OnePlus 12 Review: Getting It Right For The Price

OnePlus is on something of a roll lately. Just months after launching not only the best foldable of 2023 but indeed one of the best phones, the company is back with the OnePlus 12. It begs the question — can OnePlus keep up the same momentum? On the one hand, a slab phone is decidedly less sexy than a foldable, but on the other hand, it’s a lot more practical, a lot less fragile, and basically half the cost.

The OnePlus 11 was a very solid offering in and of itself, and over the year, Oppo found a very good formula for its camera sensors, including most of its foldables. It has brought that formula to the OnePlus 12 as well. Add to that OnePlus’s reputation for great software, fast charging, and speaking of charging — wireless charging is coming off hiatus and back into the game, so is this phone, launched at the end of January, the phone to beat this year? That’s the question that needs to be answered.

This review was produced after using a OnePlus 12 review sample provided by OnePlus for two weeks on T-Mobile’s network.

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The hardware design of the OnePlus 12 is going to be polarizing, for sure. Some might call it “kitchen counter chic.” The OnePlus 12, or at least the “Flowy Emerald” colorway has a marbleized pattern on the back reminiscent of a countertop or floor of a bank. Some will see the marble look as fun. In short, you will either love it or go for the Silky Black option which is much safer.

OnePlus is keeping the gigantic camera island from last year which now encloses three cameras and a laser auto-focus module. The island is somehow even bigger than last year, almost a full millimeter thicker, and the edge is more chamfered, evoking the look of a large DSLR camera lens. As for the rest of the hardware, aside from the typical volume rocker and power button, you get OnePlus’s signature ring/vibrate/mute slider switch.

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Meanwhile, this device’s 6.82-inch screen is large, brilliant, and gorgeous. The LPTO ProXDR display is capable of a ridiculous 4,500 nits of peak brightness and has a dynamic refresh rate of 1-120Hz, depending on usage. It has a resolution of 3,168 by 1,440 for an extremely dense 510 ppi.

The phone comes with a film screen protector that you may be tempted to remove from the start. It has a tendency to trap bubbles, which can be slightly annoying, especially while gaming. Also, the curved edge display is prone to phantom touches which can throw off your gaming if you have particularly pudgy digits.

Underneath that lies the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 12 or 16GB of RAM, and 256 or 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage. One thing you have to love about OnePlus is that it doesn’t skimp on internals. Other notable components include the in-display fingerprint sensor and NFC coil for contactless payments, which we will talk more about later.

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The OnePlus 12 comes with a massive 5,400 mAh battery which is remarkable given the extremely thin form factor. That’s probably also the reason that this phone just goes and goes for a long time. It’s almost a two-day phone. You can routinely forget to plug it in one night and it’ll still go strong for most, if not all the second day. The phone just sips the battery.

But when the battery eventually dies, you can charge it up with fast 80-watt charging. This charging is so fast, that the phone charged from 9% to 25% in the time it took to write the paragraph above and this sentence. OnePlus’s fast charging, which is common overseas, is game-changing in the U.S. It can, if you let it, change your relationship with your battery. Rather than charging your phone every night — which is decidedly not even necessary — you can just let your phone go until it gets down to the 15-20% mark, then plug it in for literally 10 minutes and be back up to 50-60%. Plug in your phone, put on your shoes and coat, and you can unplug it and head out for the night with confidence.

This is the kind of charging that is long overdue in the U.S. — OnePlus is the only vendor in the U.S. that ships a charging brick like this in the box. To be fair, Motorola still ships a charger with some smartphone models, but nothing compares to OnePlus charging. This is the kind of thing that should be the norm, but it sadly is not.

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OnePlus has had a complicated relationship with wireless charging in the past, but it’s back. 50W wireless charging is possible, assuming you use OnePlus’s 50W wireless charger. All the same, it’s great that OnePlus has resurrected wireless charging from its early grave following the OnePlus 10.

OnePlus wants to focus on fast charging, which is an entirely fair stance to take, but when you’re selling a phone that compares favorably to every other flagship, and you leave out a feature that every other flagship has, that’s not a good look. The absence of wireless charging was very evident in the OnePlus Open, so one can only hope that OnePlus has seen the error of its ways.

For now, this phone has it, and it’s great, and fast which is as it should be. After all, it’s OnePlus’s job to make sure its flagship device measures up to the competition, and without wireless charging, it can’t.

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor lies inside this phone — technically the second phone shipping to the U.S. with the Samsung Galaxy S24 series just barely beating it to store shelves. That processor is probably at least partially responsible for the battery conservation observed in the phone, but more importantly, it means this phone just flies. Nary a stutter will you find, even when playing games like “Call of Duty: Mobile” or “Genshin Impact” on high graphics settings.

Even more, the Dual Cryo-velocity cooling system uses a dual vapor chamber system to dissipate heat, meaning the phone stays cooler during gaming. In real-world use, that means that when you’re gaming for 30 or more minutes the phone gets warm, but never hot to the touch. Further, even after gaming with the screen at full brightness, the phone’s battery only dropped from 100% to 98%, backing up the processor’s battery-sipping reputation.

