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Your OnePlus 13 Will Get a Dedicated AI ‘Mind Space’ in Update Rolling Out Now

I played with OnePlus’ flagship AI feature. It worked well, and it’s heading to some phones imminently.

It’s a non-negotiable right now that every phone-maker out there must have a plan for integrating AI into its devices. OnePlus is a little late to the party, but it’s arrived nonetheless. Back in May, the company announced plans for bringing its own vision of personalized AI to OnePlus phones, and from this week, it’s rolling out to the OnePlus 13 and 13R.

At a launch event in London earlier this year I not only got to see the first AI features to land on OnePlus phones in action, but also learn about what the company’s future plans are for bringing more complex and sophisticated AI features to its phones down the road.

With all Android phone-makers increasingly making use of best-in-class Qualcomm chips and relying on Google’s Gemini AI, having a strong AI strategy is one way they can set themselves apart from rivals. I was impressed with how far OnePlus seems to be thinking ahead and not rushing into going ham on AI. Its initial AI rollout will likely capture people’s attention, even if its ideas aren’t entirely original.

OnePlus’ statement AI tool is called Plus Mind, which can save, suggest, store and search based on what’s currently on your phone screen, ultimately depositing the details in an app OnePlus is calling «Mind Space.» Plus Mind can be activated at any time, either by a dedicated button (if your phone has one) or by a swipe-up gesture. If it spots details of an event or reservation, it will propose creating a calendar entry.

Mind Space is a place to «organize your fragmented memories,» said Arthur Lam, the company’s director of OxygenOS and AI strategy. This is a hub where all of your most important content will live. AI search will allow you to find what you need without the information overload you may be used to, or it will automatically translate content into another language to make it accessible and searchable.

Plus Mind will debut with the upcoming launch of the OnePlus 13S, a phone designed specifically for the Asian market, which comes with a dedicated AI button (the «Plus Key,» as OnePlus is calling it) on the side of the phone. That means for those of us in the US and Europe, we’ll have to wait a little longer to enjoy OnePlus’ vision for AI ourselves. It will eventually be rolling out to the OnePlus 13 as an over-the-air update later this year, although the company is yet to confirm exactly when.

Plus Mind and Mind Space: My first impressions

On the OnePlus 13, which shipped before the addition of the Plus Key, you instead have to use a three-fingered swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen to activate the AI features. When I tested this in person, it was hit or miss as to whether I could get it to work. There’s definitely a knack to it — you need to start from a couple of centimeters above the lower rim — and there’s a high chance of accidentally displacing what’s on the screen. 

It’s clear that OnePlus designed Plus Mind to be used with a dedicated button, and no doubt all future OnePlus phones will feature a Plus Key of their own. It is a shame in retrospect, though, that the key is missing from its most widely available 2025 flagship phone.

After using Plus Mind to save a variety of content, I had mixed opinions on how useful it was. The process of capturing and creating events out of details displayed on screen was seamless, and I found that I was able to use natural language within Mind Space to pull up the details of these events after the fact. But when saving articles I thought were interesting, Mind Space wasn’t able to provide a summary of the entirety of what I’d been reading — only of the specific text that was on screen at the time I activated Plus Mind.

I also struggled to organise the content into collections within Mind Space. This is a manual process, rather than a situation in which the AI takes over to categorize everything you’ve saved. This feels a little like a missed opportunity.

Like other Android phone-makers, OnePlus has the benefit of tapping into the best of Google’s Gemini phone tools, while also choosing what additional features it wants to bring to its phones to make them stand apart from its competitors. That said, its initial foray into AI with Mind Space is bound to draw comparisons to what Nothing is doing with Essential Space — its own dedicated hub for saving content, snippets, links and reminders.

What’s next for OnePlus AI?

Plus Mind and Mind Space are just the first part of OnePlus’ three-stage AI strategy. Next up is integrating a large language model into Plus Mind, allowing your phone to understand your habits to create a «persona» it uses to understand you.

«It will help you understand yourself,» said Lam, and could even help you discover something «surprising» or «enlightening» about yourself.

Stage 3 is when OnePlus plans to go full AI agent, turning into a personal assistant that can know everything about you. But the company’s not quite there just yet. In the meantime it has a few other ideas in the pipeline.

Coming first to India (again, not the EU or the US), are AI VoiceScribe, which will provide you with a quick summary after your call on WhatsApp, Snapchat or Telegram, and AI Call Assistant, which provides you with in-call translation in both text and voice.

On the more playful side, OnePlus is introducing two AI photo tools. The first, AI Best Face 2.0, will allow you to correct the faces of up 20 people in a group photo so that everyone is looking their best (if they have their eyes closed, for example, or what OnePlus describes as a «suboptimal expression»). AI Reframe, meanwhile, will analyze your carelessly shot holiday snaps and suggest creative cropping and framing to make it look like you weren’t three cocktails deep when you shot them.

These photo features will come to OnePlus phones this summer, beginning this week, but for the major OnePlus AI tool rollout, you might have to wait a little longer.

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WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September

Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. 

Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.


Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.


WWE 2K25

Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.

Persona 5 Tactica

Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.

Other games on PS Plus

Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.

*Premium subscribers only.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.

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Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving. 

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths. 

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress. 

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench. 

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate. 

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.) 

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

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