The OnePlus 11 takes a sleek design which is eye catching, though it aint perfectly modelled and polished as an iPhone or even a Samsung Galaxy. Flip the phone over in your hand and you’ll catch on the edges and seams. The bezel seems a bit thicker on the top and bottom, and it’s not perfectly uniform either.
There’s a nice, deliberate curve that reminds me of a modern sports car in its slope. The curve on the back from the camera module to the huge, protruding bump also shines like curves on a fast ride. OnePlus is clearly trying to equate the design with speed (we even heard from the OnePlus 11’s design lead about its form and aesthetics, if you’re interested).
On the bottom edge, you’ve got the USB-C port (no more headphone jack for evermore, it seems), as well as a SIM card slot. There will be a dual-SIM model, and the phone can handle eSIM as well, or a combination of both (maximum two lines of service between physical and digital SIM).
DISPLAY
6.7-inch display is larger than many pricier competitors
Vivid and colorful, with high refresh rate
Deep display calibration and customization options
This screen really pops. It’s big, bright and colorful, and it looks fantastic for playing games or viewing photos. The fast refresh rate benefits greatly from the amazing Snapdragon performance. Side-by-side, I’d rather be playing games and watching movies on my OnePlus 11 than my iPhone 14 Pro.
That’s also because the OnePlus 11 is much larger than competitors in this price range, or even some more expensive devices. It features a 6.7-inch panel, which is much bigger than the 6.1-inch screen on the iPhone 14 or Galaxy S23. That means it’s a bigger phone to hold and manage, but that extra real estate really pays off.
Even though this screen is larger than the competition, OnePlus didn’t skimp on the pixels. With 525 pixels per inch (ppi), this display is sharper, with a higher resolution than any of the competition, even at its much larger size. Apple’s so-called Retina display on the iPhone 14 manages to pack only 460ppi, by comparison.
It’s not the brightest screen you can buy, but it makes up for that in contrast and dazzling color. OnePlus also supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ standards for dynamic range. The iPhone 14 has the same color accuracy support, but can’t match the refresh rate, and doesn’t look quite as vibrant.
The OnePlus 11 also uses LTPO display technology, so it should be able to sport an always-on display without draining the power, or slow down the refresh rate when the phone doesn’t need the speed.
type of photographer. Have you heard of Hasselblad cameras? The ones used by both professional magazine photographers and astronauts in space? That’s the look and feel that OnePlus is going for, and you can’t have it any other way with these phones.
That means you shouldn’t expect amazing telephoto shots, or super-close macro photography. The longest lens sees only 2x, compared to the 3x lens on Samsung’s Galaxy S23 series. The iPhone 14 gets no telephoto whatsoever, while the Pixel 7 Pro gets a 5x zoom lens, but then you’re looking at an additional $100 to $200 for the benefit of Google’s more advance optics, relative to the price of the OnePlus 11.
Where the OnePlus 11 excelled was at portrait and landscape photography. With portraits, I couldn’t catch as much detail as I’d like, but the lighting and color was superb, with the synthesized bokeh supposedly designed to emulate that achieved with Hasselblad lenses. Photos have a rich, natural look to them that the iPhone and Pixel can’t match. While Apple and Google are looking for accuracy and reality, the OnePlus 11 gives me the artistic feel of a real, prime photography lens.
It isn’t versatile, but the results are beautiful. It’s not the camera for everyone, but it is a camera I love to carry. As a photographer, I mostly carry a 50mm and 85mm prime lens, with the occasional fisheye. While the OnePlus might be a bit wide for my taste, it did produce some great-looking photos, with nicely blurred background bokeh that looked more like the product of lens blades on an aperture than digital blurring.
That said, there were big problems. Whenever I zoomed in to an unusual length, the software would muddy the image, and details started to look like an impressionist painting. The longest-distance zoom does an amazing job with optical image stabilization, so it was easy to line up my shot. Unfortunately, that shot looked horrible, with few usable details by which to identify the subjects far away.
The portrait mode was a mixed bag. It did a better than average job with fuzzy outlines and hair, as you can see in my selfie photo, but in the portrait shot I took of my beer at Tree House Brewery (the second photo below), a corner of the glass was lost to the background blur.
When it works, though, it takes better photos than the competition. My food looked more appetizing and less artificial through the OnePlus 11 lens than it did when shot with my iPhone 14 Pro. I couldn’t see every hair on my puppy’s fur, but I caught the warmth of her brindle color and her coat reflected light in ways that were more natural than I’ve seen from other camera phones.
