OnePlus has confirmed that it misled OnePlus 12R buyers by advertising the wrong storage specifications. While the read and write speeds of storage mediums such as SD cards, SSDs, or hard disk drives are often put front and center by the manufacturer, the same is not true for the flash storage that's used in smartphones.
Specs for the storage used on smartphones often fly under the radar, even though they are pretty important and can be one of the indicators of how fast a smartphone will perform in both day-to-day use and heavier tasks such as gaming and video editing.
For flagship Android smartphones, UFS 4.0 is the latest storage standard and is twice as fast and nearly 50% more efficient than the previous standard, UFS 3.1. OnePlus' latest flagship, the OnePlus 12, uses UFS 4.0 storage for all variants, and for the OnePlus 12R, the company initially claimed that the higher storage variants use UFS 4.0.
All OnePlus 12R variants feature UFS 3.1 storage
However, benchmark testing revealed that the OnePlus 12R has slower read and write speeds than the OnePlus 12 on all variants. Complaints from folks who bought the phone soon started flooding social media, and OnePlus president and COO Kinder Liu has now confirmed that that the 12R doesn't use the latest UFS standard at all.
For the OnePlus 12R's asking price, UFS 3.1 storage is more than satisfactory, but the misleading advertising has opened the doors to understandable backlash from customers, especially the tech-savvy ones who tend to be more pedantic about a phone's specs when buying one.
OnePlus hasn't yet revealed if it intends to compensate 12R buyers in some way or reduce the phone's price for future buyers. We're assuming the Chinese manufacturer will simply try to sweep the controversy under the rug and hope everyone forgets about it, as providing monetary compensation won't be good for the company's finances.
Image credit: OnePlus
