OnePlus has just released its most appealing flagship in quite a while. The catch is that most of the people who bought its phones over the past decade won’t be able to get one.
The OnePlus 16 went on sale today in China. This summer the company withdrew from both the US and European markets, which makes this its first flagship since then, and the phone has no chance of reaching either region.
A 9,000mAh battery tops the spec list
The battery is the first thing you notice. The OnePlus 16 uses a 9,000mAh silicon-carbon cell, which puts it among the largest batteries in any Android flagship so far.
Wired charging runs at 100W and wireless at 50W. Both are quick, and a battery this size needs that speed, because it takes much longer to refill than the cell in a typical flagship.
OnePlus usually puts performance first, and it still does here. A Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset powers the phone, with up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage.
185Hz is mainly for gaming, while 165Hz covers everything else
The OLED panel now reaches 185Hz, which OnePlus has never offered before. That top rate allows 185fps gaming, but only in compatible titles, so how much you get from it depends on which games add support.
The more useful change for everyday use is that the system UI can run at up to 165Hz. OnePlus calls this a first for high refresh rate panels like this one. In practice, you get the higher rate when scrolling and swiping around the phone, not only in games.
The cameras could finally close the gap
Cameras have been the weak point of OnePlus phones for years, and the OnePlus 15 still had trouble in low light. The 16’s main sensor gets three upgrades together: 200 megapixels, a larger 1/1.4-inch-type sensor and a faster f/1.4 aperture.
On paper, combining a bigger sensor with a wider aperture is the right way to fix low-light problems. Whether it actually works will come down to how OnePlus tunes its image processing, and we’ll need to take photos with the phone before saying more.
The rest of the rear setup is a 50-megapixel ultrawide and a 50-megapixel telephoto. The telephoto also moves up to a much larger 1/1.95-inch sensor.
There are lights on the back, too
The silver model has LED lighting built into its back. The lights form a large “16” next to what OnePlus says is a set of galactic coordinates.
The shapes can’t be changed, but the lights will reportedly flash in different rhythms to signal calls, messages, battery level and more. Whether that turns out to be useful or just a novelty you notice for a week depends on how easy it is to tell the patterns apart.
Pricing and availability
In China, the OnePlus 16 starts at ¥5,699 (about $850). It won’t be sold in the US or Europe. That means the phone that fixes many of OnePlus’ long-standing weak spots arrives just after the company stopped selling in the markets where it built its fan base.