OnePlus unveils OnePlus 11 Concept phone with Active CryoFlux (hands-on)

OnePlus today unveiled its OnePlus 11 Concept smartphone, which the company had been teasing for the past few weeks. The device, not meant to hit production, is designed to showcase the company's new Active CryoFlux cooling solution.

Active CryoFlux is a fancy term for what is essentially a closed-loop liquid cooling system the sort you'd find on a desktop PC but miniaturized greatly for a smartphone.

At the heart of the system is a ceramic piezoelectric micropump, which circulates fluid through a series of tubes between an upper and lower diaphragm. The micropump takes up less than 0.2cm² of space on the device. The pump circulates the fluid, which moves around the tubing that acts as a heat sink and radiator, absorbing heat from the SoC and releasing it slowly over the course of its run back to the pump.

OnePlus claims that the Active Cryoflux can reduce temperatures up to 2.1°C, good for another 3-4FPS in a game. During charging, the temperatures can be down by 1.6°C, shaving off 30-45 seconds from the charging time.

The rest of the features are mostly cosmetic. OnePlus has used a curved, transparent glass for the back cover, which the company claims is unibody even though there clearly is a frame along the sides. The back cover lets you see the tubing underneath, which has been partially illuminated. The area around the camera has also been illuminated and the camera has a new Guilloche etching pattern.

It's unclear if OnePlus will ever actually implement this technology in a production smartphone. The company had shown an interesting self-tinting camera cover class on the Concept One at CES 2020 but never implemented it on a production device. Same was true for the color changing back on the OnePlus 8T Concept as well. Of course, not every concept feature has to hit production and sometimes it's just cool to show off new stuff you have been working on on the side.