All that being said, Geekbench tells a different story. Geekbench 6 is the benchmark app we typically use, but the OnePlus 12 only returns a 959/4,946 Single/Multi-core score, which is…not great. For reference, the OnePlus Open, with the generation older processor returned 1,101/4,109 single/multi-core score scores. We’ve reached out to OnePlus for comment, and we’ll be sure to update this review when we get a response.

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The OnePlus 12 runs OnePlus’s custom (don’t-call-it-ColorOS) Oxygen OS 14, which is based on Android 14. The software is effectively the same build that came on the OnePlus 11 which is close to stock and includes the various customizations you can enjoy on a OnePlus phone like icon shapes, easy folder creation, and other tweaks like animation speeds and OnePlus’s “shelf.”

One returning feature is the ability to expand a folder to a 2×2 size, displaying a miniature 3×3 grid of small icons. If you have a folder that you access more often than others, this size folder can save you a tap, or help you lay out even more icons than the 5×6 grid allows. Put simply, as the photo above demonstrates, you can essentially double your icon space by placing two 3×3 enlarged folders next to each other, and two extra apps on the end, you can double the number of apps you can see in those two rows.

It’s not particularly attractive. In fact, it’s downright silly-looking, but it works. The more likely use-case here is that a single folder on the home screen will have more than a few often-used apps that will be easy to access from a single enlarged folder.

Speaking of “familiar OnePlus software,” once again, the phone was not certified for Google Pay during our review period. If this sounds annoying and stupid, that’s because it is. A software update to be issued around retail availability will enable these features, so we assume they’ll work but we were unable to verify it before publication.

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The camera set on the OnePlus 12 is almost the same as that on the OnePlus Open, with one minor exception. This year, OnePlus is the first device to use Sony’s latest LYT-808 50-megapixel sensor with an f/1.6 aperture and 1/1.4-inch sensor. The phone also boasts a 64-megapixel 3x optical zoom sensor and a 48MP ultrawide camera with a 114-degree field of view. In theory, this camera setup should perform just as well as the OnePlus Open which was very, very good.

There is a lot to like about this camera set. The 1x/3x camera setup with large sensors is a great middle ground between something like the 3x/10x optical zoom setup of the Samsung Galaxy S23. The 64MP camera sensor behind the 3x optical lens allows you to capture virtually lossless 6x zoom images of stunning quality. That’s a great accomplishment and still gives you options as a photographer.

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This camera setup is quite good, but it seems like OnePlus took a minor step back, possibly due to being the first out of the gate with Sony’s latest sensor. During the day, photographs and video are extremely good as one would expect. Even moving subjects like a flag waving in the breeze don’t suffer from motion blur, which can be a challenge. At 6x zoom, you can even pick up some frayed threads at the end of that same waving flag. That’s impressive.

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Macro shots are quite good with nice bokeh in the background. You can pick up some exceptional detail from a range of roughly five centimeters or so.

However, there is a noticeable difference in color between the ultrawide cameras and the main sensor. This is normal in midrange phones that have much smaller ultrawide sensors, but in flagship phones, the phone maker needs to do a better job.

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At night, the phone performs pretty well, on par with most flagships. Notably in video while there is a slight amount of judder when walking and shooting, it’s minimal, even when there is no subject in the field of view. You also get a bit of banding when shooting video in low light. For those not familiar, “banding” is when you have a distinct border between light levels like a gradient fill in Photoshop. You generally don’t see that in flagship-grade cameras, but it’s not uncommon in mid-range phones because of the lack of light.

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For subjects that are standing still, the camera does a great job capturing detail, though the focus is on the soft side. But the same is true whether you’re shooting anywhere between 1x and 6x. Motion doesn’t cause as much of a blur as you might expect, but where possible, keep your subjects still.

Unlike the OnePlus Open, tapping on your subject doesn’t help the exposure levels, because they’re already about where they need to be. To be clear, that’s a good thing for the point-and-shoot crowd. The best advice for night-time photography is to take a few shots because focus might be an issue on one of them, so it’s best to have a backup. It was also five degrees Fahrenheit when these test shots were taken, so it’s also very possible that shivering hands were involved in some of the focus trouble.

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The OnePlus 12 will be available for preorder starting today at OnePlus.com, Amazon, and Best Buy. It will not be sold in carrier stores — which is another step back for OnePlus. There are a series of pre-order special deals you can get from various retailers. All of them are offering a free storage upgrade from 256GB to 512 GB if you preorder, which is a nice deal. OnePlus.com will continue its tradition of discounting some money for any phone in any condition. In the case of the OnePlus 12, that’s $100 off.

The base price for the OnePlus 12 is $799.99 which, for the record is the same as the Samsung Galaxy S24 and the iPhone 15. Knock off $100, and you’re into Pixel 8 territory. That is an impressive price point for this phone. Despite minor foibles in the camera output and a questionable Geekbench score, there’s very little to not like here.

With the announcement of the Galaxy S24 just last week, and promises made during Snapdragon Summit 2023, one might wonder where all the AI features are. That’s a fair question. If indeed that is where the world is headed, the OnePlus 12 can be found to be lacking. However, since our most modern conception of AI is still in its infancy, we can’t ding the phone too much for its lack.

If there is such a thing as a budget-friendly flagship, this is it. The impressive hardware, along with a fine set of cameras means this phone has set a high bar that other phones might have trouble clearing throughout the rest of 2024.