On days with light usage, I have 70 percent of the time left to sleep. When I spent more time on the phone streaming music, navigation, and Instagram Reels-ing, I often ended up with around 60 or 50 percent. I’ll leave it on my nightstand without bothering to plug it in, a refreshing change of pace. Over the course of two days, I achieved an amazing ten and a half hours of screen-on time.
This may be the best battery life on a flagship smartphone in the US today, especially when you combine it with the incredibly fast recharge time. OnePlus remains one of the only companies to include a charger in the box – mostly because it’s the only way to take advantage of its SuperVOOC fast-charging technology. I was able to ramp up from 15 to 80 percent in 30 minutes (50 percent in 15 minutes). It’s hard to worry about a broken phone if you don’t mind carrying a bulky charger around (is folding prongs too much to ask for?).
But there is always a compromise somewhere. If you’re a fan of wireless charging and are particularly interested in Qi2 smartphones that use magnets (like Apple’s MagSafe) for more convenient and faster charging, you’ll be disappointed here. The OnePlus 15 supports wireless charging, but only the standard Qi technology. OnePlus is selling the magnetic case as a balm, but unlike Samsung’s current crop of top-end phones, it doesn’t even turn it into a Qi2 ready phone. It will only charge at slower Qi wireless charging speeds. (You can do Buy OnePlus’ proprietary wireless charger for faster charging, but that’s a separate purchase, and that will be the wireless charger Only Recharge select OnePlus devices quickly.)
The strong battery and super-fast wired charging may outweigh the weak wireless charging, but now it’s time to talk about the OnePlus 15’s second most impressive achievement: the display.
power play
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
It is the first smartphone in the US to employ Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a processor we’ll see in most high-end Android phones in 2026. The benchmark numbers are excellent. In the Geekbench 6 test, OnePlus 15 is the first phone to officially pass 10,000 in multi-core CPU performance, even better than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. However, the iPhone was still slightly ahead in single-core performance (it is also generally more efficient).