Most of the best phones now have enough water resistance that you can safely use them in the rain, but being able to use them effectively in the rain is another matter entirely, because once that screen is wet, it struggles to respond to your inputs. OnePlus though might have come up with a solution, however.
The company has revealed that the upcoming OnePlus Ace 2 Pro includes ‘Rainwater Touch Control’ technology, which combines a custom screen chip and some algorithms to account for water on the display, and prevent it from interfering with taps and swipes.
This technology was shown off in a video on Weibo (via GizmoChina), where it worked perfectly in the rain and was compared to an iPhone 14 Pro, which struggled much more. The video also showed the OnePlus Ace 2 Pro working perfectly in foggy conditions.
Another interesting aspect of this phone is that it has 24GB of (LPDDR5X) RAM, a detail which OnePlus also revealed on Weibo (via GSMArena). That will make it one of the first non-gaming phones with 24GB of RAM, though the Xiaomi Redmi K60 Pro is set to have the same amount, and will land a couple of days earlier.
In any case, OnePlus claims that this is enough RAM to allow for 53 apps to be open simultaneously, and for up to 41 applications to be able to remain open in memory for up to 72 hours.
In practice, this is probably more RAM than most people need, but if you’re using large numbers of apps then it could be beneficial.
Given that two non-gaming phones are about to ship with this much RAM, there’s a high chance we’ll see many others follow – there are even reports of the Samsung Galaxy S24 series coming with a bump to their baseline memory. That said, we’re more interested in OnePlus’s Rainwater Touch Control, and it remains unclear whether other phones will get that. Hopefully at the very least the OnePlus 12 will and that this innovation will start cropping up on rival phones too, as it's a feature everyone could benefit from.
Apple had previously been granted a patent in 2022 (which builds on a prior 2018 patent) titled 'Modifying functionality of an electronic device during a moisture exposure event' with explicit intentions of operating in a similar fashion to what the Ace 2 Pro demonstrates here, but we're yet to see the company put this advanced touch input into practice on the best iPhones.
As for the OnePlus Ace 2 Pro, that’s landing in China on August 16, but may not get a global launch.
