OnePlus 11R hands-on review

Software

The OnePlus 11R runs on OxygenOS 13.0 built on top of Android 13. Our phone was running build A.08 and the January 2023 security patch at the time of writing and OnePlus has promised three major Android updates and four years of security patches for this device.

The story of OxygenOS 13 is well-known at this point. While it was promised to be a "lighter experience" closer to stock Android, it instead turned out to be ColorOS 13 wearing a mustache and fake glasses. Even that is giving it too much credit, as the two are nearly identical at this point.

As such, anyone who was holding their breath for OnePlus software to go back to its glory days will likely be disappointed. For what it's worth, ColorOS 13 may be like chalk to cheese compared to older OxygenOS versions but it's not necessarily bad. It's reasonably well-designed, has a good range of built-in features without going too overboard, and offers a variety of customization options. In the end, with some patience, you can get it to look and work more or less how you'd want, which is about as good as it gets without going full custom ROM.

Unfortunately, what the software lacks is polish and attention to detail. Despite being absorbed into a much larger corporation, OnePlus software still comes out the gate feeling like it was built by two guys in a room with a strict deadline and no one to beta test.

Take for example the display refresh rate. We have pointed out in the past the ridiculously aggressive ramping down of refresh rate on the OnePlus 11 and 10 Pro, which often made the phones unusable in apps like Instagram and TikTok with a lot of scrolling and video content. It is incredibly weird that those phones shipped like that considering how popular those two apps are. The OnePlus 11R actually works fine in those apps, but it's also not quite working as intended.

OxygenOS 13.0

The aforementioned 40Hz and 45Hz aren't really working at the moment and the phone actually spends way more time at 120Hz than it should, even when it's not in use and just sitting idle. Some apps are still oddly locked to 60Hz, like the Gallery, YouTube, and Prime Video, while Netflix isn't. Almost all the browsers we tried are locked to 90Hz and do not feel great to use compared to the rest of the apps. We only found one browser that worked at the full advertised 120Hz and that seems more like an oversight than intentional. We don't even feel like mentioning the browser for the fear of it getting locked down to 90Hz in the next OS update.

Default apps

We are also not very optimistic about scrolling in Instagram and TikTok working well in the future. It feels like the current situation is temporary and not by design, and as soon as the company figures out how to enable the 40Hz and 45Hz modes it promised, it will also make sure the phone doesn't spend as much time at 120Hz as it currently does, which will invariably hurt performance in the aforementioned apps.

Games are by and large still mostly locked to 60Hz. When a game like New State Mobile does support 90Hz, the phone instead goes into 120Hz refresh rate mode while the game is actually rendering at 90Hz.

The touchscreen gestures also worked very poorly. OnePlus' navigation gestures often don't work as well as on other Android phones but the OnePlus 11R had a hard time detecting swipe gestures at all unless you went all the way to the edge of the display. This became genuinely frustrating after a while and forced us to go back to using button-based navigation.

Our review unit also came with two browsers, Chrome, and the HeyTap browser. It seems the second one wasn't supposed to be there because it would not let you update it through the Play Store and there was no easy way to uninstall it, either.

OnePlus has a fairly elaborate customization system for always-on display mode. One of the features it supports is integration with Spotify and select food delivery apps, which for India include Zomato and Swiggy. While the Spotify integration didn't add much value, the software didn't seem to want to work with Swiggy at all, so there were no custom notifications available on the AOD for that app.

None of these are deal-breaking things individually but together they tend to add up, which results in the aforementioned feeling of lack of polish. The problem is that the annoyances are often intentional so there's no real chance of them being fixed in the future.

Performance

The OnePlus 11R runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which is last year's flagship. It is paired with up to 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage and up to a monstrous 16GB LPDDR5X. Our review unit was the top-of-the-line configuration.

The last year's flagship comment was not meant to be a jibe, as the 8+ Gen 1 packs more than enough power to be a top-tier performer for several more years. As a matter of fact, the OnePlus 11R performs exceedingly well, with lightning-fast responses and fluid animation, at least when the display is running at 120Hz.

What was perhaps more impressive is the amount of stuff you can hoard in your memory. OnePlus claims you can keep 44 applications active in the background and although we didn't even have as many installed, we did instead have dozens of tabs open in two browsers while running every installed app in the background and the phone still had about 4GB memory left to spare. Not to mention everything stayed open in the background.

