OnePlus 11R hands-on review

Design

The design of the OnePlus 11R is quite similar to the OnePlus 11, to the point where they would look identical under certain lighting. This has not been the case in the past, as neither the 9R nor the 10R looked like the flagships of that year.

The front of the 11R has a curved display. OnePlus does not advertise what glass is uses for the front [Update: It's Dragontrail] but in our testing it was scratch resistant. The front camera is centrally mounted at the top of the 11R compared to the side location on the 11, which is one of the ways of telling the two phones apart.

The frame around the device is made out of plastic with a glossy finish. On the right side of the phone is the power button along with the alert slider, the latter of which had gone missing on the previous 10R.

The power button on the 11R is extremely easy to press and ends up being pressed accidentally all the time. This is especially true when using the supplied case, which somehow makes it even easier to press this button with minimal effort.

The top of the phone houses a microphone and a second outlet for the top speaker. The third member here is a first for a OnePlus phone, an infrared blaster, which is accompanied by an app to make the phone act as a remote control for household appliances.

On the left is the volume rocker and on the bottom is the second loudspeaker, another microphone, a USB-C 2.0 port, and a dual SIM slot.

The back of the phone is covered by Gorilla Glass 5 which has been etched to have a velvety texture and appearance. This is something that OnePlus has gotten really good at over the years and each of their recent phones has had incredible glasswork designed to mimic different materials. The 11R back is also resistant to fingerprints and smudges but is also not especially grippy and requires care to handle.

The phone comes in two colors, Sonic Black and Galactic Silver. Unlike previous models, the two models don't have different back textures and are identical aside from the color.

The area around the camera cluster looks very similar to that on the 11. The three camera lenses and the flash are arranged in a similar pattern and are all housed under the same large glass cover, making it super easy to clean. The starburst pattern of the 11 has been replaced with a simpler radial spin and the Hasselblad logo is gone. The ring around the camera cluster is also made out of plastic instead of stainless steel.

In terms of overall dimensions and weight the 11R and 11 are once again nearly identical, with less than a millimeter difference in size. Going back and forth between the two there is no perceptible difference between them.

Unlike the IP64 rating of the OnePlus 11, the 11R has no advertised rating. The phone has some ingress protection built-in, as can be seen by the rubber gasket around the SIM tray, we wouldn't recommend putting too much faith in these.

Ingress protection aside, the OnePlus 11R does look and feel good in the hand. The curved sides, relatively low weight, and the superb texture of the back panel lends it a very premium feel, despite the use of plastic for the frame. The fact that it can pass off as its much more expensive sibling may also be a bonus for some.

Display

The OnePlus 11R has a 6.74-inch, 2772x1240 resolution AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. The display resolution puts it somewhere between the resolution of a typical 1080p and the more expensive 1440p panels on other smartphones.

The display supports 10-bit color depth and full Display P3 coverage. The color management is clumsy as usual for OnePlus wherein it forces you to pick between sRGB or one of the wide color presets. If you pick sRGB then the phone's own camera images, which are saved in Display P3, will look undersaturated and if you pick one of the wide color presets then everything else will look oversaturated. The only exception is HDR, which does not follow the manual presets and enforces its own colors.

Regardless of which mode you pick, it presents largely accurate colors for content that uses that color space. We opted to use the natural sRGB preset, as most content is still saved in this color space.

The OLED panel gets reasonably bright although it's not the brightest we have seen under direct sunlight. The automatic brightness adjustment works well and isn't as conservative by default as it was on the OnePlus 11.

For HDR, you get HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG support. OnePlus claims 1450 nits of peak brightness but when placed beside a Pixel 7 Pro with a 1500nits display, the OnePlus 11R consistently underperformed in terms of peak brightness when displaying HDR test patterns of varying sizes.

The phone has a Bright HDR video setting, which on other OnePlus phones boosts HDR brightness at lower encoded values to make the image pop more but the option seemed bugged on the 11R, as it ironically made the image darker when enabled. OnePlus also continues to adjust brightness automatically for HDR content based on ambient lighting, which is frustrating as HDR content has its own mastering value for luminance that is absolute and should not be messed with for best experience. For these reasons, the HDR experience on the OnePlus 11R remains subpar.

Display settings

The display tops out at 120Hz refresh rate. OnePlus claims support for 40Hz, 45Hz, 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz values for the display to automatically cycle through based on the content. We are not sure what the logic is behind 40Hz and 45Hz as there is no content that matches those values but it didn't matter because we never saw the phone reach those numbers. Our review unit only cycled between 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz and actually preferred to spend most of the time at 120Hz.

This is in stark contrast to the OnePlus 11 and the OnePlus 10 Pro before it, both of which very aggressively ramp down their refresh rates all the way down to 1Hz to save every last ounce of battery power. Meanwhile, the OnePlus 11R happily chugged along at 120Hz all day, which often made the experience better on this cheaper model. Not all is perfect, however, but more on this later in the software section.

Two minor annoyances on the OnePlus 11R are the front camera and fingerprint sensor placement. The front and center camera placement, with an oversized cutout, makes it quite distracting while watching videos or playing games in landscape compared to the OnePlus 11. The fingerprint sensor, which otherwise works really well, is also placed awkwardly low, forcing you to shift your grip if you hold the phone along the sides rather than the bottom.

Charging

The OnePlus 11R has a 5000mAh battery and supports 100W SUPERVOOC fast charging, which are the same specs as on the more expensive OnePlus 11. In our testing, the phone charged from 1% to 50% in 9 minutes and 1% to 100% in 26 minutes.

While we didn't do our full battery testing, the battery life on the OnePlus 11R is good and should comfortably last a full day of use for most users.

Speaker

The OnePlus 11R has a set of stereo speakers, one at the bottom of the phone and one inside the earpiece. The earpiece speaker has another grille facing the side so the sound fires more evenly on both sides of the phone.

The audio quality isn't remarkable; there isn't a lot of low-end so music doesn't sound particularly engaging but the vocals are strong with a balanced, natural timbre and thus audio from YouTube videos or podcasts does sound good enough. OnePlus also gets credit for making sure the two speakers sound reasonably balanced, so there's no sense of one speaker dominating the soundstage, either in volume or frequency response.

The phone does not have a headphone jack but we were able to use a passive USB adapter and the audio quality through the phone's DAC and amp is good. The phone also supports Dolby Atmos for speakers and headphones and spatial audio for headphones with optional head tracking support for compatible products, such as the company's own OnePlus Buds Pro 2, which we have reviewed separately.