The OnePlus 12 packs a 5400 mAh battery, up to 24GB of RAM

The OnePlus is doing its usual early flagship launch in China. The OnePlus 12 is official there but won't be released in the US until 2024. We can still fire up Google Translate and go over it, though.

This will be one of the first devices on the market with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm's new SoC for 2024. This uses an Arm Cortex X4 CPU and a novel 1:5:2 core arrangement, all built on a 4 nm process. That's one big X4 core, five "medium" A720 cores, and two A530 cores for background processing. The base model has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, while higher tiers will let you go up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The phone is only IP65 rated for dust and water resistance; in other words, it can't be submerged in water like most other flagships.

The battery is getting a big boost beyond the usual 5000 mAh capacity phones have been stuck at for years and is now up to 5400 mAh. The Chinese version has 100 W wired quick charging (this will probably be downgraded to 80 W in the US) and sees the return of 50 W wireless charging. Both will need proprietary OnePlus chargers. The display is a 6.82-inch, 3168×1440 120 Hz OLED that can hit 4,500 nit peak brightness. Unlike some other flagships that are dumping curved displays, this one is still curved.

The design is almost a complete copy/paste of the OnePlus 11. Of course, the front is all screen with a hole-punch front camera. The rear camera bump puts all the camera lenses in an off-center circle and then awkwardly wraps that shape around the phone's edge. The only difference we can see is the LED flash, which used to live in one of the four black "camera lens" circles and has been moved to the top-left corner of the camera bump.

For cameras, we have a 50MP Sony LYT-808 as the main 1/1.4-inch sensor. There's also a 64 MP 3x optical zoom telephoto, a 48 MP wide-angle, and a 32 MP front camera. The back has three cameras but is designed to look like four cameras, with the fourth spot holding some kind of camera sensor. We'll guess it's the "Rear spectral sensor" listed on the spec sheet, but keep in mind we're dealing with Chinese translation here.

The Chinese prices are not particularly relevant to the rest of the world, but in China, the base model (12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage) starts at 4,299 yuan (about $600), while the super beefy 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage model goes for 5,799 yuan (about $811).

Listing image by OnePlus