OnePlus 12 Review - Phone of the Year ALREADY?

it's easy to get caught up in the Samsung new cycle this time of year but this the newly announced OnePlus 12 I think deserves just as much attention I'm going to say something a little crazy here but I think that this phone in mid January 2024 already has a very good chance to become top three smartphones of the entire year let me explain first of all I mean it comes with a proper box I mean it is mostly a waste of space since this entire insert on top is just filled with booklet after booklet like

with still in 2002 but then underneath the phone there is not just a USBC cable but also a top-of-the-line 100 W charging brake which does sweeten the deal oh and the phone also comes with a pre-applied screen protector which is not an assumed thing anymore and as we go through this phone I just want you to keep in the back of your mind the price because even though I will be comparing it to phones like the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra the iPhone 15 Pro Max unlike those phones which are $1,200 plus this is $799 and

for that it doesn't just 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 catch so this is what the phone looks like and to be honest I love how confidently they've designed it you've got this chrome rail on the sides which then melts into the back you got a matte marble texture which feels a bit plasticky but looks Ultra Premium and then a separate glossy marble on the cameras which is even paired with a smattering of glitter this thing has

the character of one of those insane Collector's Edition phones we'd unbox in the rarest phones videos but it's not one plus like past OnePlus phones it's nicely curved it's rounded it's comfortable and it's got an alert slider on top which I can see the appeal of as a way to shut your phone up while it's in your pocket but I don't think I'd ever use it while the phone's in my hand since there's no way that like this yeah there you go it's easier than actually just tapping a virtual button on screen however the phone

does actually fix a separate problem that I have been having you must have tried at some point using a touchcreen when either your screen or your fingers are wet right and noticed how even a single drop of water is enough for your phone to think there's another finger on screen and all hell to break loose well the OnePlus 12 has aquatouch which is a customized display chipset that pays very close attention and can differentiate between the two now it still can cause the occasional screen spasm like that this is not your new diving companion and

sometimes the fingerprint scanner doesn't work when the phone's wet but it is 90% there to just being able to ignore that water which as someone who catches up with the latest news in the world with Pokémon while having a shower feels so freeing uh it's like finally after 10 years actually getting the full benefit from our phones being water resistant thanks Milo the only thing that stops this design being absolute top tier for me is that the phone is not the prettiest from the front the top corners look a bit like ears because of the

way the screen curves away on the sides and you've also got that classic oversized bottom bezel which frustrates me a little more each year as more of more of the competition start to do away with it but now is where the phone starts to really separate itself with pill and number two battery it feels like battery life is one of those things that almost every manufacturer is just scared to give you too much of they'll happily give us two times the screen resolution or five times the camera resolution we need but not battery maybe companies

are worried that you won't keep upgrading if your battery stays good or because God forbid they might have to make the design 0.1 mm thicker to accommodate it regardless the OnePlus 12 is one of the few standouts and I rate it for that it comes with a 5,400 mAh battery they've gone from zero wireless charging capability to now supporting extremely high power 50 W wireless charging which can fully charge that massive battery in less than an hour although it does require a specific OnePlus charging stand to get that speed so I'll probably just stick to

my standard CH charger it's got reverse wireless charging to top up your friends phones but then also also you know that 100 watt charging Breck that we got in the box that can take your phone from 0 to 100 in 26 minutes so compared to current iPhones or even the new Samsungs the battery experience here is a tier above all completed by one very important final extra layer battery health realizing that this is very fast charging and such a powerful phone with the potential to generate lots of heat the company has also built in a

separate power management chip which effectively decides at any given point in time using the data from 14 temperature sensors around the phone plus one in the charging brick too actually exactly what speed to charge at to ensure that your battery stays at the optimal temperature to both receive charge quickly but also not get so hot that it's going to damage the battery now every battery Los loses capacity over time but OnePlus is saying that this mechanism combined with some very cool software trickery which I'm getting to all pulls together to make the battery deterioration the

slowest here that it's ever been meaning that even after 4 years of daily use they're saying this phone will still perform like a brand new phone with a 4350 Mah capacity so will still easily last a full day which is absolutely insane if true so yeah I mean if you want to see an update video in 4 years time then a sub to the channel would be Everlasting but seriously while it's hard to obviously test them on Earth and they're definitely giving a best case scenario there is definitely reason to believe that OnePlus knows how

to optimize battery efficiently I mean this thing especially after a couple of weeks as it learns your patterns is the best battery life of any phone I've ever had my Sim in with really minimal standby drain you can leave this phone overnight and literally pick it up where you left off the next morning and then you turn the thing on and you're greeted with pillar three the screen this phone alone breaks like 18 different smartphone display records wongo it's a 120 HZ QHD plus resolution panel with more importantly a new pixel structure cuz you can

