The OnePlus 12R prematurely leaks out as the brand's more affordable 2024 high-end option
Are you excited (or at the very least intrigued) by the recently leaked OnePlus 12 but don't think you'll be able to afford the company's next super-flagship when it makes its commercial debut, which could happen as early as later this year? Why not consider the OnePlus 12R instead?
You know the largely useless 2MP macro sensor found on the back of the OnePlus 11R alongside a solid 50MP primary shooter and a decent 8MP ultra-wide-angle lens? The 12R will apparently get rid of it entirely, opting instead for a very much useful and very competent-sounding 32MP telephoto sensor with 2X optical zoom capabilities next to basically the same 50MP main and 8MP ultra-wide rear cameras.
The simple answer to that question, of course, is that no such device exists just yet, but believe it or not, we now seem to know pretty much everything there is to know about it, as well as its non-R-branded cousin.
That's right, the almost always reliable Steve Hemmerstoffer, aka @OnLeaks, aka Steve H.McFly, is once again back from the future to bring us a bunch of high-quality product depictions of the other high-end handset OnePlus is reportedly planning to release (relatively) soon, as well as all of its key specs and features.
A 6.7-inch beast with a flat (ish) screen and alert slider
Admit it, that's a pretty droolworthy description of a OnePlus phone unlikely to cost anywhere near as much as a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra or Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max, for instance. The screen, which may seem completely flat at first glance, is in fact "slightly curved", as described by Steve H., similar to the OnePlus 11R and slightly contrasting with the design approach of the "standard" OnePlus 11.
Said flat-ish AMOLED display is expected to measure a generous 6.7 inches or so in diagonal while sporting a 1.5K resolution (the exact pixel count remains unknown) and supporting silky smooth 120Hz refresh rate technology.
Under the hood, the OnePlus 12R is all but guaranteed to pack the same state-of-the-art Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor as the OnePlus 11, thus vastly improving the raw performance of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1-powered OnePlus 11R while almost certainly staying one big step behind the OnePlus 12, which is likely to come with an all-new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC inside.
On the outside, this potentially affordable Android powerhouse we're looking at today largely fails to surprise, which is however not necessarily a bad thing either. Not with such razor-thin screen bezels, an always elegant centered hole punch, a handy and sleek alert slider on one side, a volume rocker on the other, and a fairly crowded but also undeniably stylish rear camera module that deserves a little bit of special attention of its own as follows...
Moar megapixels, moar battery capacity, more money?
On the front, meanwhile, the single 16MP selfie snapper is likely to go virtually unchanged, with another big change reportedly coming from the battery size department. Even though it definitely doesn't look chunky in these freshly leaked factory CAD-based renders, the OnePlus 12R is expected to add 500mAh to the 5,000mAh battery capacity of its predecessor, bumping up the total to a very rare 5,500mAh for "mainstream" high-end smartphones today.
With the blazing fast 100W charging not going anywhere and the storage and memory ceilings once again hitting 256 and 16GB respectively, we can't help but fear that the 11R's reasonable price will have to go up to cover for the aforementioned processor, camera, and battery upgrades.
Of course, the OnePlus 11R is not available in many markets, costing the rough equivalent of $490 in India in an entry-level 128GB storage/8GB RAM configuration, for instance, and unfortunately, similar geographic restrictions are likely to apply to the 12R early next year as well, which sounds like a much bigger problem than a possible price hike.
Things that are NOT allowed: