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Jan 20, 2024

OnePlus 11 Review: Good Phone, Better Price

The OnePlus 11 is a fast, high-end Android phone with great cameras, an

The OnePlus 11 is a fast, high-end Android phone with great cameras, an excellent screen, and industry-best software support – it just lacks wireless charging and full waterproofing, like most OnePlus phones.

$699

The early flagship phones from OnePlus made their name by having top end specs but miraculously costing hundreds less than the competition.

Those days are seemingly behind the company now, but the OnePlus 11 is still a competitively priced Android phone that's good enough to recommend above more expensive competing phones.

If you want a phone with a large screen, amazing performance, great cameras, and long software support, you can't do much better than this for $699/£729 – hundreds less than the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and even a little less than the regular S23.

The OnePlus 11 is a large phone but feels slim and compact enough even in small hands thanks to its rounded edges and its curved display. It's only 8.5mm thick, and slips easily into a pocket.

I was loaned the Titan Black model, which is annoyingly slippery. It means the phone will slide off tables and out of your hands quite easily, and there's no case in the retail box (in the UK, at least) – though I’ll let it off, as the matt glass finish means it picks up absolutely no fingerprints,.

The Eternal Green version looks less attractive to my eyes, but its glossy glass back is tackier and easier to hold onto. Both versions have Gorilla Glass 5 on the rear, while the screen has the tougher Gorilla Glass Victus to protect it.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

This phone has the three-position alert slider that OnePlus weirdly left off the recent OnePlus 10T. Thank goodness it's back, as the silent-vibrate-ring switch is a real hardware differentiator for the company.

Annoyingly though, if you flick the slider when using the Chrome browser, it opens the ‘Find in page’ search field – a daily irritation I’ve not seen before on other OnePlus phones.

Most eye-catching is the new camera design, which is a black circle with flecks of silver in it – OnePlus says it's meant to look like a black hole

There's no headphone jack, but a clicky volume rocker on the left and a power button on the right. Also satisfyingly clicky are this phone's haptics, some of the best vibration feedback on an Android phone. The pips from the keyboard feel almost mechanical, and it improves the experience of using the handset.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Most eye-catching is the new camera design, which is a black circle with flecks of silver in it, complete with ‘Hasselblad’ logo to indicate a partnership on this phone with the camera maker. OnePlus says it's meant to look like a black hole. The U-shaped design around it is stainless steel but there's a seam between it and the aluminium sides of the device.

This is a good looking phone that doesn't feel too heavy at 205g, despite its size. It's a shame there's only IP64 protection though – that's fully protected against dust ingress, but basically only splash-proof. OnePlus always skimps on this where it should not, and it's a shame this doesn't match all the phones that are IP68 at this price.

The OnePlus 11 is blessed with a top quality 6.7in AMOLED screen with a 3216 x 1440 QHD+ resolution that supports both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Translation: colours are excellent, and things always look pin sharp. It's a pleasure to use.

It's a display with LTPO 3.0 technology, which means it can vary its refresh rate. It can go all the way up to 120Hz when playing compatible games or scrolling (smoothly) through social media and text but can draw back down to 1Hz to save battery when not needed. It's bright, but not up there with the Galaxy S23 Ultra's superb outdoor visibility.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

I’m loathe to remove the pre-installed screen protector but its cheap plastic coating picks up fingerprints and dust like nobody's business.

The phone is only 74mm wide thanks to the screen's tall 20.1:9 aspect ratio, making it good for one handed reading or turned landscape to grip with both paws to play games.

Dual stereo speakers in the earpiece and on the bottom on the phone can blast out audio at a decent volume without distorting. It's great for podcasts or the radio but music – as with all phone speakers – sounds tinny and thin.

Better is support for Dolby Atmos, which is best appreciated through Bluetooth headphones (OnePlus hopes its own Buds Pro 2) and can tune the EQ depending on the type of audio.

Nestled inside is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, which is also found in the Samsung Galaxy S23 and the iQoo 11 I recently reviewed. It's one of the most powerful chips at the time of writing in February 2023 for an Android phone, and it shows.

The OnePlus 11 doesn't skip a beat no matter what you throw at it. Top end games with hard to render graphics, multi-tasking between several apps, video calls while streaming video in split screen? All fine here.

Here's how it fared against similarly hench smartphones in our regular benchmark app tests:

That's partially thanks to the 16GB RAM on my review sample (the cheapest model only has 8GB, though that should be fine for most people). This memory combined with the 8 Gen 2 results means the OnePlus 11 is one of the fastest phones I’ve ever used – it's zippy no matter what you’re doing.

Opting for the pricier 16GB model also gets you 256GB UFS 4.0 storage – faster storage then the 8GB model that has 128GB of not-quite-so-fast UFS 3.0. Not a huge difference, but if you’re here to find out if the OnePlus 11 is one of the most powerful phones you can buy, that detail will matter to you.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

OnePlus also says it has put its machine learning smarts called ‘RAM Vita’ in the phone that speeds processes up even further, always assigning enough RAM to apps like the camera to ensure they never lag, while keeping every else ticking over. I can't prove how much of an impact this has, but I can say the OnePlus 11 is very rapid.

OnePlus has been unfairly derided for the quality of its cameras in the past, enough for me to say upfront that the OnePlus 11 has excellent cameras. The only minor downgrade is there's a 2x optical telephoto lens compared to the 3.3x one found on the OnePlus 10 Pro from 2022.

It's not a hugely bad thing, particularly at $699/£729. The $799/£849 iPhone 14 doesn't have a telephoto lens at all.