have lots of pixels but it's also about how those pixels are arranged and this blue diamond layout is optimized for better contrast and readability are you going to be able to tell probably not I mean I put it side by side with other phones using different layouts and NADA but to be fair this Arrangement also improves the longevity of the screen versus a lot of others it's got ltpo 3.0 which is the newest Tech that lets phones scale their refresh rates even more precisely to match exactly what you're doing it's all about wasting as little

energy as possible but then you want to know the craziest bit guess the max brightness of this phone in nits if you've been following phones over the last few months you might have seen a couple capable of over 2,000 nits for the first time ever well the 1plus 12 can go to 4,500 4,500 is an absolutely Bonkers number like I've never seen anything even remotely close to that in my life TV no monitor nothing it's so bright that to be honest it's going to have absolutely no bearing on your day-to-day use of the phone and

you'll only ever reach it while watching specifically 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 one plus 12 and a pre-downloaded Mr who the boss video well hey you're going to get the full experience oh but there's another side to it too and I appreciate this probably more that as you go dimmer on the phone's display as you dip below the 70 nit Mark the phone is going to switch over over to 2160 HZ pwm dimming what on Earth

am I talking about well okay quick lesson old phones used to have LCD displays which is essentially a white backlight that shines onto colored pixels and the way that you change the brightness of that LCD is just by reducing the power given to that backlight but then we started getting these fancy OLED displays which are way richer and more Vivid because every single Pixel is its own individual LED but the problem then is that if you try to dim an OLED in the same way as used to dim your LCD by just reducing the power

you give to the display then because each pixel is responsible for color as well as brightness you also damage the color reproduction at lower power levels Like Your Greens might start to look like Grays so many phones now use something called pwm dimming which means that when your phone screen is on what's actually happening is that that screen is flashing on and off very quickly faster than your eyes can see it and then as you lower the brightness your pixels aren't actually getting dimmer but just the gaps between the off and on States just getting

wider your phone is spending more time in the off State and so appears to be dimmer cool so problem solved right well not really cuz most Samsung and apples they do this refreshing either 240 times per second or 480 times per second which while fast is not fast enough that your brain doesn't subconsciously pick up on some of this rapid onof flashing so it can lead to headaches and strain especially at night just before bed so OnePlus has decided to use both DC dimming at higher brightness levels where you're not at risk of ruining your

colors and then when brightness gets lower pwm dimming but at 2160 times per second best of both worlds and combined with a filter that reduces blue light on a hardware level this is a screen that is both visually exceptional and also very eye friendly and fun fact is also easier for us to film because it's not constantly flickering as the brightness gets low plus the display is protected by Gorilla Glass Victors 2 which while not the absolute latest and strongest glass from the company is more than strong enough to theoretically survive a pocket height drop

without a case please don't try it then you've got number four the software this phone and it's oxygen OS 14 is an absolute Delight to use and I do have a couple of gripes with it but they're all just small aesthetic things like for one who decided that square icons were the way to go and why in the settings do I have every other option apart from circles like how do you actually manage to get Squires octagons and rhombuses but not a circle I have no idea and just generally I don't think ever since OnePlus

merged with Oppo the software has looked as good as it used to like the icons yes but also the menus the app draw it feels more like an Oppo phone than it does a OnePlus phone look at this notification the fact that the name of the group is cut off to the completely unnecessary arrow and the icon that's covering some of the message it just it could be better thankfully these complaints are only skin deep because as soon as you delve a little deeper I got to hand it to them the software on this OnePlus

12 is one of the most thoughtful useful Android skin I've been on in ways that have actually made my life better like let's say you want to do a screen recording you can now actually add your front camera footage to that feed of course when you're using the phone with one hand instead of having to enter what can be quite a clumsy one-handed mode you just swipe up and every icon on the page comes to you this has become my default way to navigate now and quick launch which means straight from the fingerprint scanner if

you carry on holding down you can go right into any app you want leap frogging you past any potential distractions on on the way so I've set mine up to do all the key work things that I tend to use often plus it can even do actions like start a new Google doc and the software is just intelligent it does a lot of clever things that you don't think about but the fact that you don't think about them means that it's doing its job like for example it'll reduce your notification volume and your vibration intensity

when you're full screen in an app because it knows that when you're full screen you're looking at your screen anyway so you don't need to be blasted and you probably also don't want to be blasted when you lift your phone up to your ears it'll automatically answer an income call and it will also switch you from speaker phone into your earpiece and fluid Cloud which is basically another Dynamic Island clone but hey it lets you keep up with what's happening in a way that saves space on screen still a good feature I just wish it

