I’m not angry at the OnePlus 15, I’m just disappointed

I never thought I’d be here. Well, I did, just maybe not this quickly. Just over 10 months after the Western launch of the brilliant, well-rounded OnePlus 13, the flagship-killing, never-settling brand is back with… another flagship. Yes, really, a second one in 2025. This time, though, instead of creating a jack of all trades (which, to be fair, was a master of most of them), OnePlus is after power users — or at least, I think it is.

The reason I say I think rather than I know is that despite testing this phone for a few weeks, I’m not quite sure how we got to this point. I know the OnePlus 15 is powerful on paper — it boasts the latest chipset, a large battery, ample RAM, and sufficient storage to prove it. But for everything that has improved, it feels like just as much has taken a step backward from a predecessor that is still one of the best Android phones you can buy. Here’s why OnePlus’s most powerful flagship ever might also be its toughest sell.

Unfortunately, the OnePlus 15’s tough sell for me starts with its design. It’s not the phone’s fault, though — it has the unenviable position of trying to follow a phone that I loved. When OnePlus first showed off the OnePlus 13 nearly a year ago, I found myself absolutely enamored with the satin, stone, and faux leather finishes, as well as fine touches like the flat display and textured alert slider, which kept me coming back for more even after I finished my review. So, I think the cards were stacked against the OnePlus 15 even before I took it out of its signature red box.

When I did, though, I wasn’t quite sure what to think of the phone I was holding. On one hand, yes, it feels as durable as any OnePlus phone I’ve ever used. I was sent the Sand Storm finish, which slots in as this year’s version of white (it’s beige-ish), and it’s treated with a micro-arc oxidation technique that shields the otherwise aluminum frame in what OnePlus boasts is a ceramic-grade coating. It surrounds a fiberglass back panel that’s slightly smoother to the touch than the frame, but is finished with a hint of sparkle if you catch the sun just right.

So far, so good, right? I mean, to this point, you might be thinking that I absolutely love the look of the OnePlus 15. Well, honestly, I love the way that it feels, no doubt, but the actual look leaves me feeling just a bit flat — pun intended, because there’s not much of a curve anywhere on this device. Yes, OnePlus has kept its nicely rounded corners all around the display, but the camera bump now sits a bit industrially on the flat back panel, the display meets the frame at a crisp right angle, and it all just feels a little nondescript.

However, if you’ve seen our video review, you’ll know that my colleague, C. Scott Brown, absolutely loves that about the OnePlus 15. To each their own, I suppose. Personally, I miss the soft touch of the faux leather, the rounded refinement of the camera bump (even if it was pretty big), and, oh yeah, the alert slider. In a move that hasn’t been seen since the OnePlus 10T — far from the only T-series vibe I get from the OnePlus 15 — this phone comes without its iconic volume control. In its place sits a small, pill-shaped Plus Key that feels… a little too familiar.

Yes, I’m very much getting at the fact that OnePlus has essentially cloned Apple’s Action Button. In pretty much every way, from size to shape to position to software animation, it feels like the OnePlus 15 is taking a page right out of the iPhone’s book. And, in true Action Button fashion, I’m treating it the same way. I’ve switched my Plus Key from its default function as a trigger for Plus Mind (more on that later) to a volume toggle, and I plan to keep it that way. Thankfully, though, OnePlus hasn’t gone full Apple — there’s still a SIM slot, making it easy to switch my phone number once I’m done with this phone.

If there’s one thing that might — just might — keep me from bailing on the OnePlus 15 as soon as I’m done with this review, though, it’s the display. Is it an all-out upgrade? No, in fact, OnePlus has lowered the resolution of its flagship from 2K on the OnePlus 13 to 1.5K this time around. I can’t pick out the difference in resolution with my naked eye, but it’s certainly an odd downgrade to make. Weighing in OnePlus’s favor, at least, is the fact that its 6.78-inch AMOLED panel comes with an impressive 165Hz refresh rate while gaming. The rest of the time, it’s fully variable between 1 and 120Hz, which is perfectly respectable for my day-to-day usage.

Also impressive are the OnePlus 15’s bezels, or lack thereof. Apparently, OnePlus used a Low Injection Pressure Over-molding technique (LIPO) to protect the delicate circuitry with resin rather than leaving open space behind the display, thus allowing it to shrink the bezels to a mere 1.15mm on all four sides. Honestly, if not for the beige frame of the Sand Storm finish, I might not notice the contrast of the bezels at all.

