These I was expecting. We've got the OnePlus 12 and 12 R
with OnePlus proudly displaying their never settle slogan
and talking a lot about a return to their flagship killer roots.
What I wasn't expecting is this, a 50 watt wireless charger.
This thing will charge wirelessly faster than most phones charge over a wire.
Even many flagships like, oh, I don't know, the iPhone 15 and the Samsung S24 Ultra.
We're gonna get to that in a minute. Let's start with the OnePlus 12.
They have absolutely packed this thing with kind of jaw-dropping claims.
Oh, wow, is that ever gorgeous? Geez, Oppo has always pushed the envelope
when it comes to the design of their backs. Sorry, they have packed this thing with features
with everything from 80 watt wired charging with their super VOOC technology, which no way.
They actually include a capable charger in the box.
What an idea, to 50 watt wireless charging
to a claimed peak brightness of 4,500 nits
on their OLED display. Now, we weren't able to measure that
outside of the developer menu where they have a peak brightness test
and then you can shine a bright flashlight into the ambient light sensor
in order to get it to hit that number. OnePlus also claimed 20 hours of YouTube playback,
which this phone completely annihilated.
We saw almost 28 hours of playback in YouTube
at 200 nits display brightness. Wow.
On the outside of the phone, we've got the usual suspects with our lock button, volume rocker.
Does this thing have an IRE knitter? Super cool. Amplified earpiece speaker and bottom speaker SIM slot
and USB-C charging port, along with OnePlus's trademark notification slider.
Yeah, gotta love to see it. And on the inside, it's got the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor
with OnePlus's biggest vapor chamber cooler to date.
They're saying it's about 14 square inches in area, which is pretty wild
when you consider the overall size of the device. OnePlus says this contributes to both
the cooling of the screen and cooling of the SoC,
but we'll get to this in a little bit more detail later. We found that having a bigger vapor chamber
doesn't necessarily help you avoid thermal throttling if you don't add any kind of active cooling
to the outside of the device. The cameras are another big area of focus for OnePlus.
That is a sizable camera bump, but far from the deepest one that I've seen lately,
it's pretty manageable. And we're looking at a 50 megapixel main shooter
with a 64 megapixel periscope telephoto and a 48 megapixel ultra-wide.
That is a really fast lens on the main shooter too. F1.6 with optical image stabilization.
I actually have pretty high expectations for this. The one area where OnePlus has really struggled
for me in the past has been video, but in terms of photo, like, man, that's responsive.
That's a ton of dynamic range. Like I really just don't really know what I would complain about.
Stutter though as I'm panning around.
Yeah, it's no iPhone, is it? It's not bad, but it's no iPhone.
There's one thing that you gotta give to Apple. God, does video ever look good on the iPhone?
Excuse me, excuse me, on iPhone.
Inside the phone, we've got Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4.
12. Or 16 gigs of RAM with 256 or 512 gigs of storage,
and Corning Victus 2 glass with an aluminum frame.
Enough about the 12. Because the 12, okay, flagship killer, I guess,
now that flagships are $1,200 US,
the 12R is the one that I think is gonna be in a more interesting price band
for many of our viewers today. It's got a lot of the same goodness as the 12.
It's got that same 4,500 nit peak brightness
on its also LTPO, 120 Hertz AMOLED display for that.
Oh, so butter smoothness. It's got the same number of cameras,
but they have been downgraded a touch. It's got the same support for 80 watt
super-vooc charging, including an included charging brick,
which is really nice to see, but it's got a bit of a smaller screen
and some other unexpected exclusions. No wireless charging, although that does come with a benefit.
You actually get a 100 milliamp hour larger battery
in the 12R, and that did result in real world games and battery life.
This thing saw almost 30 hours of battery life
in our YouTube playback test. That is flipping impressive, but the bigger one
is that it uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
It is using a last generation chipset. However, as we saw in our performance testing,
this might not be as big of a deal to you as you might think.
As it turns out, in our benchmark suite, which admittedly at this point is gonna need some upgrading,
the real world difference in performance is almost negligible because we are more often capped
by the frame rate limiter of the applications that we are running than by the performance of the SOC.
Another thing that we noticed when we were doing our performance testing was that in our stress test,
the 12 actually thermal throttled so much
that even though it scores much higher in synthetic benchmarks like 3D Mark,
when you run them over and over and over again, it throttles down to performance
that is only about 10% higher. So if you're a hardcore mobile gamer
and you're gonna be playing for hours at a time, real world difference in performance
might not be that much. Now, some of that can be accounted for
by the slightly higher resolution of the OnePlus 12's screen, but not all of it.
