Almost a year ago, OnePlus released the OnePlus 13, a quality flagship smartphone with high-end specs and a lower starting price than its competitors in the U.S. It also did the same thing the year before, as well as the year before that. This is pretty normal, in other words.
What is surprising about the new OnePlus 15 (aside from the fact that they skipped 14, presumably for cultural reasons) is that it’s coming out in November instead of January. OnePlus may have accelerated its release schedule for this year’s flagship, but not much else has changed. The OnePlus 15 is a very solid Android handset with glossy specs, including a super high refresh rate and the biggest battery you’ll currently find in a smartphone of this caliber.
And with an $899 starting price, it’s at least $100 cheaper than the flagship models from Google, Apple, and Samsung.
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OnePlus 15: Price and specs
It’s got a good display.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable
I’ve already explained that you can get a OnePlus 15 for $899 (compared to $1,099 for the iPhone 17 Pro). Here’s what you get for that price:
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6.8-inch display with 2772×1272 resolution and up to 165Hz refresh rate
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Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile chip
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12GB RAM
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256GB storage
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7,300mAh battery
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Three rear cameras: 50MP wide, 50MP ultrawide, 50MP telephoto
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32MP front camera
There is only one other variant of the OnePlus 15. For an extra $100, you can get a version of it with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage. I personally don’t love that anyone who opts for the slightly cheaper phone is getting less RAM, but that’s also pretty unlikely to affect most people’s daily lives in any meaningful way. The lack of a 1TB storage option also stands out among other recent flagship smartphones, like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Still, compared to the competition, OnePlus comes out looking like a winner here. No other flagship from the Apple-Google-Samsung triumvirate has a 165Hz display, and the OnePlus 15 is the first smartphone to hit the U.S. with the cutting-edge Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. At 7,300mAh, the battery is also larger than the ones found in the S25 Ultra, Google Pixel 10 Pro, or iPhone 17 Pro. And while the higher-end OnePlus 15 costs the same as a base Pixel 10 Pro, none of those other devices can be had for $899.
This is a pretty good deal, is what I’m saying.
OnePlus 15: Design
This looked cooler last year.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable
However, there are a couple of areas where OnePlus didn’t really bring the wow factor this year, and the design of the phone is one of them.
It’s not bad, but it is 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 eye-catching one that OnePlus says will only be available in limited quantities. Bleh.
My other issue with the OnePlus 15 is that the rear camera bump is now a fairly safe-looking square (with rounded corners), rather than the more visually distinctive circular bump found on the OnePlus 13. At a glance (at least to the eyes of people who don’t look at phones every day for their jobs), it just kinda looks like an off-brand iPhone. It’s perfectly functional and inoffensive, but I wish it had a more unique look.
Other than that, though, the phone is at least comfortable to hold and the bezels around the display are very thin. This isn’t a total boondoggle by any means; it’s just a little boring.
OnePlus 15: Performance
It charges fast, too.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable
One area where OnePlus very much did not drop the ball is performance.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is probably one of the best chips you can get in a phone in the U.S. right now, or at least that’s what the marketing says. I’m inclined to believe it, though, as 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.
Speaking of games, those are what benefit the most from the maximum refresh rate of 165Hz. PUBG Mobile, in particular, is astoundingly smooth on this thing. I’m not a big mobile gamer at all, but if I was and I needed a new phone, I’d take a close look at this one.
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 those. Geekbench numbers aren’t necessarily the definitive word on a 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, it’s pretty normal stuff, including integration with Google’s Gemini chatbot. It’s got automatic voice transcription in the sound recorder app and the ability to scan images and turn them into PDFs, both of which are nice and convenient, if not especially novel.
Mind Space is probably the most unique AI feature on the OnePlus 15. It’s a pre-installed app that stores anything you ask the phone to analyze using Plus Mind. Plus Mind is something you activate by either pressing the Plus Key on the phone or swiping up on the screen with three fingers. Doing so will basically take a screenshot and use AI to analyze whatever is in it. For instance, I took a screenshot of some movie listings on a website for a theater near me. After doing that, I can go to Mind Space and look at 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.
This is not bad, per se, but its usefulness is a little muted, in my opinion. It’s nice that I can take a screenshot and automatically turn that into a calendar entry, I suppose, but an app that tells me what’s on my screen feels a little redundant when I could simply look at the screen myself. I just don’t know that this is doing anything that I can’t already easily do with my brain.
OnePlus 15: Battery life
Battery life is, without a doubt, the standout feature of the OnePlus 15.
The 7,300mAh cell is, as previously noted, bigger than what you get in some other flagships. But that doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything on its own. That said, I can confirm that this thing lasts a while. I would estimate that I could go about 30 hours between charges on the OnePlus 15, depending on what I’m using it for. My testing involved 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 doing that.
In other words, the battery’s real good, folks.
OnePlus 15: Camera
As I said in the specs section earlier, you get a trio of 50MP lenses on the rear end of the OnePlus 15. I love even numbers. They make my job easier.
Anyway, photos taken on the new OnePlus 15 look nice. Colors really pop and images are sharp and clear.
NYC is a little gloomy these days.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
As for nighttime shots, I don’t have too many complaints here. You can brighten up the image without making them look too fake.
Left:
No night photography here.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
Right:
Night mode turned on here.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
For what it’s worth, you do only get 3.5x optical zoom here, as opposed to slightly higher counts on some of the other flagship phones from big companies. You also get 7x “optical-quality” zoom, which is slightly lower than the 8x count on the iPhone 17 Pro. If you stick within those parameters, zoom shots look nice and sharp.
No zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
7x zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
Macro photography is always a plus for photographers who love taking photos of tiny things.
Tiny.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
And lastly, portrait mode works as you’d expect, too.
Portrait mode.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
OnePlus 15: Final thoughts
OnePlus phones are honestly a little boring to talk about because they’re quietly very good, fairly no-frills devices that you can get for a marginally more agreeable price than an iPhone. The OnePlus 15 is no different.
A quality display, a powerful processor, and a huge battery make this a perfectly acceptable handset for anyone in the market for an Android upgrade. I’d definitely take it over a Galaxy S25 Ultra, and maybe even over a Pixel 10 Pro. I wish it looked a little more interesting, but that’s so far down the list of concerns with a smartphone that I can’t hold it against OnePlus too much here.
