OnePlus 12R Genshin Impact Edition hands-on

The OnePlus 12R Genshin Impact Edition is launching around the world later today with the start of a nearly month-long pre-order period. The phone is coming to the US and Canada, the UK and Germany, India too. There are some places with OnePlus presence that are not getting it, but this is a very wide release for a limited edition phone – and we got to play with it a few days before the rest of the world.

Fans of the game should have already recognized Keqing – the phone’s Elector Violet color scheme was inspired by the character. It’s a gradient that is a little lighter on the top and it has a peacock motif painted on the glass.

You may have noticed the speckled appearance of the glass – that’s the result of a new electro-etching process. The goal is to make fingerprints less visible and to make the glass more pleasant to the touch.

That is if you’re going commando – the limited edition phone comes in a bespoke bundle that collectible merchandise, but even the accessories have been styled after Keqing. This means a violet 100W charger and a matching violet USB A-to-C cable with a right-angle plug and a violet LED light. The SIM ejector tool is shaped like Lightning Stiletto.

And a protective case that adds a different look for the phone with a colorful image of Keqing. Those are the things you might take you, but there are things you will leave at home on a shelf too

There’s a Keqing acrylic stand in the box, a pin and eight magnets. The box itself is fully custom and looks the part.

The bespoke Keqing-themed box

Beauty isn’t skin deep, however. OnePlus has partnered with miHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, and invested $14 million to establish a Genshin Impact Gaming Laboratory. The goal is to tweak its phones to deliver a high, consistent frame rate at Ultra graphics settings and to speed up load times with features like RAM-Vita.

Based on internal testing by OnePlus, the 12R Genshin Impact Edition can run the game at an average of 59.4fps for over an hour without getting too hot (thanks in part to the dual vapor chamber design). The company claims that the CPU-Vita feature of the Trinity Engine recognizes different game states and automatically adjust the CPU to optical settings.

Naturally, the phone has a Keqing theme loaded by default, which includes violet wallpapers and a icon pack. There's more - the phone has an exclusive ALways On Display design and fingerprint unlock animation, a stylized Electro Element charging animation, even stock the power on animation has been replaced with a custom one.

The 12R has a lot of compute power – it is based on the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset that powered last year’s OnePlus 11 flagship. The Adreno 740 GPU is quite powerful, though the R-phone took one step back from flagship performance – as the company confirmed after some initial confusion, the phone has UFS 3.1 storage, not 4.0.

The OnePlus 12R has a curved 6.78” display on the front, an AMOLED with 1,264 x 2,780px resolution and 10-bit colors (HDR10+, Dolby Vision). Even better, it is an LTPO panel, meaning that it can adjust its frame in the range 1-120Hz.

You can check out our review for more on the display, the chipset performance and more.

If you want the OnePlus 12R Genshin Impact Edition specifically, that will go on open sale in late March, pre-orders start today. There is only one configuration, the top-specced 16/256GB model. Below are the prices for the US, Europe and India. As you can see, it’s slightly higher than the regular 16/256GB model.