The camera department at OnePlus has been able to make some lofty boasts in recent years - with a focus on bigger sensors, better tech, and a high-profile partnership with Hasselblad. But the company could be prepared to zoom beyond anything it's offered before with the OnePlus 12.Longtime Indian leaks blogger Yogesh Brar has tweeted out some key specifications for this future release based on supposed intelligence from an engineering sample unit.

Most of these numbers and what they're tied to won't surprise you if you've been keeping track of recent phones across the industry. We've seen the OnePlus 11 sport a 6.7-inch QHD OLED display and a 5,000mAh battery with super-fast SUPERVOOC wired charging speeds... OK, that one topped out at 80W, whereas the OnePlus 12 is said to go as fast as 100W. And it's only natural to predict a next-gen chipset - Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 - will be in a next-gen device.

We come back to the cameras, though, and it's suggested that, while we won't see too much change to the main and ultra-wide cameras, we will see the OnePlus 11's fixed telephoto camera switched out for a periscope system with double the resolution at 64-megapixel. That's right, "periscope," as in mirrors or prisms bouncing light in a shaft instead of a straight stack of lenses.

Oppo Find X6 Pro - 2
Oppo

It's really only a shame when you consider that, while this will be a OnePlus-first, parent company Oppo has been pouring research and development into periscope cameras on phones for years. The company took it to market with 2019's Reno 10x Zoom and has been iterating on the technology ever since. The latest Find X6 Pro takes a rather conservative approach and ends up with a zoom factor of 2.8x, but early critiques seem to show it doing a bang-up job in terms of detail.

The big unknowns at this point are what the zoom factor will be and what sensor will be used for the OnePlus 12's periscope camera. We suspect more rumours should satisfy our curiosity well before the official release date, tipped to be in December (at least for China).