It’s been roughly a month since I got my hands on the OnePlus 15, and it’s been a pretty wild journey so far. This phone has divided opinions in a pretty sharp manner, especially over some perceived upgrades in the camera department. But there’s more to the device than meets the eye. A lot of it.
This phone is terrific in ways that leave even established players feeling like a generation behind at meaningful tech innovations. It serves a handful of practical benefits that will matter more on a day-to-day basis than sheer bragging rights. What follows is a detailed retelling of my journey with the OnePlus 15, how it exceeded my expectations, and where it fell short.
Plenty stylish, plenty durable
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For the aesthetics and hardware approach on its latest flagship, OnePlus took a rather different route. Instead of pushing a brand new design language, the company essentially aped the same fundamental look as one of its budget-centric phones from earlier this year.
Recommended VideosIt might sound lazy, but that route also allowed OnePlus to focus on a more practical aspect — durability. This is the first mainstream smartphone out there to come with an IP69K dust and water resistance. Simply put, this phone can withstand liquid immersion and even handle fast water jets at a temperature of up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit.
Going a step further, OnePlus deployed a Micro-Arc Oxidation technology on the Sand Storm variant to apply a ceramic-grade coating on the metallic frame. The result is a beautiful surface texture that offers enough grip and also happens to be stronger than titanium. It’s one of the most beautiful colors and in-hand feel combos I’ve experienced on a phone lately.
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Over at the front, you have a display panel that comes with Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus 2 shield. I love the uniformly thin bezels on this phone, and the shift to a flat profile instead of sloping edges is also a welcome move. There’s a bit of a downgrade here, though.
The display resolution has been toned to 1.5K (2772 x 1272 pixels) compared to its predecessor, though you will hardly feel the slight drop in pixel density compared to phones with a 2K panel. With a pixel density of 450 PPI, I didn’t run into a scenario where this screen left me desiring higher sharpness.
Qualitatively, it’s a nice display that produces vibrant colors and offers good viewing angles. The real star of the show is the 165Hz refresh rate — paired with enhanced animations and UI fluidity — which makes all the interactions feel buttery smooth. The phone can technically touch the 165fps output in a handful of games, too.
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Once again, it’s hard to visually discern the difference between 120fps and 165fps gameplay to a casual user. But to folks who take their battle royale and shooter game experience as seriously as e-sports professionals, the extra visual fidelity and fluidity can make a big difference.
My only qualm with the display is that it could’ve been a tad brighter. The 1800 nits of peak brightness is not a bad number, but the competition is doing much better. I didn’t run into a scenario where the OnePlus 15 gave me any serious legibility issues, even under daylight, but glares and reflections are nearly unavoidable, especially if you are married to the cause of dark mode and gothic theming.
Related: I love the OnePlus 15 camera, and these are my tips to get the best shotsThe only two ways of avoiding this conundrum are to either raise the brightness output or put an anti-glare layer on top, a la Galaxy S25 Ultra or the iPhone 17 Pro. OnePlus is apparently aware of this slight hiccup, which is why the brand sells an anti-reflective tempered glass screen protector for the OnePlus 15.
A speedy behemoth with fitting endurance
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The OnePlus 15 comes armed with Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 silicon, paired with up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It’s a potent performance combination, and the phone doesn’t disappoint. OnePlus also adjusted the performance architecture and threw a few custom chips into the mix.
Instead of focusing on setting a peak performance record on synthetic benchmarks, the OnePlus 15 prioritizes sustained performance and higher stability. This strategy works pretty well, irrespective of whether you are engaged in games or high-resolution camera capture. But that doesn’t mean you’re handicapped.
On the contrary, you can push the phone into overdrive mode by selecting the peak performance preset, and even adjust GPU-specific settings such as anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing effects. For regular usage, this phone offers an experience that’s as speedy as it gets.
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Battery endurance is one area where the OnePlus 15 runs miles ahead of the competition, and in more ways than one. It’s the closest I’ve ever gone to experiencing a true two-day battery life on a phone.
All that juice comes courtesy of a massive 7,300mAh battery fitted inside the phone, which also tops up at a blazing-fast pace. Let’s start with the endurance figures first. Serving as my primary driver on an extended remote work trip, I have regularly pushed nearly an hour of Google Maps while using it as my daily driver over a 5G network in roaming mode.
Other daily chores included nearly four hours of wireless music streaming, about 30-40 camera clicks on a daily basis, about an hour of gaming (a mix of Call of Duty: Mobile and Candy Crush), nearly an hour of social media scrolling, and texting across WhatsApp, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
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With such a usage pattern, I often reached home with nearly 40-45% battery still left in the tank. And yeah, the always-on display mode was active throughout the usage spell. On days when navigation was the primary driver of screen-on time, the low-power mode came in handy.
