The OnePlus 15 is the worst possible successor for the OnePlus 13

I loved the OnePlus 13 when it was launched at the beginning of 2025. Absolutely, without a doubt, I declared it a OnePlus flagship that I could finally trust to do, well, everything — it was just the right jack of all trades, and a master of most of them, if I’m honest. So, it was only natural that I thought the OnePlus 15 would pick up right where it left off.

But now that the phone has become official in China, I’m not quite so excited. Some of the rumored sidegrades and downgrades have come true, and it feels like OnePlus doesn’t care much about the well-rounded foothold it so recently established. After such a brilliant OnePlus 13, here’s why I think the OnePlus 15 will feel like a big step backwards.

My love of the OnePlus 13 began, well, the minute I took it out of its iconic red box. It was distinct, with a massive camera bump and a gorgeous Midnight Ocean finish with a vegan leather back panel. Oh, and it featured a flat 120Hz AMOLED panel that was as sharp and smooth as any I’d ever used — not to mention extremely bright. The OnePlus 13 became one of those phones I loved to use, simply because I loved to look at it.

Now, most of those things have changed. Well, the red box will probably return, as there are some things that OnePlus won’t change. However, the rounded camera bump is gone, the vegan leather finish is gone, and the 120Hz panel has been refreshed, to say the very least. It seems that the OnePlus 15 has lost its distinct personality, becoming just another phone with a square camera bump — much like the OnePlus 10T.

Actually, equating the OnePlus 15 to the OnePlus 10T is a pretty spot-on comparison. Both phones have lower-resolution displays than their predecessors, downgraded cameras (at least in terms of aperture and likely sensor size as well), and they both ditch the beloved alert slider. Yes, the OnePlus 15 has gone full Apple in terms of its Action Button clone. You appear to be able to toggle it between things like screenshots, activating the camera, and turning on the flashlight… but I’d imagine many will leave it as a go-to volume toggle, just like we already had.

There are, of course, a few things that the OnePlus 15 has that the OnePlus 10T didn’t have, like wireless charging, IP69 and IP69K protection, a blistering fast 165Hz refresh rate, and the ability to drop to just one nit of brightness, but we’re not here to compare a late 2025 launch to one from 2022. When put back up against something like the OnePlus 13, the lower refresh rate, loss of the alert slider, and all-around more boring design are just not as easy to get behind.

OnePlus has also been very transparent about the fact that its partnership with Hasselblad has drawn to a close. That’s fine, we knew that was coming, and we knew that the DetailMax Engine would be making its debut on the OnePlus 15. What makes me nervous, though, is that I don’t always want to expect much from a brand-new imaging engine — especially when it has to follow Hasselblad’s carefully measured color science.

Now, if the OnePlus 15 had kept the same camera sensors from the OnePlus 13, I think it might have been fine. That phone packed Sony’s large (and very capable) LYT-808 sensor for its primary camera with the stacked LYT-600 as its 3x optical telephoto sensor, and they were both excellent. I trusted them, and I was all too happy to post sample after sample from OnePlus’s product launch at sea.

Unfortunately, rumors suggest that smaller sensors will be used across the board, and although the OnePlus 15 is officially available in China, the company has not yet specified all of its sensors. We do know that the primary camera features a narrower maximum aperture of f/2.8, instead of f/2.6, which means it will capture at least a bit less light than before. And, if we’re pairing that with a physically smaller — albeit still 50MP — sensor, I’m more than a bit worried about how the OnePlus 15 will fare in low light.

Hasselblad also played a key role in an awful lot of what made the OnePlus 13’s cameras so great, like XPan mode, portrait modes that imitate classic Hasselblad lenses, and the foundation of OnePlus’s Master Mode for manual camera controls. Of course, I’m sure OnePlus has in-house alternatives ready to step in, I’m just not sure they’ll be quite as refined as the outgoing versions.

And, when I have this much doubt about the changes OnePlus is making, I think the decision is simple — buy the OnePlus 13 before it goes out of stock and is replaced by the modern OnePlus 10T.