on 4 years from now, a channel sub would be forever, but seriously, although it's obviously hard to test them on that and they're definitely giving the best of times, there are definitely reasons to believe that OnePlus knows how to optimize the battery efficiently.

I mean this. Something especially after a couple of weeks as it learns your patterns, it's the best battery life of any phone I've ever had my Sim on with really minimal standby consumption. You can leave this phone overnight and literally pick up where you left off the next day. in the morning and then you turn the thing on and you're greeted with the pillar 3 screen alone this phone breaks like 18 different smartphone display records on wongo it's a 120hz QHD plus resolution panel and what's more Importantly, a new pixel structure because you can have a lot of pixels, but it's also about how those pixels are organized and this blue diamond design is optimized for better contrast and readability.

You can tell, probably not. I mean, I put it next to other phones that use different designs and NOTHING, but To be fair, this arrangement also improves the longevity of the screen compared to many others. It has ltpo 3.0, which is the newest technology that allows phones to scale their refresh rates more precisely to match exactly what you're doing. It's about wasting as little as possible. energy as possible, but then you want to know the craziest thing: guess this phone's maximum brightness in nits. If you've been following phones for the past few months, you may have seen a pair capable of surpassing 2000 nits for the first time. the 1plus 12 can go up to 4,500 4,500 is an absolutely crazy number like I have never seen anything even remotely like it in my life, there is no television, no monitor, nothing, it is so bright that to be honest it will have absolutely no relation to your day. -Everyday phone use and you'll only reach for it while specifically watching high dynamic range content while outdoors, but you know if you end up in the scorching sun of the Sahara Desert with nothing but your OnePlus 12 and a pre-downloaded Mr Who the Boss video, well you'll get the full experience oh but there's another side to it too and I appreciate it probably more than as the phone screen dims as it goes below 70 nit.

Dial the phone. It's going to change to 2160HZ pwm dimming what am I talking about? Well okay, quick lesson, old phones used to have LCD screens, which is essentially a white backlight that shines on colored pixels and the way you change the brightness of that. LCD is simply reducing the power given to that backlight, but then we start to have these fancy OLED displays that are much richer and more vivid because each pixel is its own individual LED, but the problem is that if you try to dim an OLED on Se uses the same way to dim the LCD screen by simply reducing the power you put into the screen and then, because each pixel is responsible for color and brightness, it also hurts color reproduction at lower power levels.

As if their greens might start to look like greys. Many phones now use something called pwm dimming, which means that when your phone's screen is on, what really happens is that screen flickers much faster than your eyes can see and then as you reduce the brightness , its pixels aren't actually getting dimmer, but the gaps between the on and off states are getting wider. Your phone spends more time in the off state and therefore appears dimmer, so the problem was solved well, not because most Samsung and Apple do this. refreshing 240 times per second or 480 times per second, which, while fast, is not fast enough for your brain to not unconsciously detect some of this rapid flashing, so it can cause headaches and tension, especially at night, just before bed, so OnePlus has decided to use DC dimming at higher brightness levels where you don't risk ruining your colors and then when the brightness drops, pwm dimming but at 2160 times per second, the best of both worlds, and combined with a filter that reduces blue light at the hardware level, this is a screen that is visually exceptional and also very easy on the eyes and, in fact, it is also easier for us to film because It doesn't flicker constantly as the brightness decreases, and the screen is also protected by Gorilla Glass Victors 2, which while not the company's latest, toughest glass, is more than strong enough to theoretically survive a drop from a height of pocket without a case.

Do not try. Then you have software number four. This phone and its oxygen os4 are a real delight. I use it and I have a couple of complaints about it, but they're all just little aesthetic things, like for someone who decided square icons were the way to go and why in settings I have all the other options besides circles like how? in fact, you manage to get octagons and rhombuses from Squires, but not a circle. I have no idea and overall I don't think since OnePlus merged with Oppo the software has looked as good as before, I like the icons yes but also the menus. appd draw looks more like an Oppo phone than a OnePlus phone.

Look at this notification, the fact that the group name is cut off by the completely unnecessary arrow and icon covering part of the message, it just could be better. Fortunately, these complaints are only superficial because as soon as you dig a little deeper, I can hand it over to you. The software on this OnePlus 12 is one of the most useful and thoughtful Android skins I've ever come across in ways that have really made my life better, let's say you want to do a screen recording. You can now add your front camera footage to that stream, of course, when using the phone one-handed rather than having to input what can be quite clunky one-handed. mode, simply swipe up and each icon on the page appears.

This has become my default way of browsing now and quick launching, meaning that right from the fingerprint scanner, if you continue to hold, you can go straight to any app you want. You left behind any potential distractions along the way so I set mine up to do all the key work things that I tend to use frequently, plus it can even do things like start a new Google Doc and the software is just smart and does a lot of things. things. of smart things you don't think about, but the fact that you don't think about them means it's doing its job, like reducing the volume of your notifications and the intensity of your vibration when you're full screen in an app. because it knows that when you're in full screen you're looking at the screen anyway, so you don't need to be attacked and you probably don't want to be attacked when you lift the phone up to your ears, it will.

