The OnePlus 11 is a powerful phone, but the design isn't what you'd call thrilling. Now, the company has teased a version called the OnePlus 11 Concept designed to counteract that narrative with… lots of LED lights. The "flowing back" has meandering stream-type LED lighting pattern with a ring around the camera module, along with a unibody glass design. It will be revealed on February 27th at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona, OnePlus announced.
With the design, OnePlus is adopting a gaming PC-type approach with the use of LED lighting. That's reasonable considering the OnePlus 11 is one of the better gaming phones out there, with features like a 120Hz display, extremely fast 100W charging and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor.
OnePlus has done special edition phones before, including Star Wars and Pac-Man themed devices. However, this looks like its first with external LED lighting that takes a page from the Nothing Phone 1's transparent, light-up back. It also borrows a bit from the OnePlus 8T concept that used a color-changing back.
In case you need a reason for the lighting, the company says it's to "show the engineering breakthroughs of the OnePlus 11 Concept by highlighting the icy blue pipelines which run through the entire back of the phone, almost like OnePlus 11 Concept has its own series of blood vessels."
It's not clear if it's called "Concept" because it's a one-off concept product, or if that's the name for a special edition phone that will go on sale. If it's the latter, it would certainly stand out from other smartphones. In any case, we should learn more when it's unveiled on February 27th at 3PM ET.