OnePlus 12 Full Review - Galaxy S24 Ultra Killer!?

launching this the OnePlus 12 at the same time as this the s24 ultra is a pretty ballsy move or perhaps it's just coincidence but how can the OnePlus 12 possibly stand out well for starters it's $500 or $400 cheaper than the s24 ultra which is nuts it's even $200 less than the s24 plus and the pixel 8 Pro and with this big Pro xdr 120 HZ screen with the latest Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chip 12 or 16 gigs of RAM 256 or 512 storage a proper Flagship triple camera system although mostly borrowed from the excellent 1plus open oh and we also get the biggest battery on any non-gaming phone inside here somehow they've squeezed in a 5400 million Power Cell well technically 2 2700 is a dual battery design but 5400 versus 5,000 on the s24 ultra versus 5,000 on last year's OnePlus 11 so it's like 8% bigger than the ultimate flagship get phones and we get much faster charging so straight away I'm pretty excited about the 12 and I'm also pleased to report that OnePlus will now offer four full OS updates four years of Android with this guy not quite the seven years we get with Samsung and Google for the pixel phones but I'll take it however one thing we're not hearing as much about with OnePlus is AI which to be fair I'm pretty sick of hearing about it but both Samsung and Google offer some pretty cool AI powered features like instant slow-mo Photoshop style generative fill transcribing and translating and it feels like you're getting just a bit more for your money but if you're not too fuss about all that then the OnePlus 12 is definitely worth considering which until last year with the 11 I hadn't said for a few years actually I think we can all agree OnePlus kind of lost their way a little bit over the last few years they got too expensive the camera was never really kept up with a competition they just became a bit sort of me but I think last year with the cheaper 11 and also the OnePlus open foldable which to be fair was just a rebranded Oppo fan 2 but still I maintain it was the best folding phone of the year and so I reckon we're seeing the beginning of a return to form but can the 12 keep that up well let's start with the design and this comes in two colors boring and not boring okay silky black or flurry Emerald although it does look a little bit like a kitchen countertop what do you think still very similar style to last year's OnePlus 11 let me have a little lean forward there you can see we've got the uh triple camera setup on the back it looks like You' got four cameras but it's three plus the Flash and Laser Alo focus and not a hint of an apple inspired Samsung copied titanium frame Insight still very much aluminium although we do now get Gorilla Glass 5 on the back and we have this sort of new matte textured feel to it although they have increased the screen size from 6.7 to 6.82 in so it's a little bit bigger but it's also a little bit heavier 220 G now up from 205 last year although that still makes it about the same as the iPhone 15 Pro Max but I do like the rounded corners and versus the boxy s24 Ultra it feels smaller and more comfortable to hold big fan of the alert slider now on the left side although I would have preferred it if it was a little bit lower down to make it easier to reach they've given the Dual speakers a nice little [Applause] upgrade we get Doby Atmos and a new 3D spatial audio option so if you want to you can now listen to different audio from different points around you so perhaps your game sounds are coming from up front music in the background calls coming in from the left notifications pinging you from the right it's a full sensory overload through experience although I haven't really found myself using it that much also not particularly sexy uh as I've also been described but they've added new antennas so there's this new 360 antenna design including three dedicated just to gaming so you should see better and more reliable 5G and also Wi-Fi connectivity including Wi-Fi 7 if you have a Wi-Fi 7 router which you don't oh on the best bit we also get an IR blaster which I know is very popular with a lot of people so you can control your TV and AC units and various gadgets they've also updated the USBC Port OnePlus of also upgraded the water resistance you can uh see where this is going we've got ip65 now up from 64 last year and although that doesn't quite compete with the 68 water andest resistance you get on well the s24 and most other flagships this will survive I hope a little puddle of water some rain like that and they've actually added a new Aqua touch feature so it should mean the screen works better while wet you can see that it's not missing a single press so a little bit more durable not quite as much as some of the flagship Rivals but an upgrade from the 11 Gorilla Glass 5 on the back gorilla glass Victor two on the front which is nice although not as nice as the new gorilla glass armor that we have on the Samsung and actually if I pointed towards my little light here it is much better at reducing those Reflections I think Corning say is like 75% less reflective you can barely make out the screen on the OnePlus much much easier to see on the Samsung so while obviously this