The best lens on a phone is always the main one and the 50Mp shooter here is no exception. In fact, I would say it is very good indeed. It has an aperture of f/1.8 which takes in enough light to properly expose shots, plus optical image stabilisation (OIS) to counteract hand jitter.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

It produces natural, true-to-life colours where phones from Samsung might over-saturate tones. In daylight, the OnePlus 11 is as good as the iPhone 14 at capturing a scene, though on occasion people and landscapes look a little washed out. This is also true of the 16Mp front-facing camera which is nothing particularly special and struggles in low light.

I still prefer the processing of the Vivo X80 Pro, particularly in low light where it can capture far more detail than the OnePlus 11. That phone also has an additional periscope zoom lens, something missing here.

The OnePlus 11 also lacks the clever – and accurate – software of the iPhone and Google Pixel 7 to retain people's natural skin tones. It has ‘natural colour calibration with Hasselblad’, that aims to keep the natural colours of scenes, but isn't developed for skin specifically. Overall this is nit-picking what is a superb main camera.

There's also a 115-degree ultrawide lens with an impressive 48Mp half-inch sensor. Shots aren't as good as the main lens, with colours a little darker than the scene, but images are sharp and more than good enough to post to social media.

The third sensor is the aforementioned 32MP RGBW (red green blue white) portrait telephoto lens. This is a fixed length lens designed in partnership with Hasselblad to produce the bokeh effect of that company's XCD 30mm lens, and is used at 2x whether you select regular photo or portrait in the camera app.

It produces impressive results, mostly dealing with people's hairlines and keeping backgrounds attractively blurred, using both hardware and software to achieve its effects. It's also good to punch in to 2x zoom on occasion, but anything beyond that is digital zoom.

There's also a Hasselblad-branded X-Pan mode to shoot like an old film camera in a wide panoramic format, plus a Pro mode that's well-thought out with manual controls, and options to shoot in RAW and 10-bit colour. There's a lot to dig into below the auto-mode surface, and the phone is very fun to shoot with.

The night mode is too enthusiastic though, boosting light way up above a scene's actual lighting to a comedically bright effect. But video is strong, being able to shoot in 4K at 60fps and 8K and 24fps.

Impressively, OnePlus has crammed a dual-cell 5000mAh battery into the svelte OnePlus 11 with excellent all-day results. I had no issue taking the phone off charge at 7am and being confident it would last till 11pm. This was with steady use texting, listening to music through Bluetooth headphones, connecting to a smartwatch, and using it for photo, video, maps and more.

OnePlus has crammed a dual-cell 5,000mAh battery into the svelte OnePlus 11 with excellent all-day results

It's not a two-day phone unless you’re a very light user. If you hammer your phone then you’ll love the 100W fast charging, which in my testing charged the phone from 0% to 71% in 15 minutes and was full in 26 minutes.

Charging this fast truly changes the way you use your phone. No more overnight plugging in needed – you can charge for the 30 minutes before you leave your house and leave with 100%.

There's no wireless charging, something I personally do not use even when it's on a phone, but it's worth noting. At this price you might expect it.

OnePlus phones basically now run Oppo's ColorOS Android software skin, even though OnePlus still calls its own version OxygenOS. That means the stock-ish, fairly untouched Android look of old OxygenOS is no more.

Instead the latest version, OxygenOS 13 based on Android 13, has a look based around rounded corners of notifications, widgets, and app icons. The notification shade has big rectangular and circular icons which are fine, but I found the notifications themselves the most annoying thing about using the phone.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

It's not easy to swipe away notifications as they come in, reminding me of Apple's iOS and its inflexibility. You must swipe to the right to dismiss, but it's also not always clear whether you should tap or swipe down on a stack to deal with them, and I ended up nuking the whole list out of frustration sometimes.

The auto-brightness is also maddeningly aggressive, turning the screen way too dim for my liking. I turned it off often, which is something I don't do on other phones.

The OS is perfectly pleasant to use though, and the settings app is well thought out and clear. Some settings are hidden in sub-menus, but I did find it easier and faster to tweak Android to how I like it visually compared to the latest Samsung phones.

The OnePlus 11 doesn't skip a beat no matter what you throw at it

Perhaps best of all here is the promise of four years of Android updates and five years of security patches, the first such promise for any OnePlus phone, and matching Samsung. It makes the OnePlus 11 joint-best in the industry at the time of release for Android software support.

The OnePlus 11 costs $699/£729/€849 for the version with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage, and $799/£799/€919 for 16GB and 256GB storage. You can pre-order it direct from OnePlus, or from most other electronics retailers and select carriers and networks.

It goes on full sale on 16 February.

This pricing makes the phone relatively affordable considering its specs but still a chunk more than the best Android deal around, the $599/£599/€649 Google Pixel 7.

OnePlus has successfully undercut the $799/£849/€959 Samsung Galaxy S23 and only really misses out wireless charging and waterproofing in comparison. The iPhone 14 starts at the same price as the S23 in the US and UK, though is a little more in Euros.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

If you want an Android smartphone with top specs in 2023 that's designed to stay fast and will have software support till 2028, the OnePlus 11 is a great choice. It's also one of the cheapest high-end phones to offer this.

The absence of wireless charging shouldn't be dealbreakers for most people. After all, this phone has an excellent screen, top cameras, good battery life and truly fast charging, and the best performance of any Android phone to date. The lack of full waterproofing is more annoying to me.

Sure, the software looks different to the OnePlus phones from five years ago, but the same is the case for iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones. OnePlus can't just stand still, it also must evolve – luckily for us, the OnePlus 11 is a fine evolution and one of the best phones you can buy for a price that undercuts many competing products.

Henry is Tech Advisor's Phones Editor, ensuring he and the team covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about for readers and viewers all over the world. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.