OnePlus 11 Concept is the world's first liquid-cooled phone (2024)

The OnePlus 11 Concept has become an early standout at Mobile World Congress 2023, thanks to both the striking looks and innovative new tricks it's added to the already excellent OnePlus 11.

Chief among these features is Active CryoFlux cooling, the blue piping that is easy to see in the images of the phone and that OnePlus teased prior to MWC. It's effectively a miniaturized version of the cooling systems used in gaming PCs, with the blue color coming from the coolant fluid within.

The coolant actually circulates too thanks to an "industrial-grade piezoelectric ceramic micropump‘,” a tiny diaphragm-like structure that sends the liquid coursing up and down the phone to direct heat away from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset.

OnePlus claims that this coolant can reduce the phone's temperature by 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.78 Fahrenheit) during gaming, or 1.6 degrees C (2.88F) when charging, which equates to faster refuels and more frames per second.

We've had phones with in-built cooling fans and external cooling accessories like the RedMagic 8 Pro and the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro before. OnePlus says it looked at a fan as a cooling option, but decided they were too big, heavy and noisy.

The OnePlus 11 Concept’s back glass is seethrough, as you may have guessed from being able to see the phone's azure veins. But what is less obvious is how the phone's flecked with metal to give it more of a personality.

The phone's camera system, ringed with its own cooling "halo", benefits from this subtle detailing too. It features a Guilloché etched pattern, another first according to OnePlus, that you normally find on luxury watches.

Even the front of the phone's been modified slightly for this concept model. The curved display of the regular OnePlus 11 has been made even curvier, giving the phone a quite different rounder feeling in your hand. Given how many people violently dislike curved displays as they are though, this is one part of the concept that OnePlus is perhaps better off not bringing to one of its regular phones.

There's no mistaking the OnePlus 11 Concept for a production model, and that's a bit of a shame. Keen mobile gamers would no doubt love to see what impact liquid cooling would have on their phone, and also see it at work through the back panel. Maybe we'll see a tamed-down version of this technology someday, but for now OnePlus is content to capture our imaginations with the 11 Concept, not money from our bank accounts.