I've used nearly 30 phones this year — no joke — and while many of them have great features worth writing about, I keep going back to one of the first releases of 2024: the OnePlus 12. It's hands-down my phone of the year and now you can experience greatness for a record-breaking $250 off the OnePlus 12 a solid week ahead of Black Friday.
That's $549 for the fastest flagship phone in the U.S., making it almost half the price of Google's overpriced Pixel 9 Pro all while kicking its proverbial butt in every test we put them up against. We wrote that the OnePlus 12 beat Samsung in all the right ways, and it turns out that OnePlus would beat Samsung to the Android 15 update by several months on top of everything else.
If I had to choose one phone to buy this year, it's absolutely this one, and it's not even close.
To put this price in perspective, my colleague Harish wrote last week that you should wait until Black Friday to buy a OnePlus 12 so it'd drop back down to its previous-record low price of $599. Now that it's $50 cheaper than that, this deal's a no-brainer.
Aside from a low price, the OnePlus 12 sports fantastic build quality with the best haptics in the business. The screen gets plenty bright without hurting your eyes — unlike the Pixel 9 series and its low-HZ PWM display — and support for great features like Pro XDR, you know you're getting the best image quality and the best display for your eyes.
If you're worried about camera quality going from a Pixel to a OnePlus phone, don't be. As Android Central's managing editor wrote, the OnePlus 12's camera surprised him, even when directly comparing it to a Pixel. I've taken scores of wonderful photos and videos from the OnePlus 12 over the last 11 months and love using it every day.
Of course, we can't forget to talk about battery life and charging. OnePlus's Android 15-based Oxygen OS 15 update is something truly special and made battery life even better for me. I get well over a day from a single charge and never have battery anxiety because the charger that's included in the box — yep, OnePlus doesn't cheap out like Samsung, Apple, or Google — charges the phone from 0-100% in 30 minutes. No joke. It's insane and will blow you away every time you use it.
If you were on the fence about which phone you should upgrade to this year, stop looking and just get a OnePlus 12. Thank me later.
