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Art et designTranscription
00:00All right, now that we're back down to earth after all of that Vision Pro launch stuff,
00:08I've had a chance to go back and re-pick up some of the things that I was testing that got
00:12like interrupted by that week of chaos. And there is some really good stuff. The OppoFind X7 Ultra
00:18design, I really like more than I expected. The ZenBook Duo, the full screen, dual screen laptop
00:24for 2024 is kind of sick. And there's some other stuff that is better than expected. But the one
00:28that stood out to me, maybe the most of them all is this guy right here, the OnePlus 12. This may
00:34have flown a little bit under the radar. I mean, with everything that's been going on, but it's
00:38gotten some improvements from last year, and it is priced very competitively. Matter of fact,
00:42let's just start with that. $799. And you also get a free upgrade to the 16 gigs of RAM half
00:48terabyte model for that price if you pre-order. It's literally already marked down to that on
00:53Amazon. So I'll have a link below. Flagship price? Yes. But when it's competing theoretically
00:58against some of the ultra phones, $1,000, $1,200, $1,300, then suddenly it's kind of in the category
01:07of, dare I say, flagship killer. So look, it's nearly the same on the outside. They found what
01:13they like, and they're keeping it consistent, same shapes, same camera bump circle that kind
01:18of melts into the side with these neural details around it. It's still Gorilla Glass 5 on the back,
01:23and there's a new set of colors and textures, but in general, you'd be forgiven for thinking
01:26it's nearly the same as last year. Or maybe you wouldn't, but don't let that fool you.
01:31Up front, this screen is, I think, the biggest noticeable physical difference from last year.
01:36It gets way brighter, up to 1600 nits outdoors, and it's hitting crazy numbers now. 4,500 nits
01:43peak HDR brightness. Basically, it's super impressive and extremely readable outdoors
01:48and in any light, but it also gets extremely dim too. Now, I don't like that it's this curved
01:53over the edges. You can see the light fall off and the extra reflections that come with that,
01:58but basically from corner to corner, this 6.8 inch 1440p LTPO Pro XDR display is a real upgrade
02:05over last year. So then the rest of the upgrades to this phone are definitely a case of a bunch of
02:10little changes all stacking up on top of each other to equal a large difference from last year.
02:16Does that make sense? That's what smartphones are nowadays. I remember reviewing the OnePlus
02:22One and then the OnePlus Two the next year, and just the gigantic total shift, big direction
02:28changes between those two phones. Nowadays, it's just about finding a bunch of clever little
02:33things and stacking a bunch of little improvements on top of each other to just make the user
02:37experience a little better. So obviously, if you're going to be a flagship killer, you've got
02:40to have the newest chip inside. So it does. It's the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Not that you'll notice a
02:45whole ton of difference side by side with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phone, but this phone does
02:50have much better cooling as well. So it's giving them some headroom to play with slightly boosted
02:54clock speeds, and it's benchmarking right behind the gaming phones and the S24 Ultra. In real
03:00world use, that just means this phone is super fast, really, really fluid. It's a smooth phone
03:06all the time. This is something OnePlus has done really well for a long time, even with high
03:11performance mode being off in the battery settings by default. But speaking of battery, this
03:16phone is definitely prioritizing battery, super long battery life over like ultra high end
03:22performance numbers and getting every last FPS out of the thing. And as a result, this is a
03:27battery champ. First of all, you just start with a huge capacity. So it's got one of the biggest
03:31batteries ever in a OnePlus flagship. It's now a 5400 mAh battery. That's bigger than a lot of
03:37other phones that are ultras now. And you better believe they've kept their trademark super fast
03:41charging also. So it's technically a split battery. It's dual 2700 mAh and it can juice up at 80
03:48watts wired. This combination of huge battery, awesome battery life, prioritization of battery
03:54length and ultra fast charging honestly makes this at least a contender to think about right now
04:00for battery champ of the year. Matter of fact, if you just leave this phone and all of its out
04:06the box settings, meaning not in high performance mode, just regular performance mode by
04:10default, 1080p, which it is out the box, and then just auto frame rate, you can get two full light
04:17days out of this phone. And then when you finally do get down to near zero, you can charge up to half
04:22battery in like 12 minutes. If you want to go all the way full, that's only going to take about half
04:26an hour. It's just so easy. And on top of all of that, there is up to 50 watt wireless charging. So
04:33if you've got a compatible AirVoo charger, you obviously have to buy that separately. But the
