7 ways OnePlus can make Mind Space actually useful

With relatively compact flagships making a quiet comeback, it’s no surprise that OnePlus wants in. The compact-sized OnePlus 13s, exclusive to India, is the company’s latest effort to strike a balance between size, premium hardware, a few calculated compromises, and a fair price point. It gets close, too, with a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, a hand-friendly 6.3-inch display, and a large battery. It also brings with it the new Plus Key and a renewed focus on AI. To be fair, OnePlus has been talking about AI for a while, just like every other smartphone brand, but the 13s feels like the first time it’s trying to make it central to the user experience.

That shift is anchored by the Plus Key, a hardware shortcut for triggering an assortment of shortcuts like profiles, flashlight, camera, and, of course, AI-powered features. Among them is Mind Space, a tool meant to help users save and organize whatever’s on their screen. It’s not a huge leap from Pixel Screenshots, what Nothing is doing with Essential Space, or what several productivity apps have experimented with, but Mind Space, paired with the Plus Key, shows potential as a digital memory bank for screenshots, copied text, and other snippets. In theory, it’s helpful. In practice, it still feels half-baked.

The idea behind Mind Space is simple enough. Tap the Plus Key or trigger a gesture if you’re on a device like the OnePlus 13 that doesn’t have a Plus Key, and you can capture whatever you’re viewing on your screen. A website, an image, a paragraph, even part of an interface, and send it to a central interface. OnePlus uses on-device AI to analyze and sort your content into different categories. It’s a feature clearly designed for the way we actually use our phones in 2025. In the information overload era, we’re all grabbing things to revisit later, whether it’s a recipe, a product link, a boarding pass, or something you don’t have time to read in the moment. The problem, though, is that Mind Space doesn’t go far enough yet.

My first gripe is a rather big one, but I seriously think the interface needs a rethink. Right now, it’s more of a linear dump than an organized system. Everything you capture gets listed chronologically with minimal sorting. You can filter by content source, but that’s about it. There’s no tagging, no folders, no smart grouping beyond the source — a feature Pixel Screenshots handles a bit better. Mind Space would benefit from automatic categorization. In fact, this should have been a default feature given the use of an on-device LLM. Receipts, personal notes, ideas, screenshots from social media, even website summaries, with manual overrides for people who want control, is what I want to see. If it’s going to be a space for managing everything you’ve captured, it needs to offer more than a feed.

Search is another weak point. The AI can extract some context, but it’s hit or miss. Search for “laptop deals,” and it might find your saved screenshot from Amazon, or it might not. Search by date or vague context, and the results get even more inconsistent. A proper semantic search engine that understands what you meant, not just what you typed, would go a long way. The OCR functionality shouldn’t just dump information from a page. It should summarize and categorize it better. I understand this is just the first iteration of the app, but it needs these features to build an audience and critical mass. I’d love the ability to use Mind Space to build a collection of must-reads shared by Instagram booktok creators, but it can’t. Or how about summarized versions of interesting articles? At the moment, all I get is a link, author information, and publication date. That’s not very helpful for a summarization tool.

Automation is another area where Mind Space could grow. Right now, everything requires a manual trigger. But the potential here is in passive capture. If the system notices I’ve copied the same text multiple times, it could offer to save it. If I’m always taking screenshots of recipes or Instagram ads, it could automatically tag and sort them into collections. OnePlus has on-device AI running anyway, so why not let it anticipate my behavior and suggest captures or even actions based on what I’m saving? Taking it one step further, voice input would also help. If I could say “remember this restaurant” or “save this address for later” and have the AI find and store relevant content, it would make Mind Space feel more like a true assistant. There’s no reason voice couldn’t be part of the interface, especially when other OEMs are moving quickly to layer voice control across their AI features.

Next, there’s no cloud syncing. As niche as my gripe sounds, it is critical to the way I wrangle information. Mind Space is entirely local, which means everything I save lives only on my phone. Switch devices, lose the phone, or try to work across a tablet or laptop, and all that captured content is gone or inaccessible. If OnePlus is serious about building an AI-powered memory system, it needs to offer a way to securely back up and sync Mind Space across devices. Even better, a web or desktop client would let users organize and act on saved content outside the phone. Until then, it’s not really a memory system. It’s just a temporary locker.

Then there’s the walled garden problem. Mind Space doesn’t connect meaningfully with other apps or services. I can’t export content to Google Drive or send it to my Notes app. The only cross-app integration I’ve come across so far is the ability to create calendar events. As convenient as that is, it’s not enough. For a feature positioned as a personal productivity tool, it’s oddly disconnected from the rest of the phone. OnePlus should think seriously about app integrations, whether that’s through deep linking, system-level shortcuts, or a proper API that lets developers hook into Mind Space.

Exporting is a pain point, too. Once something is in Mind Space, getting it out isn’t easy. There’s no bulk export and no way to send content to third-party apps in a structured format. For users who want to write up notes in Docs or track saved items in a spreadsheet, Mind Space is a dead end. A proper export feature, even if limited to standard formats like PDF or markdown, would make the tool more useful in everyday workflows.

Privacy is another concern of mine. While OnePlus says most of Mind Space’s AI runs on device, there’s no real transparency around what data is stored, how long it’s retained or what happens when you delete something. For a feature designed to capture all kinds of personal information, that’s a problem. A dedicated privacy panel with toggles for data retention, syncing if ever introduced, and analysis history would help build trust.

Most of all, if OnePlus is really serious about this, Mind Space needs to be more than just a scrapbook. Give it some structure. Let users add checklists or reminders to saved content. Show clippings in the context of a timeline. What you saved, when and why. Maybe even surface recurring themes over time. If someone keeps saving screenshots about an upcoming trip, that’s probably worth surfacing as a smart folder or project. These are the kinds of use cases that AI excels at.

Look, I like what OnePlus is trying with Mind Space. It’s a genuine problem for users like me who consume a copious amount of information every day. But for it to succeed, Mind Space should feel personal. Not just in what it saves, but how it evolves. If a user tends to clip content during work hours, prioritize showing those items first. If someone mostly saves social media posts and shopping links, maybe offer price tracking or AI summaries, or extract more information like the booktok example I mentioned earlier. This isn’t out of the realm of possibility, as dedicated apps already let you do that.

Right now, Mind Space feels like a concept in public beta. A good concept, but still a concept. It’s not useless, but it’s also not packing enough utility to build a workflow around. That could change. The foundation is solid, the hardware support is already there, and the broader trend toward AI-first experiences is only picking up speed. But for Mind Space to matter, OnePlus needs to treat it as more than a checkbox on the feature list.

Mind Space has to become a key part of how people use their phones every day. When paired with OnePlus’s excellent tablets for content consumption, I could see this being a compelling reason to shift to the company’s ecosystem. But it’s not there yet. If OnePlus wants to build an ecosystem that’s smarter, more contextual, and more personal, this is the right place to start, but it’s got its work cut out for it.