OnePlus 12R gets an essential free upgrade that makes your phone much better

We're very impressed with the OnePlus 12R, the latest flagship from the budget-busting brand. But as we explained in our OnePlus 12R hands-on, while we really rated the camera and the long battery life, it wasn't perfect at launch. In particular we felt that its performance could be improved. So we're pleased to see a new update for the phone's OxygenOS system that delivers performance improvements as well as some other worthwhile tweaks.

The update, according to the official OnePlus community forum, is rolling out now; there are two versions, one for the Indian market and one for global users. And it delivers improvements in three significant areas: system, communication and camera.

What's new in the OnePlus 12R OxygenOS update?

The most important part of the update, as ever, is the latest Android security patch – so this release includes the February 2024 patch to keep your phone system secure. The update also "improves system stability and performance", which should hopefully address the niggles we identified in our hands-on, and it promises to improve fingerprint unlocking and make unspecified apps less prone to crashing.

That's the system changes. Next up: communication. OnePlus says that the update should mean significantly more stable network connections, which presumably means both cellular and Wi-Fi, and it also makes the NFC function more reliable and more widely compatible.

Last but not least there are camera improvements: better stability of the camera app, and improved camera performance "for a better user experience". 

These are welcome improvements, but whether that's enough to launch the OnePlus 12R into our best Android phone guide remains to be seen: its more affordable sibling, the OnePlus 12, already lives there thanks to its Galaxy S24 Ultra-style spec that comes in at roughly one-third of a Galaxy S24 Ultra's price. As we said in our OnePlus 12 review, that phone "packs in a top camera and blistering performance, while looking better than almost anything else." 

We particularly liked its camera, developed in association with photographic legends Hasselblad: while it tends to desaturate colours a bit more than we're used to – many Android phones go in the other direction –  it's capable of shooting really stunning pictures.