OnePlus 11R Solar Red hands-on

OnePlus recently launched the OnePlus 11R Solar Red edition in India. This is similar to the standard OnePlus 11R with mostly aesthetic differences.

The Solar Red edition was initially unveiled as a Genshin Impact special edition in China. The Solar Red is essentially the same phone minus the special packaging and software personalization.

The main feature of this variant is the striking red vegan leather back, replete with a leather texture in the middle, fake stitched pattern, and a ribbed texture around the edges for grip.

Visually, the design is quite convincing but not so much in hand. The material is quite tough and hard and has none of the plushness or give of real leather. It wouldn't have been difficult to make a softer material perhaps but that would also cause it to wear quicker and I'm not sure vegan leather has quite the same alluring patina as real leather.

The rest of the phone is identical to the standard 11R externally. The sides are still made out of glossy plastic that also surrounds the camera. The front has the same curved display. When viewed from the front, the Solar Red edition looks no different than standard models.

The story continues in software as the Solar Red edition has no extra software features or customizations. Not even a single extra wallpaper.

There are some differences on the hardware front. The Solar Red comes with an astonishing 18GB of system memory and 512GB of storage, both of which are higher than what you get from the other colors.

However, the 18GB memory is of the slower LPDDR5 variety, and not the LPDDR5X found on the 8GB and 16GB variants. Having said that, you are unlikely to notice the difference in usage as the difference in peak memory bandwidth between the two is fairly small. We also noticed this in benchmarks as there was no notable difference between the Solar Red and other variants.

All in all, nothing completely out of the ordinary but a decent option if you want something other than the usual glass back. The OnePlus 11R Solar Red is now on sale in India and priced at INR 45,999.