Hands On With OnePlus’ Liquid-Cooled, Light-Up Concept Phone

BARCELONA—OnePlus hit the ground running here at MWC with its OnePlus 11 Concept smartphone, a design study that merges the ideas of liquid cooling with high-end smartphones.

OnePlus took its OnePlus 11 5G flagship device and smushed it together with a chassis meant to reduce thermals and improve performance. OnePlus calls its Active CryoFlux technology a “game changer” when it comes to mobile cooling.

In the company’s laboratory tests, the CryoFlux tech helped reduce the overall temperature of the phone by 2.1 degrees Celsius during gaming, which translates into a 3 to 4fps gain in gameplay. That’s not a huge improvement, but it is something. Active CryoFlux is also able to reduce the phone’s temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius during charging, which slices 30 to 45 seconds from the overall charging time. The former metric is far more important than the latter, in this case.

(Credit: Eric Zeman)

How is it doing this? According to OnePlus, it has miniaturized the liquid-based cooling systems of gaming PCs in order to fit them into the smartphone form factor. The Active CryoFlux system relies on a piezoelectric ceramic micro pump to push the oil/silicate-based liquid through a series of pipes. The pump requires less than 0.2 square centimeters of space but is still able to circulate the liquid through the chassis without drawing too much additional power.

(Credit: Eric Zeman)

The pipes are fitted into a glass membrane that’s positioned on the rear of the phone. It is covered with a magnetron-spluttering coating wherein metal and alloy are spread about using an electric field. (Seriously, the materials team had a field day with this one.) The liquid is then illuminated on the rear panel and around the camera module to give the phone some personality. And what a personality it has.

(Credit: Eric Zeman)

There’s no denying the raw visual appeal of a phone that brings its own light-up show to the party. Granted, it’s not a blinking, flashing experience like the Nothing Phone (1), but it is something other than a plain rear glass panel on what might otherwise be a boring old smartphone.

The camera module, in particular, is stunning thanks to the Guilloché etching that gives it that timepiece-like appearance.

Sadly, this is but a concept device. OnePlus says it hopes to bring a device that combines the power of the OnePlus 11 with the visually appealing cooling capabilities of this concept phone to market eventually. Until it does, we’ll have to settle for this piece of eye candy.