A former darling of the smartphone market, OnePlus has recently received tons of flak over one unpopular strategy after another. Its software commitment for a few of the OnePlus Nord phones didn’t sit well for fans of the company’s “Never Settle” philosophy, and its “merger” with OPPO raised doubts about its future. Its biggest offense lately, however, is its secret throttling of performance on OnePlus 9 phones. Now it seems to be reconsidering its position and can offer a compromise, but probably not until next year.
On the one hand, OnePlus’ justification for throttling the phone’s CPU sounds reasonable enough, citing its users’ concerns over battery life and warmth regulation. On the opposite hand, OnePlus committed two errors in its implementation, surprising Apple’s high-profile scandal over an identical iPhone throttling scheme. OnePlus intentionally hid this fact from its users and didn’t give them an answer to that throttling mechanism.
Now it seems that OnePlus are going to be addressing a minimum of one among those faults. Before OnePlus launched its new OnePlus Nord 2 phone, which also exhibited that performance throttling behavior, it revealed that it’s performing on how for users to modify this “optimized mode” on or off. This way, they will choose whether to prioritize performance over battery life or the opposite way around. The company’s full statement is below:
“Since different chips perform differently and that we want to form bound to get the simplest performance and efficiency out of everyone, we’ve implemented performance optimizations to varying degrees on the OnePlus 9R and Nord 2. However, given the clear feedback from users and media, our R&D team is currently performing on adding a choice to let users turn on/off this optimized mode and have better control over the performance of their phones. We’re targeting to possess this solution ready with one among the primary builds of OxygenOS 12.”
There are a couple of catches to the present promise, though. For one, users will need to remember that such a feature exists or that their phone is running during this “optimized mode,” meaning their performance is throttled consistent with OnePlus‘ standards. The likelihood is that the corporate won’t be advertising this rather controversial “feature” anyway.
The other caveat is that it’ll only be available on OxygenOS 12 with Android 12. Considering Android 12’s launch date and OnePlus’ own testing schedule, we’d not see this feature arrive on affected phones until very late this year at the earliest.
