Intro:
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 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 an HSBC 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.
Back you got a matte marble texture which feels a bit plastic 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 touchscreen.
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 aqua touch which is a customized display chipset that pays very close attention and can differentiate between the two now.
Basic:
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 taking 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 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 you know that 100 watt charging Break 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 Samsung's 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.
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 My 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 Blog 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 Wong it's a 120 HZ QHD plus resolution panel with more importantly a new pixel structure because 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 NADP but to be fair this Arrangement also improves the longevity of the screen versus a lot of others it's got LPO 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 to 2160 HZ PWM dimming what on Earth am I talking about well okay quick lesson old phones used to have LCDs 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 eye can see it.
Conclusion:
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.
