With the OnePlus 11 already out and reviewed, we weren’t necessarily expecting big news from OnePlus at MWC 2023 in Barcelona this week, but it looks like they’ve put those expectations on ice! Or on liquid cooling, at least — while it’s not meant for commercial release, the OnePlus 11 Concept phone they’re showing off at this year’s show introduces an advance mobile cooling system past what they put in this year’s flagship phone, and it’ll hopefully be a sign of things to come.
We were already impressed by the performance of the OnePlus 11, but even with a fancy cooling system, OnePlus figured they could do a better job of keeping temperatures down and performance up.
The OnePlus 11 Concept phone at MWC 2023 has a cooling system called Active CryoFlux, a drastically scaled down version of the kind of liquid cooling pump systems you see in gaming PCs. The micropump in the phone takes up less than 0.2 square centimeters of area, allowing OnePlus to not substantially increase the device’s size and weight. The system decreases operating temperatures by 2.1 degrees Celsius during gaming, helping to keep frame rates up.
Impressive as is, but this being gaming PC-style cooling we’re talking about, you know it has to look dope, too. The OnePlus 11 Concept phone has a clear back, so you can actually see the micropump at work.
The cherry on top is the ice blue cooling liquid that gets pumped in a ring around the main camera lens, giving it the real RGB flair we all came for.
With the OnePlus 11 powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, advanced graphics features like ray tracing are finally making their way to mobile, making cooling systems like this necessary — lot of power going into these phones these days, and keeping them cool is all the more important, since they are phones. In hands, that presumably don’t like to hold super hot things.
Only thing that remains to be seen is why this cooling system is just in the OnePlus 11 Concept they’re showing off at the show, and not in the commercial release. We’re sure the fancy presentation kicked the cost up beyond what was reasonable for a commercial release, but it’s also possible the underlying technology either wasn’t quite ready for mass production yet. But, hopefully as mobile cooling systems like this become cheaper to produce and more reliable, we’ll see the rise of an era of tricked out RGB bedecked mobile phones. Feels inevitable, at this point.