is $500 more I'm a little bit spoiled Now by this brighter and much less reflective screen the good news though is we do also get a slightly brighter screen with the OnePlus we're now talking, 1600 nits of peak outdoor brightness up from 1300 last year and it can now hit a partial HDR peak of 4500 nits for those super bright highlights in your HDR photos and videos it supports both HDR 10 and Doby Vision the lat of which of course is still missing from Samsung's phones and their TVs and I do also appreciate the high PW dimming the 2160 HZ pwm which basically is a number of times it's not like the screen refreshes but it's like it's pulse with modulation so basically at lower brightnesses especially going to get less ice strain so when you're browsing Reddit or Doom scrolling last thing at night with the brightness turned down and you're in bed hopefully it'll give you less ice strain it should give you less I Trin and as I say it's also a touch bigger 6.82 in with a fully Dynamic 1 to 120 HZ refresh rate so it is a lovely screen although I know these curved edges are not everyone's cup of T obviously we now have this flat screen on the s24 ultra which does seem to be where the trend is heading but I know a lot of people do still prefer curv screens it looks and I think feels a touch mod premium so next question how fast is this because yes it comes with the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 as all Flagship Android phones do really well except for the Vivo X100 Pro that's the mediate Tech chip but if I grab my trusty OnePlus 11 and then open the specs Pages you can see here we've got the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 versus the 8 gen 3 also that bigger battery the cameras and not listed is the all new cooling system which include dual Vapor Chambers and according to OnePlus this is the best cooling system they've ever made in their phones which you'd hope I mean it'd be weird if they said it wasn't as good as previous ones but what they're saying is it's given them the headro to actually boost the clock speeds a little bit on the H gen 3 chip and kind of like we've got with the custom 8 gen 3 for Galaxy which is sort of tuned by quom to be a bit faster on here it should be pretty similar on this should be let's put it to the test okay so OnePlus 11 OnePlus 12 s24 Ultra all 8 gen 3 phones and we're looking at about a 10% optic in single cor about 20 in multicore although you can see the s24 ultra does come out on top here but what about 3D mark this is a really demanding test this sort of runs for 20 minutes using the GPU so 3722 on the 11 going up to 5076 on the 12 about a 35% optic although again the s24 ultra do win and significantly in terms of stability we've gone from a 65% stability down to just 53.5 and the s24 is at 61.4 which means by the end of the 20-minute test the 12 is only about 5% faster it really is throttling quite significantly and it's just not as smooth as you can see we got on the s24 ultra there this has like twice a size Vapor chamber as last year obviously we have a b cooling system in the 12 as well but that's not great now if we actually swipe down here the 12 does win in terms of battery life it used just 5% same as the 11 whereas the s24 ultra actually used 133% in this test although I have had other examples of the test where it's used a little bit less but still the 12 does seem to be lasting longer it also has the biggest battery however I was having a little bit of trouble with that geekbench test the scores kept being really low on the 12 for some reason until I realized that you actually have to turn on high performance mode in the battery settings to get those higher scores and by default is off so OnePlus are clearly prioritizing battery life keeping the phone cool over getting the Peak Performance of the chip so while this is certainly very fast and a nice little upgrade over the 11 I still think the s24 ultra is a smoother faster probably better gaming experience on the plus side the uh OnePlus side you might even say they have added some very Nifty new gaming options swapping down from the corner brings up the game menu and from here you can turn on the new adaptive frame booster a kind of frame generation if you like making any game feel like it's running at 120 FPS although it actually drops the native fps to 40 so for Less Twitchy games like this you'll definitely appreciate the smoother perceived refresh rate but for multiplayer games competitive Shooters instead I would turn on the new hyper response engine which helps to reduce screen lag and increase response time so your touch you know when you press to shoot it just feels more instant you've got hyper HDR to boost the brightness and the vibrancy there's a resolution of scaling option to make it look a bit sharper and your usual power modes do not disturb and various game settings bottom line though the OnePlus 12 is exceptionally fast with the new hardware with the new algorithms and Technologies those game features and at the heart of it that oxygen OS software this still feels like one of if not the fastest phones you can buy in terms of just how smooth and responsive it is the one area it doesn't feel quite as fast I have to say if I bring in the