And, before you worry about what that technical change might mean for the OnePlus 15’s durability, fear not. This phone has more IP ratings than you can shake a stick at — or realistically memorize the differences between. It has IP68 protection, as you’d expect, but it also has IP66, IP69, and IP69K to cover submersion, high-pressure jets, temperatures of up to 80 degrees Celsius (roughly 176 degrees Fahrenheit, and, of course, dust. I’ve yet to put any of those ratings to the test; however, it has handled the first real snap of cold Baltimore weather for the season without an issue.

I, of course, realize that my opinions on the design of the OnePlus 15 aren’t gospel. Heck, there’s a good chance you’ll like the new look, and that’s great. It feels solid, the limited-edition Ultra Violet color pops, and the protection around the camera lenses is a bit more reliable. I’m just saying that I don’t think it feels quite as unique as the last few OnePlus flagships — I could have done without one more square camera bump in my life.

Honestly, you can certainly disagree with everything I just said about the OnePlus 15’s design. As I mentioned, there’s even a bit of debate within the Android Authority team over whether we like it or not. However, it’s much tougher to disagree with the fact that the OnePlus 15 is a beast under the hood. It has a little bit — okay, more than a little bit — of everything to keep the lights on, featuring a brand-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, up to 16GB of LPDDR5X Ultra Plus RAM (a mouthful in itself), and up to 1TB of storage.

That powerful combination is, of course, the very reason that OnePlus was so motivated to get this flagship into our hands so quickly. It rushed to bring Qualcomm’s latest chipset to market faster than anyone else, moving up its usual launch timeline in the West to match its China release schedule — that’s why we’ve got two phones in one year this time. Everything suggests that OnePlus wanted to put on a good show, which is exactly what we’ve come to expect from the brand since the earliest days of the OnePlus One. To see just how impressive the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is, I loaded our comprehensive slate of benchmarks and set it in motion, and the results are… interesting.

Across both legs of the CPU-intensive Geekbench 6 test, the OnePlus 15 did exactly what I expected: It set the tone. Alright, it got edged out ever so slightly by Apple’s A19 Pro in the single-core part of the test, but it came right back for multi-core performance, beating the iPhone 17 Pro and staying ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra. Interestingly, this is almost the same result as the OnePlus 13 delivered just a year ago when it, too, was the first to market with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.

On the PCMark side, where the CPU test is a bit more comprehensive and indicative of real-world performance, the OnePlus 15 comes up just a little short. Yes, it surpasses its predecessor, but it doesn’t match the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which is likely its closest performance-based rival at the moment — at least until the Galaxy S26 series arrives. Samsung flagships typically overperform on PCMark, but I can’t say with absolute certainty why the OnePlus 15’s performance falls quite as short as it does on this part of the benchmark, though I do have a guess I could make.

Unfortunately, that guess comes from the benchmarks that I can’t show you. Usually, I’d follow up our round of CPU stress with an equally taxing gauntlet of GPU stress in the form of several 3DMark Wild Life and Solar Bay stress tests, but I can’t do that this time. I started those tests, no doubt about it, but I was just never able to finish any of them. The OnePlus 15 would hammer its way through about 15 out of 20 runs of the respective stress tests before abruptly exiting and declaring that it was too hot to continue. And, like a moth drawn to flame, you can believe I tried to pick up the phone to see just how hot it was. When I did, I found I could only hold on for a second or two before dropping the OnePlus 15 back to my desk.

We’ve encountered heat issues with the 8 Elite Gen 5 before, but this is the first time we’ve seen a phone with this chipset outright give up on completing what is an industry-standard stress test. The OnePlus 15 just can’t shake the heat that its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset is generating. It’s trying to — OnePlus’s 360 Cryo-Velocity Cooling System has all the right pieces in place — but it can’t quite keep up with the rising temperatures.

Our data and testing expert, Robert Triggs, has also been digging deep into the numbers and has a more comprehensive take on what’s going on (including single-run GPU tests that are not very impressive either). We’ve also verified stress test failures on two different OnePlus 15 handsets, so this isn’t an isolated issue. When we presented our findings to OnePlus, we weere given the following statement:

In everyday use—whether multitasking or heavy-duty gaming—the units run within normal thermal limits; we’ve received no reports of excessive heat.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 delivers our highest peak performance yet, so in prolonged, all-out workloads it reaches the thermal ceiling sooner. We are already refining the thermal curve so that our peak performance remains uncompromised while surface temperatures stay comfortable.

Of course, synthetic benchmarks are one thing, but the combination of a screen cooler, a massive vapor chamber, and a white graphite rear cover should go a long way in helping the OnePlus 15 maintain its claim of constant 120fps while gaming. However, it has not done so in my experience.

