OnePlus 15T launched: Pocket-friendly size, but not a wallet-friendly price

OnePlus launched the OnePlus 13T last year, which landed in India as the OnePlus 13s. The company has been teasing the arrival of a follow-up for a few weeks now, and it finally launched the OnePlus 15T.

Much like last year’s phone, the OnePlus 15T is a pocket-friendly phone at 150.5mm tall. By comparison, the Galaxy S26 is 149.6mm tall and the Pixel 10 measures 152.8mm in height. This small size is thanks to the 6.32-inch 165Hz OLED screen (2,640 x 1,216, Crystal Shield Glass), which also offers 1,800 nits of “global peak” brightness.

It used to be the case that a smaller phone meant a smaller battery, but the OnePlus 15T delivers a gargantuan 7,500mAh silicon-carbon battery. This capacity puts the vast majority of smartphones to shame. In fact, it’s slightly larger than the OnePlus 15 battery.

Once you’ve run out of juice, you can rely on 100W wired SuperVOOC charging or significantly slower but still brisk 55W PPS charging. The phone also supports wireless charging (50W), which was missing altogether on last year’s model.

Otherwise, the OnePlus 15T is a powerhouse on paper thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, a 5150mm² vapor chamber cooling system, and 12GB or 16GB of RAM. In fact, OnePlus claimed that the phone can sustain 165fps or 144fps gameplay in select titles for several hours.

The new phone also brings a pretty capable rear camera pairing. Expect a 50MP main camera (f/1.8, 1/1.56-inch sensor) and a 50MP 3.5x telephoto camera (7x lossless zoom). The latter is a major zoom upgrade over the OnePlus 13T’s 50MP 2x camera. Check the front and you’ll find a bog-standard 16MP camera in a punch-hole cutout. In terms of camera features, you can expect options like 8K/30fps capture, 4K/120fps slow-motion recording, underwater capture, and reflection removal. Unfortunately, the selfie camera tops out at 1080p/30fps video. That’s a real shame when the rest of the industry has moved on to 4K/60fps recording.

Other notable features include Bluetooth 6.0, Wi-Fi 7, NFC, an ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensor, an IR blaster, and an IP69K rating. Unfortunately, the phone only offers USB 2.0 wired transfer speeds.

There’s an elephant in the room with the OnePlus 15T, and that’s the RAM crisis. Memory and other components have shot up in price over the past few months, and that’s seriously affected the price of consumer tech products. Unfortunately, the OnePlus 15T isn’t immune to this situation.

The OnePlus 15T launched in China at 4,299 yuan (~$624) for the base 12GB/256GB option. By contrast, the OnePlus 13T started at 3,399 yuan (~$467 at the time). This is clearly a huge price increase and doesn’t bode well for other phone releases later this year.

The OnePlus 13T eventually launched in India as the OnePlus 13s, but there’s no official word if the OnePlus 15T will be available outside China. Unfortunately, tipster Yogesh Brar previously claimed there was a “90% chance” that the OnePlus 15s was canceled. This release also comes as rumors swirl about the brand’s fate in global markets.