The OnePlus 15 is the phone to buy if you hate charging your phone

Have you ever laid down for the night and realized your phone charger is across the room? And then thought to myself, “No, I’m not going to get up and plug it in”?

And then it turns out without a doubt that you won’t regret that decision tomorrow – that your phone will run smoothly until the next evening without going into low power mode? No? Well, that’s because you haven’t used the OnePlus 15.

Like its close relative from Oppo, the $899 OnePlus 15 comes with a battery capacity so large that it will challenge any power user to drain it in a day. This is thanks to its silicon-carbon battery, a technology that is increasingly being adopted outside the US that allows for thinner, higher capacity batteries than lithium-ion.

The OnePlus 15 has other things going for it, too: a great screen and great performance, for starters. And there are some things I like less, like OxygenOS’s increasing tendency toward bloatware. Not that Samsung is bad yet, but it’s a lot different from the OnePlus of five or six years ago. As I see it, this is a battery-conscious phone. And given the recent trend of “lighter, thinner phones but with worse batteries”, this “huge battery capacity, but a regular-sized phone” sounds like a winning proposition.

When I first set up the OnePlus 15, I took its 7,300mAh battery capacity as a challenge. Display resolution, always-on display, screen timeout, performance – I set everything to their most battery-consuming settings. In two days without charging overnight and with about nine hours of screen-on time, the battery was down to just 32 percent. If I had tried to do this with any other flagship phone sold in the US, I would have been out of battery halfway through the second morning, if not sooner. This is amazing.

There’s some bad news: Silicon-carbon batteries degrade faster than their lithium-ion counterparts, which is why U.S. manufacturers have been hesitant to adopt them. OnePlus claims that the battery will retain more than 80 percent of its overall health during the first four years. Similarly, the company guarantees OS upgrades for four years and security updates for two years beyond that.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable commitment on OnePlus’ part, but at the same time, I wish the technology would move toward batteries with better long-term longevity, not shorter ones. Most people who buy this phone will probably want to move on within four years anyway, and I know plenty of people who have phones with lithium-ion batteries that don’t last that long. I hope that a phone like this can be given to a family member or donated and when the first owner is done with it, it can be used by someone else. According to the website, OnePlus offers repair service in the US, but there is no specific battery replacement option, and the turnaround is slow – 12 to 15 business days. Don’t expect a same-day battery swap as you would with an Apple or Samsung phone.

I’m sad to say that this phone’s “industry first 1.5K 165Hz display” has been largely wasted on me. It sure is a nice screen! It’s pretty fast, although I wish it had a touch Brighter in direct sunlight, if I’m being picky. But I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in comparison between a 120Hz screen and this 165Hz display. I tried with this real racing 3One of the handful of games that supports top refresh rate, and yes, it looks good. During the 20-minute session, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 got a little warm, but I didn’t notice any stuttering.

OnePlus was one of the last to ditch the curved edges and adopt flat edges that the rest of the industry has adopted. I, for one, welcome the change; The flat edges feel a little more secure in my hand. OnePlus fans are less excited about another update: turning the beloved alert slider into an action button called the “Plus Key.” It’s a trick straight out of Apple’s playbook, right below the menu screen, where you can assign different functions to buttons.

By default, this serves as a shortcut to “Mind Space,” where you can dump screenshots and voice memos so the AI ​​can catalog and tag them for later reference. This pixel screenshot or nothing is giving essential space. Interestingly, the Gemini Assistant on the OnePlus 15 can access the information you save in Mind Space. This only works consistently if you specifically push Gemini to find the mind space, which makes it a little less compelling. And I like the idea of ​​a place to keep things that otherwise exist only in endless Chrome tabs, but my dozens of open Chrome tabs are proof of how hard it is to break old habits and form new ones.

Speaking of software features, I’m not crazy about the way OxygenOS has trended toward bloat over the past few generations. I think it’s starting to look like the artifacts from years past are piling up and the company is continuing to pursue new ideas. There’s the shelf, a place for widgets I don’t ever remember using, two rows of suggested apps at the top of the app drawer, and a handful of first-party apps crammed in between the stuff Google requires OnePlus to preload.

Plus, there are now a bunch of AI features vying for attention, like AI Writer that often pops up as the first option when I tap on selected text, right where my finger immediately clicks “Copy.” Cheeky. You can opt out, uninstall, and detach a lot of these things, but it takes a lot to do — especially if you come to OnePlus looking for a less cluttered experience than Samsung.

Elsewhere, OnePlus is still sticking to some of its traditions. You’ll get up to 80W fast charging with the wired charger (still!) and red cable (still!) included in the box; OnePlus also sells up to 100W. Compared to standard USB-PD, you get a faster but less blistering 36W. When the phone was down to a worrying 17 percent, plugging it into the supplied charger for 20 minutes brought it back up to 60 percent – ​​easily a day’s worth of power.

Wireless charging is also fast, although you’ll need OnePlus’ proprietary $50 charger to get its top 50W speeds. But there’s one thing you won’t find here: integrated magnets, the Qi2 wireless charging standard. Instead, OnePlus outsources the 15 magnets to the case. In one of those cases you will get up to 11W of power on a Qi2 charger. The ability to charge quickly with typical chargers isn’t as appealing as being able to charge this phone on any old MagSafe charger, but maybe I’m just having no fun.

The OnePlus 15 is the company’s first flagship after parting ways with Hasselblad as camera partner; Now it is using the self-built DetailMax engine. I think OnePlus is doing okay on its own; White balance is well judged and shifts to warmer tones at all the right times. The colors are attractive without looking unrealistic. Interestingly, OnePlus has opted for smaller sensors in all three rear cameras compared to the OnePlus 13. And while it can achieve a lot in good light, you run into its limitations very quickly in low light; Trying to capture a moving subject in the hazy blue light proved beyond his capabilities.

Overall, the OnePlus 15 feels a bit disjointed. There are plenty of borrowed ideas here – Apple’s action button and maybe even a hint of frosted glass throughout the UI. There are a few things OnePlus is carrying over from the previous era, like its commitment to offering fast charging. And there are AI features – some of which seem well-thought-out, though others feel a little too me-too. But put it all together and it’s a bit of a confusing picture. Thankfully, the OnePlus 15 has a great idea that blows away the rest: a phone that answers the question “What if you never had to worry about battery life?”

I suspect OnePlus thinks of it as a phone for gamers, even though it doesn’t look like a phone for gamers on the surface. The emphasis on performance and screen refresh rate, combined with long battery life, sounds quite attractive to those who run very power-hungry games. But you don’t have to be a gamer to appreciate the battery life this phone offers; Almost anyone will be happy with a device that charges less. I would have appreciated a greater emphasis on camera hardware than an industry-leading screen, and if you did too, you might be happier with the Pixel or Galaxy. But for those concerned about battery – gamers or otherwise – there’s nothing else like the OnePlus 15. Anyway, not in America.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge