Hot on the heels of the OnePlus 11 launch this month, the company is back with a new version of the phone – but this one you can’t buy.
The OnePlus 11 concept will never go on sale, and instead OnePlus is just showing off the shiny new phone – literally – at the MWC show in Barcelona.
The hook here is twofold: a new liquid cooling tech that can help the phone run longer, and a set of lights and other effects to show off that cooling.
OnePlus says its “Active CryoFlux” technology was influenced by gaming PCs, borrowing their approach of pumping liquid through pipelines that run through the body of the phone. The pipelines are between the layers of the phone body and the liquid – a mixture of water, oil and micro-powder – is pumped by a ceramic piezoelectric micro-pump that occupies less than 0.2 cm2 – so the phone as a whole is basically no bigger than before.
Of course, there’s no point in including all that fancy tech if you can’t even see it, so the 11 Concept is fitted with a see-through rear to make sure we all know the glowing blue pipelines are there. – a design that has already raised some eyebrows thanks to its similarity to the shiny Nothing Phone (1), a competing device launched by former OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei.
Dominic Preston / Foundry
The camera module is in turn surrounded by a circular pipeline with more liquid flowing through it, although this is more for visual effect than practical cooling benefit. Guilloche engraving – a technique borrowed from the luxury watch industry – completes the look of the glasses. A slimmer bezel and glass unibody design make the phone as a whole particularly elegant.
Liquid cooling itself is already in phones, of sorts – vapor chamber cooling is typical these days, with tiny amounts of liquid being able to heat up to form vapor and then condense and cool the hardware. This approach is slightly different, as the liquid will remain, well, liquid.
Xiaomi introduced a method similar to this before, which it called Loop LiquidCool – but this technology was introduced in late 2021 and hasn’t even appeared in a concept phone, let alone a real product, since then. .
The OnePlus iteration looks – and, to be honest, looks – quite impressive, but most people will likely find the gains minimal at best.
While gaming, you can expect the phone to stay cooler “up to 2.1°C” with Active CryoFlux, which translates to a whopping 3-4 fps gain. Temperatures can drop 1.6°C during charging, reducing total charging time by 30-45 seconds. Given that the OnePlus 11 was fully charged in just 26 minutes when we tested its charge for our review, a drop of less than a minute doesn’t seem like a game-changer.
Still, flagship phone wars are won by marginal gains, so improved cooling may still give OnePlus an edge.
Dominic Preston / Foundry
OnePlus has confirmed that Active CryoFlux technology “will be in a future device”, so it won’t be a concept for long. It’s at least an improvement over the latest OnePlus concept device, a handset shown at CES 2020 that can hide its cameras thanks to glass that could switch between transparent and opaque. This technology never appeared in a OnePlus phone again – or a device from any other manufacturer, for that matter.
Last year’s flagship OnePlus 10 Pro was followed in August by the performance-focused 10T, the closest OnePlus came to a gaming phone. Could this year now see an 11T with a version of Activate CryoFlux indoors?
OnePlus also announced that the OnePlus 11 has become the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phone to be certified by Qualcomm as ready for its Snapdragon Spaces XR technology, and revealed that Tower of Fantasy is the first game to support the launch of hardware compatible spokes on the 11.
Elsewhere at MWC, Xiaomi gave a global launch to its 13 and 13 Pro flagships, Nokia launched phones you can fix yourself at home, and later today we expect Honor to do so. the same goes for its Magic Vs and Magic 5 handsets.