Admittedly, I’m not the biggest gamer, preferring titles like Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus and Pokémon TCG Pocket over PUBG and Call of Duty: Mobile, so I haven’t tried to cook the OnePlus 15 on my own. However, I’ve noticed that the phone still gets warm under my relatively light usage. It does, however, worsen when I need to rely on the OnePlus 15 for something sustained, like navigation. I took a few friends back to my alma mater, Penn State, for a football game during my review period, and when I pulled up Google Maps to get us through Harrisburg (the only real hiccup along the way), the OnePlus 15 quickly built up heat and took quite a while to vent it back down.

Now, I will say this was the only time all day that the phone got quite so hot. It handled the stress of fighting for cell service on the crowded tailgating fields and within the packed confines of Beaver Stadium much better, and it had enough battery left over to navigate us right back home to Baltimore once my Nittany Lions were defeated.

The thing is, though, I don’t think I can excuse the OnePlus 15 because it stayed usably cool during a long travel day. This phone isn’t marketed towards everyday users; it’s meant for power users. OnePlus wouldn’t have packed it with a massive 7,300mAh battery, an expansive vapor chamber, a mountain of ultra-fast RAM, or Qualcomm’s latest chipset if it weren’t. It’s tailor-made to be a gaming phone in disguise, but I don’t think anyone can use it that way without it doubling as a self-contained hand warmer.

But let’s not look past that gigantic 7,300mAh silicon-carbon battery, which is perhaps the best piece of the OnePlus 15 so far. If you’ll remember, I was nothing less than floored by the OnePlus 13’s 6,000mAh cell, so for this version to bump its capacity even higher is an excellent sign. I, of course, was nervous about what the battery would deliver, given the often intense thermals, but I loaded up our battery drain test anyway.

I’m glad I did, too, because the OnePlus 15 lived up to expectations. It achieved higher scores in both our 4K video playback and simulated Zoom call tests than any other phone I’ve ever tested, and it has consistently ranked among the best of Android in all our other categories. I’m a little surprised not to see it set the tone across the board, coming up shortest while browsing the web, but I feel like the overall results reflect just how long I’ve been able to take the OnePlus 15 between charges.

Honestly, this is one phone where you can just about leave your charger at home when you go out for a weekend away. I juiced it up on the Friday afternoon before my friends and I headed to State College, and despite a rather late evening followed by an early morning, I wasn’t searching for a charger until comfortably into Sunday morning. The OnePlus 15 handled my mix of gaming, navigation, Spotify streaming, and a few half-hearted attempts to load other football scores while I watched Penn State fall to its sixth loss of the season, and it still had plenty of juice to spare.

When I finally emptied the largest battery I’ve ever used on a smartphone, it was time to grab a familiar friend: the 80W SuperVOOC charger that OnePlus continues to include in the box. I’ve given OnePlus a lot of stick for its dedication to the USB-A charger — and rightfully so — but I’ll continue to admit that it’s beautifully, blisteringly fast. Yes, I would love a USB-C charger, but if I’m going to continue with this big, beefy block, at least it’s fast.

My charge testing results show as much, too. In the graph above, it looks like the OnePlus 15 is the second fastest of the bunch to fill its cell, falling just behind its predecessor, but that’s okay. Why? Well, the OnePlus 15 has an extra 1,300mAh worth of battery to fill. That means more heat build-up, potentially more throttling, and probably slightly more time tethered to the wall, all of which we see above. However, even with those extra stressors, the OnePlus 15 reached 100% just about five minutes after the OnePlus 13.

Compared to any other phone on our list? The OnePlus 15 looks like an Olympic sprinter. It beat the Galaxy S25 Ultra with its 5,000mAh cell by about 15 minutes and cut the charging time of both the iPhone 17 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL nearly in half. That’s just OnePlus’s wired charging, too — if you prefer wireless power, the OnePlus 15 supports the same 50W AirVOOC speeds as last year and pairs with the proprietary magnetic charger, though be prepared to jump through a lot of weird hoops to get it to work.

While the OnePlus 15’s internals might be a case of two steps forward, one step back, its updated cameras are… less endearing after the OnePlus 13 was one of our favorite camera phones earlier this year. It’s no secret that the partnership with Hasselblad came to an end earlier in 2025, and with it came OnePlus’s brand new imaging pipeline, the DetailMax Engine. As it was described by OnePlus, not much should have changed, just the Hasselblad branding and perhaps a bit of the color science — oh, and that the portrait lenses would no longer be tuned in line with Hasselblad’s mirrorless lineup.