04:36OnePlus 11 didn't even have wireless charging at all. So this is a gigantic improvement. I almost
04:41want to get greedy and also wish that there was Qi2 support for wireless charging. But I don't know
04:46about you, but Qi2 has felt like it's off to a weird, rocky start, especially this year. It's been
04:51surprisingly uncommon for any phones to support Qi2 with the magnets and wireless charging. This is
04:57likely because there seems to be a 15 watt charging limit with Qi2 for now. So if you want to
05:03do fast wireless charging, you aren't doing Qi2. So yeah, no Qi2 wireless, no magnets, but very,
05:10very fast charging. Either way, way better display, better chip, better battery. And also now the
05:15cameras have gotten an upgrade. Now I'm just going to say cameras have been a relatively weak point
05:21for OnePlus's highest end phones for a while now. We've always wanted to call them flagship
05:26killers, but people love cameras in flagship phones. And it just hasn't quite been able to match
05:31that highest level. I'd say now it's on the acceptable for a flagship level, but it's not quite
05:37beating those yet. And that's still true about this phone. Now this main sensor, it is actually very
05:41slightly different. Instead of the OnePlus Open's Sony LYT-T808 sensor, it is the LYT-808 sensor. It's
05:50two more megapixels. It's slightly wider aperture with the glass in front of it. Nevertheless,
05:55basically these OnePlus 12 photos aren't going to shock you. I've done some side by side
05:58comparisons. I've even said this before. It's pretty good. Most of the time it's pretty sharp. It's a
06:04little contrastier than the OnePlus Open. The HDR effect looks fine. It just, it falls apart a
06:10little too quickly as soon as there's adverse conditions, especially low light. But here's the
06:14thing, just for the context of that, it's not that far behind. We've already tested this because we
06:20did the blind smartphone camera test last year with 20 of the best smartphone cameras in the world.
06:25And in that test was the OnePlus Open. So yeah, there's a lot of software involved with these
06:29cameras, but basically this extremely similar camera system in the standard light photo, it had
06:34the third highest ELO rating behind the two pixels. Then in portrait mode, it was also top 10. But in
06:40low light, it was fifth from the bottom, right around the Sony and below the Razr. So in summary,
06:46yeah, the camera system is new. It does have new hardware. It has a new zoom and everything. But
06:52altogether, it is just like a lot of the other stuff I'm showing you a little bit better than last
06:56year. And that's going to be good enough for a lot of people, actually, most people most of the
07:00time. But if we want to consider it flagship, it's just there is a little bit of a gap till it
07:05reaches the best. But I'll tell you what they keep, they even more keep stacking it up. There are
07:10so many little things about using this OnePlus phone that I really like. Like I love that I can
07:16specifically force any app I want to be at whatever frame rate I want. Like there's literally a
07:21list of every single app on my phone. And by default, you've probably noticed all the mapping
07:25apps like Waze and Google Maps, they always even on every other 120 hertz phone, they always
07:29override and run at 60 hertz. But on this phone, I can just fix it. Just give me all the frames,
07:35please. I also love that this phone has an infrared blaster, one of the least common features in the
07:40world of a modern smartphone alongside like a headphone jack. But yeah, it literally lets you
07:44turn on and off and control appliances remotely without having to find the remote like this TV
07:50here or a stranger's TV. I don't know. It's the little things. I love that this USB-C port not
07:55only supports basically the fastest charging we've ever seen on a phone in the US, but also
08:00supports extremely fast data transfer speeds. This is a USB 3.2 Gen 1 port. The names and
08:08generations are horrible at this point and incredibly confusing. All you really need to
08:12know is that this has basically the best data speeds available from a USB-C phone. So if you get
08:17the right cable, you can get large files like videos on and off of the device real quick. And
08:23then a lot of you will probably love that this new screen supports high PWM dimming. If you've
08:28never heard of this before, it might not even matter to you, but there is a select fraction of
08:32the population that is specifically sensitive to the flickering that becomes visible at super low
08:38brightness with a lot of these smartphone OLED displays to the point where like it causes
08:42headaches and eye fatigue. So some smartphones, including this one, are now addressing it with
08:47super high pulse width modulation. Basically, they still flicker on and off to get that lower
08:53perceived brightness, but much, much faster than the human eye can perceive. 2160 Hertz in this
08:59phone's case. So it still appears liquid smooth at all brightness levels, which is awesome. If you
09:04use your phone in the rain or when it's wet, you probably already know how chaotic that feels.