My DSLR still does a much better job, and OnePlus will only go so far as to call this DSLR-like image quality. In fact, there are a lot of phones that can do more, since the OnePlus range is quite limited.
What the OnePlus 11 offers is cool photography. This isn’t a versatile zoom lens, it’s a prime. It’s for folks who have heard of Hasselblad and Leica and Lomography. People who don’t take photos, but rather make photos. I enjoy this sort of photo work, but it isn’t for everyone. Just the cool kids.
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Oxygen OS runs atop Android 13
Clean interface with tons of hidden features
The OnePlus 11’s interface, so-called Oxygen OS, runs atop Android 13. It looks closer to Google’s original Android designs, based on the Pixel 7 interface, with a clean and modern aesthetic, though you can tweak it to the point of tackiness, with silly screen transitions, floating buttons, and swiping gestures you’ll commit to memory like spells you forget after you’ve cast them.
OnePlus has also added many useful features, and kept some things that Google removed. You can still organize the app drawer a little bit with OnePlus, while Google now treats it like a kitchen junk drawer that you can open but not clean.
OnePlus 11 in green on wicker basket top with screen on
As with Samsung phones, it’s worth digging through the settings and features, because the mad scientists at OnePlus and its community have been building out Oxygen OS for years. Though the main interface has been streamlined and simplified, there are some cool things hidden behind the scenes.
He’s a teenager, and even he was impressed with this feature, because he loves watching reaction videos, and assumed it would take a complicated setup to produce. OnePlus has one settings menu entry called ‘Special features’ and another called ‘Additional settings’, and both are chock full of unique concepts that may amaze you (or your teenager).
PERFORMANCE
Super-fast Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset
Blazing performance in games and video recording
The OnePlus 11 simply screams with performance. The fast processor paired with the high-refresh screen make for an amazing experience playing the newest games, editing photos, or even just using the interface.
The phone seems to lock some graphics benchmark tests at 60fps, which is quite low for what the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can produce. We reached out to OnePlus for comment and the company says it is not throttling the phones on benchmarks. I suspect there’s an issue with the benchmark software, which is pretty unreliable and far removed from real world tasks.
BATTERY
Largest battery in its class at 5,000 mAh
Fast wired charging
No wireless charging
The battery on the OnePlus 11 is an interesting story, with many twists and turns, but a happy ending. The good news is that the battery lasts all day, if you don’t party too hard with all of the super performance settings, high resolution cameras, and sweet, smooth gaming action.
The OnePlus 11 charges so fast that the 110 Volt outlets in the US can’t handle the proper electrical push required, so chargers are a bit slower here, but still faster than any Samsung, Google, or Apple phone you can buy.
OnePlus says the phone can charge to 50% in 10 minutes, and a full 100% in only 25 minutes. That didn’t pan out in my tests. In 10 minutes I reached between 40-45% charge every time. I was sometimes fully charged in just under 30 minutes, but never 25.
That said, Senior Phones Editor, Alex Walker-Todd was able to push his European unit at the promised full 100W and that version did hit the 25-minute full charge promise time and again. Wherever you pick one up, it’ll recharge quickly.
The OnePlus comes with a special charger, and it’s oddly USB-A to USB-C, anachronistic in early 2023. OnePlus says buyers just aren’t ready for USB-C on both ends of the cable, even the special, thick cable required for OnePlus fast charging.
Another charging oddity is the lack of wireless charging, though I personally won’t miss it on this phone. When the phone can charge to full in about thirty minutes, I don’t need to trickle charge it in one spot throughout the day. Similarly, OnePlus says that not enough customers are ready and equipped for wireless charging to make it a priority on this phone.
It has plenty of power to last, with the fastest quick charging boost
Still, wireless charging could be table stakes to play at the big flagship table. Every other flagship competitor has wireless charging, and Apple even adds its special magnets for cool MagSafe accessory options. No magnetic battery packs are in store for the OnePlus 11.
The final word is the size of the battery. Not only do you get a much larger screen with the OnePlus, you also get a bigger battery inside. The OnePlus 11 uses the same battery as the biggest flagship phones around, the same 5,000 mAh capacity you’ll find on the new Galaxy S23 Ultra, for instance. That means it has plenty of power to last, with some of the fastest quick charging boost.
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