worked for more apps it seems to be quite specific right now but the phone does all of this while also making sure that any apps you've downloaded are not misbehaving like I've had a couple of notifications come up telling me that say Instagram is draining too much battery in the background and with one tap the phone will just start clamping down on from now on still letting them function if they need to do something in the background but just not letting them take the Mickey with it it's quite satisfying it's just disciplining them on your

behalf and like every single option with regards to customizing the way your phone looks or functions OnePlus just hands it to you no extra apps needed even granular control over things like your status bar and your fingerprint scanning animations my entire first day with this phone I was just navigating settings there's that much to do there's a couple of cool but probably unnecessary features like this shelf which OnePlus encourages you to set as your swipe down option instead of your notification bar but yeah I mean they're more background status things that you check way less

often so I never felt like I needed instant access to them and the other is anti- peeping notifications which when you set it up uses your front camera to see if someone else aside from you is also looking at your phone and if they are it continues to send you your notifications but just in a less revealing way very cool idea but I don't think it's something I'm going to use I mean naturally that's going to drain a bit of battery and I feel like it only requires a very basic level of awareness to know

when someone's staring at your screen but the big new thing that complement this whole software experience is basically the biggest vibration motor that OnePlus has ever used which means your phone can really pump out the haptics so that typing the registering your fingerprint for the first time deleting a photo the phone feels like it talks back to you in a way you really feel the O maybe I shouldn't deleted it oh and I haven't even talked about the best beted of this software the sheer speed of it and that's pillar five so the OnePlus 12

is powered by the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chip which is good I mean it's very powerful chip but also it's a 2024 flagship phone I'm not surprised by this fact the thing that I'm actually most excited about is all the stuff that the company's done around that and I'm not even talking about the minimum of 256 gigs of ultra fast storage they give you or 12 GB of ultra fast Ram see what makes a phone really fast is part hardware but also part software think of it like your phone is a whole bunch of layers

and every time you ask it to do something many of those different layers have to communicate with each other to deliver an output like let's say you plug your phone into charge the first thing that realizes it's being charged is the hardware that Hardware communicates with the Linux layer which is the Baseline of Android that Linux layer communicates with the Android layer and that Android layer communicates with the app layer to stimulate a response that you can see like that little lightning symbol becoming visible you know people say that Apple's key Advantage is that they

build both the software and the hardware together well the reason that's so advantageous is that it means they can create really clear efficient communication between these layers that's why iPhones have been very smooth even when they weren't powerful and why they get far more battery life for each milliamp of physical battery that they have versus other phones and so OnePlus is trying to do the same thing and they're calling it The Trinity engine instead of just focusing on making the very top layer work and assuming the rest is fixed they're working across all layers to

create software that better understands the exact needs of the hardware and vice versa allowing the different parts of the phone to work smarter around each other so that your CPU is only ever exerting exactly the amount of power that it needs to that your RAM actually understands which apps to keep pre-loaded and ready for quick use at all times and which to close as soon as you exit them so assuming you use your camera a lot for example it'll open rapidly and that your phone's memory can defragment itself to counter the inevitable performance loss that

happens in the long term there's a lot of jargon and marketing fluff going around 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 plenty of phones fast before but this is fast in a way that makes it feel like it's not even trying like one thing that it doesn't seem to matter how powerful Androids of Goden has always lagged is flicking around the Google Play Store not here everything is so fast at loading and the animation

so fluid and unbroken that at times you almost forget that you're actually going between separate applications and your entire phone usage just starts to blend into one seamless buttery smooth experience and then for gaming it goes one step further well actually about five this phone has a secondary co-processor called the pixel Works X7 that works alongside its main chip to do more like improved hyper rendering that without any input from A Game's developer can increase the resolution that the game runs at add frames into the game to make it run smoother and also extend the

game's natural dynamic range and put all those things together it's actually crazy to see it in action you can pick up a 10-year-old old Android game and the phone makes it feel like it was made yesterday and then on the other end of the spectrum when you find a game that already looks good you can see it both taking the visuals to another level while also making absolute mince meat of it hyper rendering plus adaptive frame booster equals happy gaming time this phone can actually run any game at 120 frames per second even if not

originally designed to that is awesome but there's more there's hyper boost which is your phone not just detecting that a game is being played and telling your CPU and GPU you to go forth and power through but the Android layer specifically understanding what the exact needs of the game are in that given moment and communicating that very clearly to your chip which can mean that in a less demanding moment your chip can dial back relax and cool down for a second only for when the action picks up again for your temperatures to be cool enough

