Branded “Intelligently Yours”, the heart of the AI is Plus Mind, “a new feature designed to quickly save, catalog and recall key information found on the screen” before AI tools analyse the content for data. The way it works is this: when you find something that you want to keep, you can ask AI Plus Mind to save the on-screen information to a dedicated Mind Space for future reference and analysis. At face value, it doesn’t look terrible dissimilar from other scrapbook apps but bear in mind that it’s a stored copy rather than a link to another website.
That’s broadly the good news. The bad news is that the ubiquitous OnePlus Alert Slider is being replaced by the OnePlus Plus Key, a customisable button which can change sound profiles, take a picture, start a recording or….launch AI Plus Mind. I’ll reserve judgement until I see it in action but the whole benefit of the the Alert Slider was that it did one thing and did it well. You could discretely silence your phone without a whole rigmarole of turning the phone on, unlocking it, finding the sound profiles and choosing the quiet one. Couldn’t we have both?
Further, OnePlus is extending Gemini’s influence into the standard OnePlus apps such as Clock and Notes, improving the overall AI experience.
OnePlus is keen to highlight that as much processing as possible is done on the handset itself, but when additional resources are needed, the AI can engage the company’s Private Computing Cloud which provides a secure, encrypted environment for data processing.
Personally I’m still looking for uses for AI at a personal level, beyond removing strangers from my photos, so this sounds promising.