In practice, though, the first attempt at a new imaging setup hasn’t quite gone to plan. Yes, OnePlus managed to keep its controls pretty much the same, and it still has the same fairly impressive Smart Scenes for stage performances and fireworks, but it feels like there’s been a distinct shift in when OnePlus applies AI processing and just how heavy-handed that processing might be.

Before we get to that, we should first touch on another significant change to the OnePlus 15’s cameras: everything got smaller — literally everything. The 50MP primary sensor dropped from 1/1.43 inches to 1/1.56 with a narrower f/1.8 aperture that lets slightly less light in; the 50MP telephoto sensor stretched from 73mm to 80mm, which is a more natural focal length, but it, too, came with a reduction in sensor size and a narrowing of its maximum aperture.

Not to be left out, OnePlus even downsized its ultrawide sensor, switching to a 116-degree field of view from 120 degrees and reducing the sensor size to 1/2.88 inches from 1/2.75 inches. Across the board, that means less light reaching OnePlus’s trio of sensors, a little less flexibility in terms of focal lengths, and a little less capability when it comes to cropping in on images after the fact.

To see what I mean, let’s check out some camera samples.

If you checked out my initial OnePlus 15 gallery, you’ll probably recognize a few of the options in this first row. What can I say? I liked the results. I think the sharpness at both 1x and 2x zoom is excellent, and the colors in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial are spot-on — no filter required. In fact, I’d say OnePlus’s default camera science is good across the three unfiltered shots, with accurate shades both where the sun hits the glass and metal of Penn State’s engineering building and a good, eerie depth to Baltimore’s harbor.

As you’ll see below, though, there are some pretty strict limits to how much you can zoom in on a photo due to OnePlus’s smaller sensor.

Before we get to those limitations, I’ll give OnePlus a little more credit for not letting its ultrawide camera take much of a step back. It captures sharp details in all three shots above, whether they’re taken in ultrawide mode or up close and personal in macro mode. I do think the Neon filter, which is meant to resemble the CineStill 800T film stock, goes a long way in making the middle image feel modern and clean, but nobody ever said there was anything wrong with a few edits.

That same filter pops up again in the shot of the ladder leading out of Baltimore’s harbor, which looks much bluer and much deeper than it really is. Once again, the OnePlus 15 nailed the colors in both the image of Penn State’s Old Main to the left and MLK Jr. to the right, with fairly rich contrast in the setting fall sun.

I’m not as thrilled with the statue to the far left, however, as it feels more than a little flat with the lion blending into the trees and bushes behind it. I’m not sure if there was a breakdown in picking it out as a subject or if the DetailMax Engine left its contrast at home that day, but it doesn’t make the famed Nittany Lion look all that impressive.

Running through most of the OnePlus 15’s zoom range is enough to give you some performance-related whiplash. I left the widest (0.6x) and narrowest (120x) angles off this gallery since it would have been tough to make out the players at either end of the spectrum, though for two very different reasons.

Between the extremes, I feel like the OnePlus 15 has a mix of decent detail but too-bright colors from 1x zoom to 2x zoom before shifting to better colors but an immediate loss of detail from 3.5x zoom all the way to 7x zoom. If you stop to punch in on any part of the crowd, you’ll immediately notice that it becomes something of a white-clad mess. There’s minimal separation from one person to the next, whether it’s the Blue Band or the security personnel on the sideline.

Then, when the crowd is out of the picture, the players themselves seem to pick up some glare on any pieces of white apparel, and most fine details, such as cleats, leg braces, and lettering, suffer from excessive sharpening. Thankfully, the numbers still look half decent, but the identifying letters on the refereeing crew look like they’ve been run through Google’s Pro Res Zoom engine. If this were OnePlus’s first attempt at super-long zoom, I might not mind, but I was thoroughly impressed by the results from the last generation’s Hasselblad-based tuning, so this oversharpening looks very much like a step backward.

On the bright side, OnePlus’s video stabilization has come a long way in the last few years, and goodies like 4K recording with Dolby Vision at 120fps add some of my favorite slow-mo footage that I’ve captured on a phone in a long time. Sure, it’s mostly just clips of cute dogs stretching and walking around Fell’s Point, but I’m not complaining when the results make me smile. Otherwise, the OnePlus 15 also supports 8K recording at 30fps from the primary camera and 4K at 30 or 60fps from either the front or rear sensors.

You can also check out full-resolution versions of these camera samples (and many more) at this Google Drive link.

One thing I’ve barely touched on so far is the actual software experience of the OnePlus 15. In true modern Android flagship fashion, that means it’s time to talk about AI. The latest batch of OnePlus AI features feels like a pretty good example of the phrase “same, same, but different,” for both better and worse. There’s a lot of continuity from the OnePlus 13 with features like Pass Scan and plenty of AI-powered photo editing tools, but there are also some new tricks at play.

