OnePlus Water-Cooled Concept Phone Has Glowing Veins

(Credit: Eric Zeman) OnePlus has a new concept smartphone on display at Mobile World Congress, and it’s got some cool glowing lines on the back. OnePlus says those luminous lines aren’t just to look cool — they’re part of the phone’s “Active CryoFlux” cooling system. It stands to reason you could make an active liquid cooling system for a phone without having it glow, but where’s the fun in that?

The OnePlus 11 Concept uses the same basic body style as the retail phone, but there’s a glowing ring around the enormous camera module, along with the aforementioned glowing lines across the back. It’s designed to be eye-catching, but the underlying technology is, according to OnePlus, capable of improving the smartphone experience.

Some high-performance smartphones have shipped with active cooling in the form of a spinning fan, but that adds noise, weight, and makes water resistance nigh impossible. The OnePlus 11 Concept uses an “industrial-grade piezoelectric ceramic micropump” to run coolant through a closed loop that pulls heat away from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 system-on-a-chip. The system apparently takes up less than 0.2 square centimeters of space, allowing it to fit inside the OnePlus 11 chassis. Although, it’s unclear if OnePlus had to change the internals or remove components to make the system fit.

Improved cooling isn’t just a gimmick — modern smartphone SoCs get toasty under load, and that causes them to throttle and lower performance. OnePlus says that Active CryoFlux cooling can lower temperatures by 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.78 degrees Fahrenheit) during games. That could allow the SoC to remain clocked higher and render 3 to 4 more frames per second. When charging, the phone could be 1.6 Celsius cooler (2.88 degrees Fahrenheit). OnePlus says that could cut 30 to 45 seconds from overall charging time, which doesn’t actually sound very impressive.

This device is only a concept, and OnePlus is fond of creating demo-worthy hardware, but most of it never finds its way into retail devices. Even if the company uses the Active CryoFlux system in future phones, it probably won’t glow like this. And anyway, the stock OnePlus 11 already has fantastic thermals. You can play games for as long as you want, and the “Cryo-velocity” cooling block inside ensures virtually no loss of performance. That’s not the case for a lot of other phones.

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