09:09Like there's memes about it. Like it just seems to kind of act on its own when there's water
09:13droplets on the screen. But this phone claims that with a new technology called Aqua Touch,
09:18it will totally remain as usable as ever, even with water all over the screen. Now you might
09:24have seen the ads for it. It might sound ridiculous, but it actually works. It's not
09:29perfect obviously, but you can definitely feel that it's dramatically more responsive to the
09:34point where I can actually type things on this wet phone screen where I just would not want to
09:38do that on any other phone without this. Kind of feels like magic. I am very impressed. And then
09:42there's even just extra little tiny things on top of that, like 12 or 16 gigs of fast RAM. That's
09:48sick. Future-proof. Also Dolby Atmos with spatial audio support. Great. It also has great haptics.
09:55Like all this tiny stuff adds up to be a great overall experience, but it's not perfect, right?
10:02Let's be real. No phone is perfect, but at least I can say about this phone that also the downsides
10:06are also a couple small things. Like I, for one, I've already talked about this, but I'm kind of
10:11over the curved displays. So this one keeping that, it's not a deal breaker. Like you might even
10:17argue it's a little more character to this phone in the world of 2024 smartphones, but it definitely
10:22has its downsides from the glare to the light fall off to the drop test durability, but okay, fine.
10:28They've gone curved, but then the fingerprint sensor underneath is also still a pretty
10:33average optical sensor. Doesn't feel like it's been upgraded in years. And then for having the
10:38new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip inside, which a lot of other flagships do, this phone doesn't really
10:44have any of the AI features like at all. And this is something I wanted to keep an eye on with all
10:51these phones coming out with this chip early in this year, which is okay. Qualcomm puts out a new
10:55chip, small performance gains, small efficiency gains, but also huge new AI capabilities. And this
11:03phone kind of just skipped the AI part. Now, not that that's a disaster, but those were some
11:09genuinely useful features. The only one I found on this phone is in the photo editor and it's called
11:14AI palettes, but it's just like a color overlay. I don't even really think there's that much AI
11:20going on with this at all. So none of that generative fill crop correction, none of that magic
11:26editor stuff, none of that auto live transcription of phone calls or live translation of phone
11:32calls, none of that like speaker labels in the voice app, none of the auto summaries in the
11:37browser, anything like that. It's just none of it. It's not on this phone. And then also random bug.
11:42I don't know. Every time I'm in the overlay browser and I reach up to my favorite little alert
11:47slider on the OnePlus phone and change modes, it opens a search box like to find in page. I don't
11:53know why they shouldn't be connected, but it does it every single time. But maybe the biggest
11:56legitimate downside of this phone when you're comparing it to the other flagships it's going up
12:00against is it's promised fewer years of software update support. Now I've already gotten a pretty
12:07major software update since I started testing this phone, big camera improvements and bug fixes,
12:11stuff like that. Great. But they are only promising, only promising four years of software
12:17updates and five years of security updates. Now that's fine. A lot of people only plan on keeping
12:22this phone for three or four years, maybe five years before moving on to the next one. But in the
12:26world of the flagships, the pixels, the Samsung's of the world, even the iPhone's giving you six or
12:32seven years of software updates. This is just notably behind on that. Maybe OnePlus didn't think
12:39it was worth the extra resources. It doesn't think people care that much about it to actually spend
12:44money on it to put the resources in. But yeah, four or five versus seven. So is this a flagship
12:51killer? Well, that just depends on your definition of a flagship, doesn't it? I think this is probably the
12:57most compelling thing about this phone is going to be how competitively priced it is because it's very
13:02similar in a lot of ways to let's call it S24 Ultra, right? But I've seen this phone, the 16 gigs of RAM,
13:09half terabyte version for 899 on their site. But if you pre-order it, you can get that for 799. But
13:17they're also advertising it in a lot of places for 699 because they're apparently just giving you 100
13:24bucks for a trade-in of any phone in any condition. So if you're going with 699 and this phone starts at
13:321300 bucks, then yeah, that is a damn good deal. So yeah, I'd just be looking at what's important to
13:39you. Like if I would say if camera is really important to you, or if long term software support is
13:45actually super high on your list, or if any of those AI features looked really compelling or really
13:51interesting that you'd want them, then you'd probably end up going with one of those other flagships. But
13:56for everything else, like for performance, for a great screen, for incredible battery, super fast
14:01charging, ultra smooth, like this phone is better than you probably think. Oh, and on top of all that,
14:06OnePlus also around the same time has released this phone right here. It looks almost the same, but this
14:10is the OnePlus 12R. And this is just a budget version even more so than this phone already, just
14:19basically cutting a few corners, a few corners on the camera, right? It's a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 instead
14:24of the Gen 3. There's no wireless charging, things like that. It's IP64 instead of IP65, whatever. It's
14:31a slightly trimmed down version, again, 500 bucks. I'm just saying. So if these phones weren't already
14:38on your radar, they probably should be. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.