More specifically, OnePlus has introduced its new Mind Space, which feels like a OnePlus-ified version of Nothing’s Essential Space. You pretty much do the same as you would with the Essential Key, in that you save screenshots, notes, and more to a journal, from which you can then draw calendar reminders, recommendations while planning trips, and shopping lists from recipes. Ironically, considering the company’s lineage, its design is almost eerily similar to Nothing’s, but I suppose that’s a good thing, as Essential Space works quite well.

Other photo editing capabilities like AI Portrait Glow show promise, too — at least when used correctly. Essentially, the idea is that you can artificially re-expose your portrait shots, bringing up the lighting indoors or possibly lowering it outdoors for a more lifelike effect. I tried it on a close-up of the MLK Jr. Memorial shown above, and I feel like it’s just subtle enough to work well without being too obviously edited, but that was also on a pretty clean camera sample from a sunny day.

What is slightly frustrating, though, is that OnePlus can’t seem to decide just how heavy Oxygen OS 16 should be. After a relatively light and streamlined experience on the OnePlus 13, everything feels a bit heavier this time around, with animations and app icons that resemble the OPPO software we were eager for OnePlus to move away from. It’s perhaps most noticeable in the drop-down Shelf, where OnePlus houses a pedometer, weather forecast, reminders, and a clock, all of which look indistinguishable from OnePlus’s parent software.

I’m also fairly disappointed to see OnePlus continue to treat Android updates as a secondary priority. In an era where most similarly priced flagships offer seven years of both major Android versions and security patches, the OnePlus 15 is satisfied with four years of the former and six years of the latter. If you’re going to sell a device based on a massive battery and a powerful chipset, you at least need to back it up with software support that lasts as long as the rest of the setup.

So, here we are, with a OnePlus 15 that’s kind of good, but also kind of not. In another world, it would probably be enough to earn a solid all-around rating from me. I’d praise the performance, I’d acknowledge that the cameras are generally okay within their comfort zone, and I’d absolutely adore the massive battery while ignoring the rather bland design. That’s what I would love to say about the OnePlus 15.

Instead, though, I have to call it the second-best OnePlus flagship of 2025. It’s simply not as well-rounded as the smartphone-of-the-year contender OnePlus 13, nor do I think it actually does the finer things better. Its battery life is slightly better, it’s more durable, and its benchmarking numbers are slightly higher in single tests, but its cameras are altogether worse, its design is less interesting, and it’s still only supported for four years of Android OS updates.

The biggest selling point is arguably its exciting new processor, but the sustained performance burns past the phone’s thermal management measures, meaning that its very powerful chipset has to run with training wheels on. Even the AI features remain a significant step behind those of Samsung and Google, and they’re certainly not worth the upgrade over what you’d get on the OnePlus 13.

To me, this is a weird Android flagship in that it does several things okay, but it doesn’t do anything well enough for me to recommend it to anyone but a OnePlus die-hard who can enjoy its best qualities and look past the obvious caveats.

For everyone else, my best advice is that you buy the OnePlus 13 ($849.99 at Amazon) while you still can. Embrace its quirky circular camera bump, its Hasselblad tuning, and its soft faux leather finish. The software experience will be largely the same across the two, but I’d rather have the alert slider over the Plus Key, and I was just fine with a 6,000mAh battery and the original 8 Elite’s performance headroom.

Outside of the OnePlus ecosystem, you might also want to give the Pixel 10 Pro ($999 at Amazon) or Pro XL ($1199 at Amazon) a try. They take a pretty similar approach to their cameras, using a hefty dose of AI at longer focal lengths, but Google’s Pixel UI is altogether cleaner, its AI features are more developed, and you’ll actually get a respectable number of software updates. Mix that in with a refined design that’s still identifiably Google, and you might find yourself converting all your tech to the Pixel family before long.

I also think Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Plus ($999.99 at Amazon) and Galaxy S25 Ultra ($1299.99 at Amazon) are worth a look. No, One UI isn’t as light as Pixel UI, but it’s lighter and more customizable than Oxygen OS, and Samsung’s cameras have probably had the longest time to figure out long-range zoom. Better yet, the Galaxy S25 lineup knows how to optimize its Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipsets so you can actually play high-end games on them for more than 15 minutes without getting toasty hands.

If you do decide to pick up the OnePlus 15, though, I’d love to know why. Personally, I don’t see how any of the trade-offs are enough to make the phone worthwhile over the competition from its rivals, or, most damningly, the phone that came before it.