that your chip has the head room to actually just go for it and it's all assisted by probably the most advanced calling system to ever exist on a phone outside of those specialist gaming phones it's got the largest VAP chamber in the industry which is essentially a metal canister containing a liquid which as the phone heats up turns to gas cools down again and condenses plus it's got Aerospace grade thermal performance gel to Aid heat conduction further and in total here's the shocking stat to me no less than 38,000 mm squar of heat dissipation area

spread across five layers on both the front and the back side of the phone to be very clear 38,000 mm squared considering what the size of the phone actually is is absolutely insane and the benefit of these dissipation layers being both on the back and the front of the phone allows it to get rid of heat in two directions at the same time compared to most phones which just 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

has 360° antennas for 5G and Wi-Fi meaning that you won't have a signal Interruption if you say flick your phone horizontally to game now before we bring this all together we need to talk about the most contentious pillar the cameras and I say contentious because OnePlus doesn't have the best camera reputation and in a way when I use this phone I can see why like the starters the front camera is just mediocre and I don't mean mediocre because it does lots of face smoothing to make you look nice it's also 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 a way it's impressive cuz there so much processing happening but because the OnePlus is doing such little of this processing in real time as you're shooting the stuff the shooting experience itself feels really unpolished and the photos don't look good until you've taken them which is part of the reason why I find myself taking like three shots of every single scene just because I don't

completely trust that I've got a shot that looks good and it's not just that because there's not much real-time processing happening video suffers do you see how while the iPhone in this case looks like it genuinely understands the scene and my face the one plus very much looks like it's just taking it as it comes like the exposure of the entire scene shifts completely as the light around me changes you'll notice the electronic image stabilization goes for this Ultra smooth Outlook which can be awesome when there's lots of light but without it the phone continues

to try and recreate that but without the light information to be able to do so so you just get tons of weird artifacts and blur oh and finally the focusing can sometimes also let you down you might know that Samsung for example they use a laser to get exact Focus distance OnePlus doesn't really have that and while you probably won't notice if you're coming from another phone without it I can feel its absence so there are things that could do with fixing and what kind of annoys me about recent OnePlus is that it feels like

instead of actually fixing them the company instead just tries to lean more heavily into their partnership with Hasselblad as if that's somehow going to make it better I mean this is what a Hasselblad camera looks like realistically how much is that company going to be able to help you with your phone they're very different things okay I realize I'm absolutely dunking on this but it's because I care it's because these are issues that I keep seeing on OnePlus phones and if they could just focus on them their phones could Skyrocket in value without costing anyone

anything and also because aside from these niggles this is actually a really good camera system the hardware is a pretty big upgrade over the cameras on the OnePlus 11 in every sense it's actually very similar Hardware to the cameras on the more recent OnePlus open similar main camera sensor same 48 map Ultra wide same 64 map three times telephoto lens plus a coating that's applied to the main lens that reduces glare and apparently further increases Clarity and that is interesting because while I wouldn't say that I was blown away by the open camera setup that

was a different set of circumstances before I tested the open OnePlus was hyping it up as literally the best set of cameras on a phone ever and also the phone was $1,700 so you know my expectations were here but the OnePlus 12 is a phone that's not just good but actually also aming amazing in every other area and that cost $799 which is less than half well that same camera quality here that hits very different it captures quickly it gets tons of natural background blur thanks to a wide aperture and it's pretty color consistent too

there's actually a color temperature sensor hidden in here too which when you take a photo collects 13 channels of color info to refine the endot with and it's like 98% perfect but every now and again the skin tone will just look well hassle bad you get an overall natural looking shot but with an ever so slightly cooler tone and an Ever So slight extra pop of color I really love the way it shoots to be honest it makes me feel like an artist especially with this 64 megap three time zoom lens I kind of fallen

in love with this lens it's great for people it's great for flowers it's such a naturally pretty lens especially with oneplus's color tuning that you can just take photos of even the most boring things looking their absolute worst and it still somehow looks professional I guess the point is cameras aren't the specialty of this phone and if you're someone who's picking a phone half for the cameras then it's worth spending more for a Vivo or a Samsung or an iPhone but at the same time they're not bad I wouldn't say this is like a tier

below the base level Galaxy s24 which is like the same price and it's definitely not outright worse than an Asus Zen phone that you might get for the same price so if it wasn't clear I think the OnePlus 12 is a kill a phone there isn't much in the way of cool AI summarization features like you get with Samsung or hyper intelligent cameras like you get with Google but in terms of the cold hard fundamentals this thing pretty much Nails every single one but if you do want to see what paying more for a phone

gets you then here's my video on the s24 ultra I'll catch you there