It does have the same Victus 2 glass covering, but what it doesn't have is the same storage options.
It's only available with 128 or 256 gigs of storage.
I also haven't really tried the camera yet. I can already tell these cameras are not as good.
It looks like I've got something on the lens, but I did not.
Stills are all right though. Yeah, stills are all right.
That video quality though. And I haven't even tried the Ultra Wide yet.
It's only eight megapixels. That's one of the biggest downgrades
over the OnePlus 11 because otherwise on paper, the 12R looks like an amazing choice compared to the 11.
They've got very similar specs other than we get upgraded glass, a bigger battery, faster charging.
Ooh, there is one small little bugbear. OnePlus originally said that the 12R had UFS 4.0 support
for its storage, but it's actually 3.1. So that's a downgrade over a OnePlus 11
if you could get a deal on one of those. But other than that, man, I think the cameras are the biggest deal
and I don't know about you guys, but the only time I ever use my Ultra Wide camera
is when I wanna take a picture of a room and like put markup on it.
Like honestly, that's the only thing I think I've ever used it for is like,
yeah, here's a picture of this room. We're going to IKEA.
I'm gonna write some measurements and like where those spots are so that I can remember what my room looks like
when I'm walking around in that labyrinthian store.
It's like, it feels like you're in there for so long you don't even know what year it is
or where you live anymore. Both phones are only rated for IP65 water resistance,
which is a little in the weaker side for a modern device, but they've got something water related
that is pretty darn cool. OnePlus has something that they're calling AquaTouch.
I'm sorry, what is this? HyperTouch algorithm makes it like work better
when the screen is wet. I've been provided with a spritzer bottle
and I guess I'll attempt to type a message.
I mean, that seems like pretty good, right? Let's go for accuracy, okay?
Give me a hundred character sentence, go. Subscribe to short.
Oops, that was me. Circuit.
That is pretty darn good. It's bang on.
I like it. Here we go. I mean, what could go wrong?
Oh boy. Well, that's something.
I can't even get a text box. Hello, I am typing.
Oh, and we lost it. Yeah, that's pretty much the experience I have
whenever my hands are wet in the tub. We're down to 34%,
which means it's time to try 50 watt wireless charging.
And what I'm really interested in is what's shaken with our charger here.
We're at 30 watts from the wall. There will be quite a bit of inefficiency
going from AC to DC, then from TC to magnetic induction charging.
Is that it? It's going down.
Airboop charging, buddy. This isn't the only thing
we weren't able to see working the way OnePlus said. They're frame interpolation technology.
We just couldn't get it working and they're on Chinese New Year right now.
So they were like, oh, we can't really look into this. So your mileage may vary on that as well.
But 27 watts from the wall, that means realistically, we're probably only getting about 20 watts here.
It's possible that it'll only do that kind of speed from 0%, but we're at 35.
I think it's a pretty reasonable expectation that it would charge pretty fast
when it's at 35%. Oh, there's one more thing.
We haven't checked out the speakers yet. Oh my God, Google, this was such a mistake.
What is any of this? Remember when the mail icon was red?
So you could actually tell what the hell it was. And when maps was a map, sorry, sorry, sorry.
This is not OnePlus's fault.
100% on Google. A little bright, but a big part of the problem
is how loud I have it. I wouldn't normally need this at 100%.
It's really good. Yeah, it's really clean.
How about the 12R? Amplified earpiece speaker. Nice to see that on a budget phone.
This is still an expensive phone, but it's a little thing that is often cheaped out on.
If there's a downgrade here, it's not gonna affect you too much. I'd say they're not quite as bright,
but they're still really loud and clear enough
that you're gonna be able to enjoy pretty much anything you would wanna enjoy on your phone speakers.
And otherwise you're just gonna wanna get out your earphones or whatever the case may be.
Now it's time for the hard question. Which one would I choose?
$300 less, but that does come with a capacity downgrade here.
Not to mention, of course, the spec downgrade. Or $300 more, but of course with more capacity,
more performance and bursty loads in particular. I think this just comes down to your budget
and what kind of deal you're gonna get from your carrier. As someone who takes a lot of pictures of my kids,
I am really not liking, not having a decent camera on my phone right now.
And I'd say that that could be something that could push me over the edge to the 12.
But I wanna hear from you guys in the comments. 12 or 12R or something else entirely?
Whatever it is, I don't care. As long as you're subscribed to ShortCircuit.