s24 ultra is the shutter speed just the regular camera one times and you can see the s24 is taking like twice as many photos as the OnePlus which obviously is important if you're taking shots of your fast moving kids or pets so we'll come to the camera in a second but shutter speed could be improved a little bit but first we have to talk about this massive battery all 5400 Mah hours of it compared to last year's OnePlus 11 you can expect a good 20% longer run time with the 12 and so you can just about get away with two full days of use I will of course be making a full battery comparison video I am waiting on a couple more like the new honor and xiaomi Flagship phones but I reckon the 12 has a good chance to be in the top three if not even taking the crown we also get their new super vuk wied charger bundled in the box which is always appreciated and it's actually 100 Watts here in the UK and around the world although for my American friends it actually tops out to 80 Watts over there either way we're looking at a full charge in then a half an hour plus some very Speedy wireless charging up to 50 Watts if you buy their a vuk charging pad although no G2 support sadly so long battery life fast charging that's what we like to see but let's talk about this camera because this has always been the Achilles heel of OnePlus phones great specs Great Value lovely software but the camera is always been a bit me I think is a technical term so here we are with the OnePlus 12 and I can tell you it's actually very good it's largely just copy and paste from the OnePlus open the foldable phone which actually had a fantastic camera we'll beit with a few tweaks 50 megapixel wide lens with a new Sony lyt 808 1 over 1.4 in sensor which is a mosive upgrade over the IMX 890 one over 1.56 in sensor on last year's 11 and it's almost the same as the OnePlus open although we don't get the pixel stacking Tech although we do get a slightly bigger sensor I also really like the look of the hassle blad portrait mode and also how you can change the default focal length of the wide lens very similar to the iPhone but personally I really like that 35 mm look they've also beefed up the IR filter and improved the dynamic range of the sensor and OnePlus and hassleblad are very keen on offering a specific look to their camera and I really like it it feels a bit more filmic a bit more unique than what I get from my Samsung or my iPhone I've been having a great time with this so far so you've got the main wide lens and then that's paired with a 64 megap Periscope telephoto and this is identical to the open and again a huge upgrade over last year's OnePlus 11 with a new bigger sensor and also double the megapixels and it gives us a three times Optical and six times in sensor Zoom which should be near lossless just without the 4 into1 pixel Bing Advantage you get from the Native three times Optical and well yes the s24 ultra packs in an extra lens and I would still say is the zoom King overall it is significantly more expensive and the OnePlus isn't far [Music] behind and to complete the trio we then have a 48 megapix Ultra wide which actually is a bit disappointing cuz it's basically the same as last year's OnePlus 11 which was pretty similar to the year before and it's using the same aging IMX 766 sensor it does the job but I'd hope they put a bit more effort into this one and then up front we have a new 32 megapix selfie which is also doubled from last year's 160 megapixels overall I think it is a terrific camera system and given the price it's hard to beat okay so let's wrap up and the OnePlus 12 is a terrific phone it really really is the price definitely makes it a lot more competitive as well I really like the screen the design the specs the camera is fantastic it does everything you need really and I think again for that price $799 £849 it's very hard to beat this I think maybe the pixel 8 Pro or the s24 plus would be it sort of closest competitors certainly it's a lot cheaper than the s24 ultra almost putting in a completely different category and I think unless you do want some of the AI features the Spen the slightly better all around camera system and maybe the Galaxy ecosystem it's a tough sell to spend almost half as much money again on this what I would say though is it does feel like we're missing something it's a nice little Hardware refresh the software is still great but it would have been nice to have some of those sort of new cool AI features especially for the camera but there isn't really anything to sort of hang your hat on except for perhaps the price and being a good allrounder but that is not a deal breaker by any stretch but what do you reckon do you think OnePlus have turned it around could you be tempted to buy the 12 or not for you know you make of this in the comments below and also if you got any questions drop a comment and I am also working on a whole bunch of other videos and comparisons that you may find interesting so hit that subscribe button thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time right here on the tech chat

Channel: The Tech Chap

Views: 337,286

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Id: 5EkuiulBGck

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024