It will automatically answer an incoming call and alsoIt'll switch you from the phone's speaker to the headset to Fluid Cloud, which is basically another Dynamic Island clone, but hey, it lets you stay up to date with what's going on in a way that saves screen space and is still a nice feature. I just wish it worked for more apps, it seems to be pretty specific at the moment, but the phone does all this while also making sure that any apps I've downloaded don't misbehave, like I've had a couple of notifications pop up telling me that. Let's say Instagram is draining too much battery in the background and with one tap the phone will start to clamp down on them from now on, allowing them to run if they need to do something in the background, but not allowing them to take Mickey with them.

Satisfying enough, it's simply disciplining them on your behalf, and like all options with regards to customizing the look or feel of your phone, OnePlus simply hands it to you, no additional apps needed, even granular control over things like your status bar and its fingerprint scanning animations. The entire first day with this phone I was just browsing through the settings, there's a lot to do, there are a couple of interesting but probably unnecessary features like this shelf that OnePlus recommends you set as your swipe down option instead of your scroll bar. notifications, but yeah, I mean. There are more status things in the background that you check less frequently so I never felt like I needed instant access to them and the other is the anti-peeping notifications which, when you set them, use your front camera to see if anyone else other than you, they are also looking at your phone and if they are, they continue to send you notifications, but in a less revealing way.

A very good idea, but I don't think it's something I'll use. I mean, naturally, that's going to eat up a little bit of battery and I feel like it just requires a very basic level of awareness to know when someone is looking at your screen, but the big new addition that complements this whole software experience is basically the vibration motor. largest OnePlus has ever used, which means your phone can really boost the haptic sensation, so that when you type that, register your fingerprint for the first time, delete a photo, the phone feels like it responds to you in a way that you really feel the O, maybe I shouldn't delete it, oh and I have.

I didn't even talk about the best thing about this software, its great speed and that is pillar five, so the OnePlus 12 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chip, which is good, I mean, it is a very powerful chip, but it's also a flagship phone of 20204. I'm not surprised by this fact, what really excites me most is everything the company has done in this regard and I'm not even talking about the minimum 256GB of ultra-fast storage they give you or 12GB. of ultra-fast Ram. Look, what makes a phone really fast is partly hardware but also partly software.

Think of it as if your phone is a bunch of layers and every time you ask it to do something, a lot of those different layers have to talk to each other. to deliver an output like let's say you plug in your phone to charge it, the first thing you realize is charging is the hardware that the hardware communicates with the Linux layer, which is the Android baseline, which the Linux communicates with the Android layer and the Android layer communicates with the application layer to stimulate a response that you can see as that little lightning bolt symbol that becomes visible.

You know, people say that Apple's key advantage is that they build both software and hardware well. The reason it's so advantageous is that it means they can create really clear and efficient communication between these layers, which is why iPhones have been very smooth even when they weren't powerful and why they get a lot more battery life for every milliamp of physical battery they have compared to other phones, so OnePlus is trying to do the same. Same thing and they call it the Trinity Engine, instead of just focusing on making the top layer work and assuming the rest is taken care of, they are working across the board to create software that better understands the exact needs of the hardware and vice versa, allowing different parts of the phone to work more intelligently with each other so that your CPU only exerts exactly the amount of power it needs so that your RAM actually understands which apps to keep preloaded and ready for quick use at all times and which ones to close as soon as possible. soon you get out of them, so assuming you use the camera a lot, for example, it will open quickly and your phone's memory can be defragged to counteract the inevitable loss of performance that occurs in the long term, there is a lot of jargon and nonsense of marketing.

I'm going around in circles with all of this, but the important thing and what I can say for sure is that this is the fastest Android experience I've ever had and I've called many phones quickly before, but this is fast in a way that makes it easy. I feel like you're not even trying something that doesn't seem to matter how powerful Goden's androids have always lagged, you're browsing the Google Play Store, not here, everything loads so fast and the animation is so fluid and seamless that sometimes you almost forget. that you're actually switching between separate apps and all your phone usage starts to merge into one seamless but fluid experience and then for gaming it goes a step further, actually about five, this phone has a Co processor secondary called pixel.

Works more fluid and also extend the natural dynamic range of the game. and put all those things together, it's really crazy to see it in action, you can pick up an Android game from 10 years ago and the phone makes you feel like it was made yesterday and then at the other end of the spectrum when you find a game which

already

looks good, you can see it taking the visuals to another level and at the same time making absolute mincemeat. Hyper-rendering plus adaptive frame boosting equals happy gaming time. This phone can run any game at 120 frames per second, even if it's not originally designed for that's amazing, but there's more, there's a hyperdrive which is that your phone not only detects that a game is being played and tells your CPU GPU to move forward and power on, but rather the Android layer specifically understands what the exact needs of the game are at that moment. moment and communicating it very clearly to your chip, which may mean that at a less demanding moment your chip can relax again and cool down for a second only for when the action resumes again so that its temperatures are cool enough for your chip has the space to do it and it's all assisted by probably the most advanced calling system ever in a phone outside of those specialized gaming phones.

