Following the debut of the OnePlus 12 in China, the smartphone manufacturer revealed plans for a worldwide launch in January.
The OnePlus 12 launched in China on Dec. 5, giving fans in other countries a good idea of what to expect from OnePlus’ next flagship phone. Now the company has revealed that both the OnePlus 12 and its lower-priced OnePlus 12R sibling will launch globally on Jan. 23. That’s when we’ll find out all the pricing and specs configurations info for devices released outside China that OnePlus has been keeping mum about.
This will be the first R-branded line of phones released outside India and China, showing OnePlus is moving into the global market for midrange phones. With last year’s OnePlus 11R priced at the rough equivalent of $480, the company will have a cheaper option to field between its premium-priced top-end phones and its budget line, most recently the $300 OnePlus Nord N30 5G.
We do know the broad strokes of the hardware in the OnePlus 12: Most of the new phone’s changes on its predecessor are internal, as it looks virtually the same as last year’s OnePlus 11. The biggest external change is that the Alert Slider, the physical toggle to switch between mute, vibrate and ringer settings, has been moved from the right side to the left side. On the back of the phone, the circular disk around the cameras is translucent instead of shiny metal in the white and green OnePlus 12 colors (the black retains last year’s shiny finish on the disk).
Most of the OnePlus 12’s improvements are internal. The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, which has performance improvements over last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 as well as the debut of on-device generative AI. OnePlus hasn’t shared which ChatGPT-like generative AI features, if any, will be implemented in its new phone.OnePlus has raised the minimum storage to 256GB, doubling the capacity from 128GB in the OnePlus 11. The baseline RAM has also seen an upgrade to 12GB, up from the previous 8GB. Additionally, the phonemaker has elevated the maximum capacity for both specifications to 1TB of storage and 24GB of RAM, surpassing last year’s OnePlus flagship with its 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. However, it’s uncertain whether this configuration will be available outside of China, so optimism should be tempered.
OnePlus is pushing the margins for phone specs, and the OnePlus 12 outstrips rival premium phones like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (which tops out at 1TB of storage and 12GB of RAM) in terms of hardware. That may not translate directly to superior performance, as Samsung’s phones often best OnePlus’ numbers in benchmarks — we’ll wait to see if that trend persists when we review the OnePlus 12.
The OnePlus 12 comes equipped with a 5,400-mAh battery, an improvement from the 5,000 mAh in its predecessor. Charging speeds have also seen upgrades, with the OnePlus 12 featuring 100W wired charging (compared to the OnePlus 11’s US version, which reached a maximum of 80W) and 50W wireless charging. The latter is particularly noteworthy, considering that most phones typically peak at 15W for wireless charging. However, it’s worth noting that OnePlus 12 owners may need to invest in a proprietary charger, as many popular third-party models rarely exceed 25W.