About a year ago, OnePlus released the OnePlus 13, which is a quality flagship smartphone with high-end specs and a lower starting price than its competitors in the US. It did the same thing a year ago, as well as the year before that. In other words, this is completely normal.
The surprising thing about the new OnePlus 15 is that it’s coming in November instead of January (besides the fact that they skipped the 14, presumably for cultural reasons). OnePlus may have sped up its release schedule for this year’s flagships, but nothing else has changed. The OnePlus 15 is a very solid Android handset with dazzling specs, including a super high refresh rate and the biggest battery you’ll currently find in a smartphone of this caliber.
And with a starting price of $899, it’s at least $100 cheaper than flagship models from Google, Apple, and Samsung.
Samsung plans to sell a lot of foldable phones next year
OnePlus 15: Price and specifications
It has a good display.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable
I already mentioned that you can get the OnePlus 15 for $899 (compared to $1,099 for the iPhone 17 Pro). At that price you get:
6.8-inch display with 2772×1272 resolution and 165Hz refresh rate
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile chip
12gb ram
256GB storage
7,300mAh battery
Three rear cameras: 50MP wide, 50MP ultrawide, 50MP telephoto
32MP front camera
There is only one other variant of the OnePlus 15. For an extra $100, you can get a version with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. I personally don’t like that anyone who chooses a slightly cheaper phone is getting less RAM, but this is unlikely to impact most people’s daily lives in any meaningful way. The lack of a 1TB storage option also comes to the fore in other recent flagship smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Still, compared to the competition, OnePlus looks like the winner here. No other flagship from the Apple-Google-Samsung trio has a 165Hz display, and the OnePlus 15 is the first smartphone to arrive in the US with the cutting-edge Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. The 7,300mAh battery is larger than that of the S25 Ultra, Google Pixel 10 Pro, or iPhone 17 Pro. And while the higher-end OnePlus 15 costs the same as the base Pixel 10 Pro, neither of those other devices can be found for $899.
It’s a pretty good deal, is what I’m saying.
OnePlus 15: Design
Last year it looked better.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable
However, there are some areas where OnePlus hasn’t really brought the wow factor this year, and the phone’s design is one of them.
it BadBut it’s boring. Your three available colors are Infinite Black, Sand Storm, and Ultra Violet. So, in other words, two of the most uninteresting colors imaginable, and a third, more attractive color that OnePlus says will only be available in limited quantities. bleh,
My other gripe with the OnePlus 15 is that the rear camera bump is now a fairly safe-looking square (with rounded corners), rather than the more typical rounded bump found on the OnePlus 13. At a glance (at least to people who don’t look at phones every day for their work), it looks exactly like an off-brand iPhone. It’s perfectly functional and ineffective, but I wish it had a more unique look.
However, other than that, the phone is at least comfortable to hold and the bezels around the display are very thin. This is by no means a complete blessing; It’s just a little boring.
OnePlus 15: Display
It also charges fast.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable
One area where OnePlus didn’t make much of an impact is the display.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is probably one of the best chips you can get in a phone in the US right now, or at least that’s what the marketing says. However, I’m inclined to believe it, because the OnePlus 15 performs like a dream. Everything is smooth as silk, and even when running benchmarks or playing intensive games, it doesn’t get too hot to the touch.
Talking about games, they benefit the most from the maximum refresh rate of 165Hz. pubg mobileIn particular, this thing is surprisingly smooth. I’m not a big mobile gamer at all, but if I were and needed a new phone, I’d take a close look at this.
And if you want numerical proof that this phone is powerful, I ran it through the Geekbench 6 benchmark test. Its multi-core score of 10,560 is about 500 points higher than the S25 Ultra, and about 700 points higher than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Again, this phone is cheaper than both of them. The Geekbench numbers aren’t necessarily the definitive word on the phone’s performance, but I can more or less promise that you won’t find any performance issues here.
OnePlus 15: AI features
Like any other high-end smartphone these days, the OnePlus 15 has some AI features. For the most part, this is just normal stuff, including integration with Google’s Gemini chatbot. It has automatic voice transcription in the Sound Recorder app and the ability to scan images and convert them to PDF, which are both nice and convenient, if not particularly novel.
Mind Space is probably the most unique AI feature on the OnePlus 15. This is a pre-installed app that stores anything you ask on the phone to analyze using Plus Mind. Plus Mind is something you activate by pressing the Plus key on the phone or swiping up on the screen with three fingers. Doing this will basically take a screenshot and use AI to analyze what’s in it. For example, I took a screenshot of some movie listings on a website of a theater near me. After doing this, I can go to Mind Space and see a text analysis of what’s in the screenshot, including the names of the movies and showtimes, and I can make calendar entries for them.
It’s not bad in itself, but its usefulness is a bit lacking in my opinion. I guess it’s cool that I can take a screenshot and have it automatically turn into a calendar entry, but an app that tells me what’s on my screen seems a bit unnecessary when I can just look at the screen itself. I just don’t know that it’s doing something that I can’t already do easily with my brain.
OnePlus 15: Battery life
Battery life is, without a doubt, the standout feature of the OnePlus 15.
The 7,300mAh cell, as mentioned earlier, is larger than those found in some other flagships. But that in itself does not necessarily guarantee anything. He said, I can confirm that this thing will go on for some time. I estimate I can get about 30 hours between charges on the OnePlus 15, depending on what I’m using it for. My testing included playing 3D games at high frame rates and streaming basketball on YouTube TV, so I might have been able to squeeze even more juice out of a charge without having to do that.
In other words, the battery is really good, guys.
OnePlus 15: Camera
As I said earlier in the specs section, you get a trio of 50MP lenses on the back of the OnePlus 15. I like even numbers. They make my work easier.
Anyway, photos taken on the new OnePlus 15 look good. The colors are really attractive and the images are clear and crisp.
NYC is a little sad these days.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
As far as night-time shots are concerned, I don’t have too many complaints here. You can brighten up images without showing them off Very Fake.
Left:
There is no night photography here.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
Correct:
Night mode is turned on here.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
For its price, you only get 3.5x optical zoom here, whereas some other flagship phones from big companies have slightly higher numbers. You also get a 7x “optical-quality” zoom, which is slightly less than the iPhone 17 Pro’s 8x count. If you stay within those parameters, zoom shots look nice and clear.
No zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
7x zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
Macro photography is always beneficial for photographers who love taking pictures of small things.
Small
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
And finally, Portrait mode also works as you’d expect.
portrait mode.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
OnePlus 15: final thoughts
It’s honestly a little boring to talk about OnePlus phones because they’re quietly very nice, no-frills devices that you can get at a slightly more favorable price than the iPhone. The OnePlus 15 is no different.
A quality display, a powerful processor, and a large battery make it a perfectly acceptable handset for anyone in the market for an Android upgrade. I’d definitely take it over the Galaxy S25 Ultra and maybe even the Pixel 10 Pro. I wish it sounded a little more interesting, but it’s so low on the list of smartphone concerns that I can’t put it here any higher than OnePlus.