A great phone, if photography isn’t a priority

If you’re reading this review, there’s a chance you’ve come to it with some confusion. Didn’t OnePlus already release a new flagship phone this year, and wasn’t it called the OnePlus 13? The answer is yes to both those questions. So, what gives? Well, over the last few years, OnePlus has been working to shorten the gap between when its phones debut in China and when they’re available in the rest of the world. This year, the OnePlus 15 arrives in North America just a few short weeks after its initial October 27 release. And like it did with the jump between the OP3 and OP5, OnePlus is skipping the OP14 because of the number four and its unlucky association in Chinese culture.

With that cleared up, you might think the OnePlus 15 suffers from following too soon after its predecessor. I’m happy to report it offers some clear upgrades over the OP13, including a faster processor and an absurdly big battery. What it doesn’t do, however, is change the OnePlus formula — for better and worse.

OnePlus / Engadget

If you don’t mind a slightly underbaked camera, the OnePlus 15 is tremendous, offering among the best displays, performance and battery life you can find on a phone right now.

Pros

• Fast processor and display
• Long-lasting battery
• 80W charger included in the box

Cons

• Cameras could be better
• Derivative design
• Only four years of OS updates

$900 at OnePlus

Pricing and availability

Due to the federal government shutdown, the OnePlus 15 does not have a US release date yet. The company had hoped to begin selling the phone starting today, November 13, but the phone has yet to obtain the necessary clearance.

“As is the case with every smartphone manufacturer, the United States’ Federal Communications Commission certifies OnePlus devices before they are sold in the US. As a result of the government shutdown, device certifications have been delayed,” Spenser Blank, OnePlus North America’s head of marketing and communications, told Engadget.

“Subsequently, US sales for the OnePlus 15 will be postponed until they have been secured. The OnePlus 15 has already finished all the required tests from the FCC’s recognized labs and the certification application has been formally submitted. We are hopeful that approvals can be generated quickly and as a result, we can bring the OnePlus 15 to our customers in the U.S. expeditiously.”

There’s also some uncertainty around pricing. On release, OnePlus plans to offer two versions of the OnePlus 15. The base model, with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, will cost $900. The company will also sell a 16GB/512GB variant that will cost $1,000. However, OnePlus warns the price of both models is “subject to change due to current market conditions.”

Hardware and display

The OnePlus 15 is a great phone with a boring, derivative design. It borrows its visual identity from the OnePlus 13s and 13T, a pair of smaller, 6.32-inch phones OnePlus released in India and China this past spring. There’s no two ways about it, in making its new flagship look more like those devices, OnePlus has at the same time made it look more like last year’s iPhone 16 Pro.

It’s a shame. The design of the OnePlus 13 was one of the things my co-worker Sam Rutherford praised that phone for, and it’s something I liked about it too. The 15 just looks generic, even if there are a few nice touches. For example, the sand storm color has a nice, ceramic-like feel to it. One other impressive aspect of the design is how thin OnePlus has managed to keep the 15 while adding a massive 7,300mAh battery. At 0.31 inches thick, the sand storm variant is only slightly fatter than the 0.29-inch thick Galaxy S25 FE I recently reviewed, which has a more modest 4,900mAh battery (the two other OP15 colorways, infinite black and ultra violet, are listed as slightly thicker at 0.32 inches).

Now, if you’re a longtime OnePlus fan, I need to mention the 15 doesn’t have the signature Alert Slider found on the company’s previous phones. I know what you’re thinking, did OnePlus do away with a fan favorite feature to add an AI button? The answer is both yes and no. The first time you tap the Plus Key, OxygenOS will prompt you to make it a shortcut for one of eight functions. Naturally, the default option is to use the button in conjunction with the company’s newish Mind Space AI hub, but you also can bind other functions to the Plus Key, including the old Alert Slider functionality. Even if it’s another thing that’s derivative of the iPhone, I like the flexibility the Plus Key gives.