While you may not necessarily need the full 16GB, there is no 12GB option, which means you end up going all the way down to 8GB if you don't spring for the higher-tier variant. While not bad by any means, it's no longer sufficient if you are a heavy multi-tasker and also not particularly futureproof. We strongly recommend getting the 16GB variant, especially since it also includes the higher 256GB storage and only costs INR 5000 more.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11
  4899
• vivo V27 Pro
  3933
• OnePlus 11R 5G
  3608
• OnePlus 10R
  3564
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  3395
• Poco F4
  3190
• vivo V23 Pro
  3021
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  2936
• Poco X5 Pro
  2930
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  2790
• vivo V25 Pro
  2521
• Realme 10 Pro+
  2371

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11
  1150
• OnePlus 11R 5G
  1060
• vivo V27 Pro
  996
• Poco F4
  975
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  894
• OnePlus 10R
  881
• vivo V25 Pro
  858
• vivo V23 Pro
  850
• Realme 10 Pro+
  842
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  795
• Poco X5 Pro
  781
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  491

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11
  1140661
• OnePlus 11R 5G
  953897
• vivo V27 Pro
  846767
• OnePlus 10R
  759929
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  718351
• vivo V23 Pro
  716766
• vivo V25 Pro
  704090
• Poco F4
  698586
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  604467
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  534143
• Poco X5 Pro
  531398
• Realme 10 Pro+
  522376

GFX Aztek ES 3.1 High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11R 5G
  52
• OnePlus 11
  49
• vivo V27 Pro
  45
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  39
• OnePlus 10R
  39
• vivo V23 Pro
  34
• vivo V25 Pro
  33
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  31
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  23
• Realme 10 Pro+
  16

GFX Aztek ES 3.1 High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11
  61
• OnePlus 11R 5G
  47
• vivo V27 Pro
  29
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  26
• OnePlus 10R
  26
• vivo V23 Pro
  23
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  22
• vivo V25 Pro
  21
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  15
• Realme 10 Pro+
  11

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11R 5G
  54
• OnePlus 11
  53
• vivo V27 Pro
  45
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  40
• OnePlus 10R
  39
• vivo V23 Pro
  32
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  29
• vivo V25 Pro
  28
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  23
• Realme 10 Pro+
  15

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11
  68
• OnePlus 11R 5G
  51
• vivo V27 Pro
  30
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  26
• OnePlus 10R
  26
• vivo V23 Pro
  21
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  20
• vivo V25 Pro
  19
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  17
• Realme 10 Pro+
  10

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11R 5G
  60
• vivo V27 Pro
  57
• OnePlus 11
  57
• Poco F4
  49
• vivo V23 Pro
  45
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  44
• vivo V25 Pro
  42
• OnePlus 10R
  42
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  40
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  33
• Poco X5 Pro
  28
• Realme 10 Pro+
  21

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 11
  126
• OnePlus 11R 5G
  104
• vivo V27 Pro
  63
• Poco F4
  59
• vivo V23 Pro
  53
• OnePlus Nord 2T
  50
• vivo V25 Pro
  48
• OnePlus 10R
  48
• Oppo Reno8 Pro
  46
• Xiaomi 13 Lite
  39
• Realme 10 Pro+
  27

Gaming performance was also excellent on the OnePlus 11R. The GPU on this chip is a strong performer and thanks to the in-game stats that OnePlus offers through its gaming tools, we can see that the bottleneck is often the CPU and not the GPU, as even when completely maxed out games like Genshin Impact weren't even coming close to the limits of the GPU at 60fps. An option to go beyond 60Hz would have been nice, at least for games that support it but as of right now, it's only OnePlus that decides which game can do that and even then they can only go as high as 90Hz.

The phone also maintains a comfortable temperature while gaming. While none of the games we tested fully stressed the hardware, the surface never went over lukewarm temperatures. The phone does, however, get quite hot when using out under the sun, and will drop display brightness aggressively to combat it.

The haptic performance on the OnePlus 11R felt quite a bit weaker than on the OnePlus 11. In fact, it felt weak in general and while it was still precise, it lacked the tactility of a good vibration motor.