It has the largest vapor chamber in the industry, which is essentially a metal container containing a liquid that as the phone heats up, turns into a gas, cools again and condenses, plus it has a thermal performance gel aerospace grade to further aid heat conduction and in total, here's the shocking statistic for me, no less than 38,000 square mm of heat dissipation area spread over five layers. both the front and back of the phone need to be very clear, 38,000 sq mm considering the size of the phone is absolutely crazy and the benefit of these dissipation layers being on both the back and front of the phone allows you getting rid of the heat in two directions at the same time compared to most phones that only have one outlet and then the final cherry on top for this whole speed experience is Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 5.4 and then just the fact that the phone It has 360° antennas for 5G and Wi-Fi, which means you won't get a signal.

Interruption if you say move your phone horizontally to play games now, before we put all this together, we have to talk about the most controversial pillar, the cameras, and I say controversial because OnePlus doesn't have the best reputation when it comes to cameras and, in a way , when I use this phone I can see why, like at the beginning, the front camera is just mediocre and I don't mean mediocre because it softens the face a lot to make you look good. just washed out like it can make you look weirdly pasty and sometimes even overexposed indoors when it's not even that bright and then look how much the photo changes after you take it.

I mean, in some ways, it's impressive because there's a lot of processing, but because the OnePlus is doing very little of this processing in real time while you're photographing things, the shooting experience itself feels really unpolished and the photos don't turn out. They look good until you shoot them, which is part of the reason I find myself taking like three shots of each scene just because I'm not completely confident in having a shot that looks good and it's not just that because there's not a lot of processing in real time, the video suffers. See how while the iPhone on this?

The case looks like it really understands the scene and my face looks like OnePlus is just taking it as the exposure of the entire scene changes completely as the light around me changes. You'll notice that electronic image stabilization works for this. Ultra smooth Outlook which can be amazing when there is a lot of light, but without it the phone keeps trying to recreate it, but without the light information to be able to do it, so you get tons of strange artifacts and blurring, and finally the focus can sometimes also disappoints you, you may know that Samsung, for example, uses a laser to determine the focusing distance.

OnePlus doesn't really have that and while you probably won't notice it coming from another phone without it, I can feel its absence. so there are things that could be fixed and what bothers me about the recent OnePlus is that it seems that instead of fixing them, the company is simply trying to lean more on its partnership with Hasselblad as if that is somehow going to make it happen. better, I mean, this is what a Hasselblad camera looks like realistically, to what extent will that company be able to help you with your phone? There are very different things, okay, I realize I'm absolutely immersed in this, but it's because I care, it's because they are problems that I keep seeing on OnePlus phones and if they could focus on them, their phones could skyrocket in value without that costs no one anything and also because aside from these drawbacks this is actually a really good camera system, the hardware is a pretty big upgrade over the cameras on the OnePlus 11 in every way, it's actually very Similar hardware to the cameras on the latest OnePlus open similar main camera sensor same 48 megap Ultra wide same map 64 telephoto lens three times plus a coating that is applied to the main lens that reduces glare and apparently increases clarity even further and That's interesting because while I wouldn't say I was surprised by the operational camera setup, it was a different set of circumstances before testing the open OnePlus touted it as literally the best set of cameras. on a phone and also the phone was $1,700 so my expectations were here but the OnePlus 12 is a phone that is not only good but also amazing in all other areas and it costs $799 which is less than the half of the same chamber.

The quality here is very different, it captures quickly, you get tons of natural background blur thanks to a wide aperture and the color is pretty consistent. Actually there is also a hidden color temperature sensor here that when you take a photo it collects 13 channels of color information to refine the endot and it's like 98% perfect but every now and then the skin tone will look good CLE bad, you get an overall natural looking shot, but with a slightly cooler tone and an extra light pop of color. I really love the way it shoots, to be honest it makes me feel like an artist, especially with this 64 megapixel triple zoom lens.

I fell in love with this lens. It's great for people. It's great for flowers. It's a naturally pretty lens, especially with the OnePlus. color adjustment that you can just take pictures of even though there are boring things that look absolutely worse and somehow it still looks professional. I guess the point is that cameras are not the specialty of this phone and if you are someone who chooses a phone halfway for the cameras, then it is worth spending more on a Vivo, a Samsung or an iPhone, but at the same time They are not bad. I wouldn't say this is like a notch below the entry-level Galaxy s24, which is the same price and is definitely not all the worse than an Asus Zen phone you could get for the same price, so if it wasn't clear, I think that heOnePlus 12 phone is a great phone, there aren't many cool AI summary features like you get with Samsung. o Hy smart cameras like the ones you get with Google, but in terms of the cold, hard fundamentals, this pretty much works with every single one of them, but if you want to see what paying more for a phone gets you, here's my video on the s24 ultra.

I'll catch you there