Separately, OnePlus has gone with a different screen this time around. The OP15 offers a 6.78-inch AMOLED display with a 1,272 x 2,772 resolution. The new screen is both smaller and less dense than the one found on the OnePlus 13, which was 6.82 inches big and had a 1,440 x 3,168 resolution. It’s also faster, offering a 165Hz refresh rate in select games, up from 120Hz on the earlier model. OnePlus told me it went with the lower resolution display because there’s no OLED manufacturer making QHD panels that fast yet. I’ll have more to say about the display in the performance section, but for now I’ll say the OP15’s screen is one of the best parts of using the phone. It’s dense enough to make text and images look sharp, and with up to 1,800 nits of brightness available, it’s easy to see and use even in harsh sunlight.

Cameras

OnePlus and Hasselblad ended their partnership in September, and the OP15 marks the debut of the company’s new DetailMax imaging engine. I’ll get to the software in a moment. First, OnePlus has once again gone with a main camera system built around three 50-megapixel sensors. What’s different this time around are the lenses. Two of them are slightly slower than their counterparts on the OnePlus 13. The main camera now has an f/1.8 aperture lens, down from the f/1.6 glass found on last year’s model. At the same time, OnePlus has gone with an f/2.8 lens for the telephoto camera. For comparison, the OP13 had an f/2.6 lens for distant shots. The good news is both cameras still come with optical image stabilization (OIS).

Broadly, the OP15 suffers from the same problem its predecessor did. Most photos look good — sometimes great even — but they don’t come out as nice as what you might snap with the latest phones from Apple, Google or Samsung. The difference is most noticeable in nighttime and low-light photos where the OP15 can sometimes struggle to eke out shadow detail. It will also completely miss a shot because it used too slow of a shutter speed. I sometimes saw similar results in daytime photos in situations where the company’s high dynamic range algorithm would get tripped up by harsh lighting. Specifically, the shots had overly lifted shadows and unnatural highlights, resulting in photos that look flat with poor contrast.

I also wish the OP15 had a better telephoto camera. It’s not bad by any means, but after seeing what the Pixel 10 Pro can do with its 5x zoom, any phone with a 3x telephoto doesn’t feel special. The limitations of the OP15’s hardware is especially noticeable when you try to push the camera beyond its maximum optical zoom. OnePlus says the camera offers 7x lossless zoom, but in my testing, I found there was a subtle drop in picture quality above 6x. At 10x and beyond, there’s very noticeable pixel smearing.

There are two areas where the OP15’s cameras impress. Across both stills and video, it does a great job of measuring color temperature and ensuring images come out true to life. Even more impressive is the phone’s ability to capture a burst of photos at 10 fps, up from 6 fps on the OP13. If you’ve read one of my reviews before, you’ve probably noticed I enjoy photographing the cats in my neighborhood, and no phone has made that task as easy as the OP15.

As it’s already wintery in Toronto, I wasn’t able to test the OP15 new underwater camera mode. But if you live in a warmer climate, the feature is designed to make it easier to snap photos in the water by temporarily turning the OP15’s physical buttons into camera controls. This is also as good as any time to mention that OnePlus has shored up the OP15’s waterproofing. The phone is now rated IP68 against water and dust, and carries IP69 and IP69K protection against pressurized water at up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit.

Performance and battery life

The OP15 is the first phone in North America to ship with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and as you can probably guess, it’s a performance powerhouse. In Geekbench’s processor suite, the OP15 put up a single-core score of 3,696 and a multi-core mark of 11,187. That puts it in select company with the iPhone Air and its A19 Pro chipset, which in our testing had a slight edge in single-core performance but didn’t perform nearly as well in the multi-core suite (likely due to thermal limitations). In real-world use, I tried my best to find a game or application that could trip up the OP15, but between its new Snapdragon chipset and the 16GB of RAM that came in my unit, the phone handled everything with ease.

