When you go to a Rolling Stones concert, you expect Satisfaction and Angie. But what if the Stones skip their fantastic new songs — like Angry or Living In A Ghost Town — altogether? Will that bring in new fans or keep old fans happy?
Something similar is happening on the new OnePlus 12, the latest flagship phone with a serious amount of gloriousness in features we already know about. For example, have you heard of a display offering 4,500 nits of peak brightness, enough to dazzle the sun? Or cooling technology that’s better than on any other phone? In the same breath, you have known about these features for a long time and the more you cook an omelette, the technique improves. On the other hand, Samsung and Google too are making smartphones or let’s say omelettes but they are switching the variety of cheese, perhaps gruyere rather than cheddar. The latter delivers plenty of AI features to make the smartphone feel fresh and relevant.
The camera module looks premium and complements the overall finish.
OnePlus 12 is an excellent refinement of the smartphone and you have to decide if that’s good enough for you. The company is playing the hits and playing them fearlessly.
Premium feel
OnePlus doesn’t stray too far from the OnePlus 11 in terms of design. It features an almost identical circular camera unit, set into a curving glass back with a glossy aluminium frame. The OnePlus 12’s back is frosted and my Flowy Emerald review model looks fantastic. It also feels good to hold (on the back is Corning Gorilla Glass 5). It feels far more premium than it did last year.
I like that the volume buttons are on the same side as the power button. It generally makes them easier to use with one hand while the iconic OnePlus toggle slider is on the opposite side.
The colour science on the main lens is spot on.
Among some of the best features of the phone is the touchscreen. At some point in time, you must have tried bathing while listening to recipes from Bong Eats. Consider that a confession. The problem I face on rival Android phones is when I want to switch from, say, the video recipe for Doi Begun to Kakrar Jhal… the touchscreen misbehaves when the fingers are wet. OnePlus has addressed the issue with something called Aqua Touch.
At 6.82 inches, the OnePlus 12 screen is big enough to give you plenty of room for playing mobile games while its high resolution and vivid colours mean content will always look great. OnePlus claims that it is the brightest screen ever found on a smartphone with a whopping 4,500 nits peak brightness.
Nimble processor
The phone runs the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor backed by 16 GB of RAM. As the most cutting-edge chip from Qualcomm it is safe to expect this new processor to be an absolute powerhouse.
Genshin Impact at maxed-out settings? Of course and it runs smoothly. The same goes for Asphalt 9: Legends. Every benchmark score will be kind to the chipset. On the software front, navigation around the interface is nippy and I found nothing that could really slow down the device.
I guess OnePlus thinks its various software optimisations will keep the phone running longer and smoother. Frankly, I’ve only been testing this phone for a little over a week so. I’m going to have to come back to this in a few months to see if it’s still performing as it should. There is OxygenOS skin running on top of Android 14. I quite like the interface because it’s neat and easy to use.
You can still take beautiful XPAN shots using OnePlus 12.
OnePlus is offering four years of software support and an additional fifth year of security support. These are good figures by 2022-23 standards. Both Google and Samsung are now offering at least seven years of support on their phones and longer support periods mean that your phone will be safer to use for a long time. Now five years isn’t bad but if OnePlus wants to compete with Samsung, it needs to be more confident with longer upgrade cycles.
Working in favour of OnePlus is the big 5,400mAh battery, which easily lasts a day and in the box is an 80W VOOC wall charger, which can juice up the battery in no time. The phone also supports 50W AIRVOOC wireless charging.
Let’s talk about Hasselblad
That brings us to the camera, which is something very important to me. Once again we get the trademark Hasselblad branding while the camera setup features a 50MP wide camera with Sony’s LYT-808 image sensor, 64MP 3x periscope telephoto camera and 114° FOV ultra-wide camera.
If you are capturing content under good lighting, there shouldn’t be any issues. The exposure is good, details are in plenty and colours are mostly accurate. Of course, these are things that everyone expects from a premium phone.
There’s almost zero colour shift when you switch between main and ultra-wide lenses, which is a problem on many Android phones. And the 3x telephoto is brilliant.
But I still don’t see any reason for Hasselblad branding, especially when photos and videos taken under uneven lighting are concerned. The phone is definitely capable of taking good-looking images but I am sure OnePlus can switch up the game. If I really want the Hasselblad treatment, I will get a Hasselblad camera as and when finances permit.
Should you buy it?
As far as smartphones go, it’s fantastic in almost all departments. Being a powerful phone it could have produced a lot of heat but the company has deployed an excellent technology to tackle heat, ensuring performance is not sacrificed. Also, the haptics are brilliant. But is OnePlus falling behind in terms of new technology, like AI? I can well imagine Google and Samsung deploying fresh AI-driven software features whenever they want… it will keep users excited. If we can keep that aside, OnePlus 12 is one smooth operator.
At a glance
Device: OnePlus 12
Price: Rs 64,999 for the 12/256GB variant and Rs 69,999 for the 16/512GB variant
High notes
Excellent battery life
Vibrant display
Uncompromising processor power
Camera offers good colour science
Muffled notes
Four years of OS upgrades fall behind offerings from Google and Samsung
AI features are not being talked about
