OnePlus 12 could go really retro with wooden option

The OnePlus 12 will be launched before the end of 2023, and we're quite excited about that: the current OnePlus 11 is a great phone – we gave it four out of five stars, which is quite the achievement in the increasingly crowded Android market – and now there's another reason to be intrigued. A new report says that the OnePlus 12 could have a wooden back, or at least one designed to look like it's made of wood.

The report comes from the social network Weibo, where Digital Chat Station shared what appears to be a legitimate image of OnePlus's next flagship. It's too grainy to reproduce here – and we mean photo grain, not wood grain – but it certainly looks woody. The translated text accompanying it says "OnePlus 12 this time has a classic wood grain shell."

Would you like a wooden back on your phone?

This isn't the first time OnePlus has experimented with natural-looking textures. The OnePlus One was made available in a Walnut Wood Edition way back in 2014, and there are tons of OnePlus cases mimicking real wood too. So it's not too far-fetched to believe this particular report – and this particular leaker, who has a pretty good track record of breaking Android news. 

Although it looks like wood, we don't yet know what the phone back will actually be made of. Wood is possible, certainly, but it seems unlikely that the whole case will be made of it: very thin wood isn't very strong and of course it's prone to scratching and scuffing too. 

While we wait to find out what's on the outside, we've already got a pretty good idea of what we're expecting to see on the inside. The OnePlus 12 is expected to have a decent triple camera setup on the rear, a battery with 5,400mAh and 24GB of RAM in some configurations. It's also expected to be packing the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and 100W wired charging. 

The OnePlus 12 launch is likely to be China only to begin with, although we don't think it'll be too long before the phone launches in other territories. If OnePlus's recent history is any indication, a global launch a month or so later seems likely.