It’s hard to describe how smooth the OnePlus 15 feels relative to other phones I’ve used recently. Every swipe and scroll feels nearly instantaneous. I suspect that’s a byproduct of the OP15’s dedicated touch response chip, which samples the screen at 3,200Hz. Speaking of the display, that 165Hz refresh rate I mentioned at the top is more of a forward-looking feature right now. As things stand, there are only seven games that can render at 165 fps. One of those, PUBG, does so through frame interpolation. So unless you’re an avid Call of Duty Mobile or Clash of Clans player, you won’t notice that benefit of the OP15’s screen, yet. Things could change in time, especially as more OEMs bring 165Hz displays to their phones. For now, the OP15 is still a great gaming phone, but it has yet to live up to its true potential.

As much performance as the OnePlus 15 offers, what’s more impressive is its 7,300mAh battery. It’s the result of a new technology the company calls Silicon NanoStack. It allowed OnePlus to make a denser battery and one it claims will age more gracefully over time, thanks to a design that retains more than 80 percent of its health after four years. Obviously, I haven’t had the OP15 long enough to test that claim, but what I can say is that it offers tremendous battery life out of the box. On our local video rundown test, it posted a time of 38 hours and 30 minutes, which is eight hours longer than the OnePlus 13, the previous record holder.

Just as impressive is how quickly the OP15 can charge. With the included 80W SUPERVOOC adapter, the battery can go from dead to full in about 40 minutes. The one downside of how OnePlus has approached charging is that the phone doesn’t support the Qi2 standard. It can wirelessly charge at 50W, but you’ll need to buy the company’s proprietary AIRVOOC magnetic puck.

Software

When he reviewed the OnePlus 13 in February, Engadget’s Sam Rutherford praised OnePlus for its restrained AI approach. Unfortunately, no company appears immune to the technology’s pull at this point, and in the months since, OnePlus has begun integrating more AI features into OxygenOS. Thankfully, many of those are either easy to ignore or situationally useful.

First, there’s Mind Space, which is functionally similar to Nothing’s Essential Space. You can either tap the Plus Key (if it’s configured for use with Mind Space) or swipe up on the touchscreen with three fingers to save a screenshot to the hub. From there, the OP15’s built-in LLM will summarize the image, and you can ask the model questions about it. It’s also possible to save voice memos to the hub, and OnePlus offers a few other AI tools there, including one for scanning documents. All of these work well, and like I said, if they’re not your thing, they’re easy to ignore.

It’s been a few years since I’ve used OxygenOS, so it was a pleasant surprise to learn it remains one of the more attractive and tasteful Android skins on the market. A standout is some of the custom animations OnePlus has baked into the OS to accentuate the speed of the phone. I also find OnePlus has one of the best organized quick settings menus. There are just enough customization options there to make it feel powerful, but not enough to overwhelm.

One area where OnePlus could do better is software support. The company has pledged to provide the OP15 with four years of software updates and six years of security patches. That’s worse than both Google and Samsung, which have committed to supporting their latest phones for seven years.

Wrap-up

In using the OnePlus 15, I was frequently reminded of the last OnePlus phone I reviewed, the OnePlus 7 Pro. At the time, it was the company’s most expensive device ever, coming in at the same $750 price as the iPhone XR and Galaxy S10e. The appeal of that phone was its speedy Snapdragon 855 processor and the fact it was one of the first smartphones with a 90Hz AMOLED screen. It was also the first OnePlus phone with a camera that was more than just serviceable.

All these years later, the appeal of the OP15 feels similar. It’s a phone for those who value speed over everything else. The tricky thing about this phone is judging its value when its price could change tomorrow. As I mentioned earlier, in the US the OP15 will start at $900, with OnePlus warning pricing for both models could “change due to current market conditions.” At $1,000, the 16GB model is a compelling alternative to the Pixel 10 Pro XL, offering a newer processor, more storage and a significantly bigger battery.

Here’s the thing: Google has already aggressively discounted the entire Pixel 10 lineup, and until Black Friday, you can get the Pro XL for $899 — $100 less than the 16GB OnePlus 15. For most people, I think that’s the play, given both the Pro and Pro XL have the better telephoto camera and Google has promised to support all of its latest phones for seven years. That said, if you’re okay with a worse camera overall, the OP15 has a lot going for it, and provided OnePlus can successfully navigate an uncertain tariff regime, it will end up not just one of the best phones of 2025 but much of 2026 too.