OnePlus 11 Concept brings water cooling to a phone with questionable results

Enlarge / The OnePlus 11 Concept was apparently assembled by tiny welding robots. (credit: OnePlus)

It’s Mobile World Congress this week, which means entering the wild world of concept phones. Usually, these are flexible display devices that will never see the light of day, but this year OnePlus has the “OnePlus 11 Concept” phone. This has a liquid cooling system called “Active CryoFlux.” We will try to decipher this thing, but our first blazing red flag is that OnePlus does not go into much detail.

It’s worth noting that OnePlus has made several concept phones, which have never really affected the company’s consumer products. One phone put electrochromic glass in front of the camera lenses, rendering them invisible when they weren’t being used. Another phone would change colors. Neither feature ever made it into a consumer phone.

OnePlus’ press release says the system features “a piezoelectric ceramic micropump at its core, connected to pipelines sandwiched between an upper and lower diaphragm. The micropump takes up an area less than 0.2 cm², enabling cooling liquid to circulate around the pipelines without significantly increasing OnePlus 11 Concept’s weight and thickness.”