Overall, this is a phone that can rid you of the “daily battery anxiety.” It certainly did, for me. For scenarios where you are running out of battery juice, the faster 120W wired charging facility delivers an unbelievable top-up experience. An empty tank can be filled in roughly 42 minutes with the 120W SuperVOOC charger.
And the best part is that the high-power adapter comes bundled in the retail package. There’s support for 50W wireless charging, as well, but only if you can spare extra cash for OnePlus’ own AirVOOC charging. It works well with a third-party Qi-certified pad or stand.
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There is no native support for Qi2 charging, though, because there are no magnets fitted underneath the phone’s rear glass shell, unlike the Pixel 10 or iPhone 17 series phones. OnePlus also offers four battery usage modes to pick from, depending on your performance requirements.
To preserve the battery health in the long run, one can set a charging limit for the maximum top-up level. You pick between a total of four stops at 80% and 100% levels. There’s also a bypass charging system available that only keeps the device on, but doesn’t fill up any juice in the battery.
Tall camera hopes that need some tuning
The imaging hardware is the most controversial element of the OnePlus 15, primarily because there are hardware-level downgrades across all three rear camera sensors. The real pinch is the reduction in the physical sensor size. Oh, by the way, the Hasselblad partnership is also gone.
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You still get an all-big-sensor layout at the back, consisting of three 50-megapixel sensors that perform 4-in-1 pixel binning to deliver 12-megapixel shots by default. You can still toggle the quality all the way to 50 megapixels, but at this resolution, you can’t capture RAW shots.
Now, let’s discuss the camera output. OnePlus is pushing the in-house DetailMAX engine for computational photography. The software-side upgrades include an enhanced burst mode, a composite 26-megapixel image format, and real-time tone mapping for enhanced video capture.
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The changes translate to an entirely different flavor of color chemistry. The OnePlus 13 preferred a more gritty and grunge-toned shadow reproduction. On the other hand, the OnePlus 15 camera shots aim for a brighter and more saturated look to pictures.
I will start with the strengths first. This phone excels at portraits in one core area — subject separation. Even with multiple faces in the frame, the phone does a fantastic job at separating them from the background. But in doing so, the phone takes a rather brute approach to applying the bokeh effect, which often ends up looking too strong and not subtle at all.
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To avoid the unnatural blurring, I often had to add some grain in the post-edits. In the regular shooting mode, the phone does a fair job at retaining the natural colors in the frame without any apparent oversaturation. But I couldn’t help but notice that the photos are a tad softer than I would prefer.
The phone does a fine job in daylight, especially excelling at depicting the brilliant blue of the clouds here in a hill station. There is, however, a certain preference for a handful of colors. The OnePlus tends to do a slightly underwhelming job in scenes where it has to depict the full gamut of colors.
While capturing sunrise scenes, it often dialed down the exposure levels of the light streaks and the sun, which ended up hiding the true colors. With a bit of focus and exposure adjustment, you can bring back some of those colors in the frame, but at the cost of stronger shadows.
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Another minor hassle is the color disparity in the shots clicked by the main and telephoto cameras. The latter has a slightly warmer tone to it. On the brighter side of things, these two sensors are fairly well-stabilized, and the algorithmic focus correction also does an impressive job.
I clicked a healthy bunch of pictures — regular and portraits — while riding pillion through picturesque hilltowns on a scooter. The OnePlus 15 still managed to deliver sharp pictures of both moving as well as static subjects. All the camera samples in this review were taken in handheld mode, and often on the move.
But do keep in mind that this is me nitpicking. In general, the pictures are good enough to post on social media. The macros generally turn out fairly well-detailed, especially when you’re pushing the telephoto camera at the native 3.5x optical zoom level. Occasionally, these shots can show a bit of a halo effect, too.
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In low-light scenarios, OnePlus often takes a more heavy-handed approach to sharpening the objects. This is both good and bad news. On a few occasions, it produced images that were visibly better than those clicked side by side with the iPhone 17 Pro. On other occasions, despite bringing out the colors in the shot, a few elements looked like an overprocessed mess.
My favorite element of the OnePlus 15’s camera experience is the filters. I particularly love the film-inspired filters, as they serve a dual purpose. First, they give a uniquely pleasant color chemistry to even otherwise mundane frames. Additionally, the synthetic grain, soft color cast, and subdued highlights do a lovely job of masking the natural weaknesses of the OnePlus 15’s cameras.
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The full-res 50-megapixel shots take a slightly higher contrast approach to freezing a frame. The shots turn out fairly well-detailed, but there’s a bit of struggle with automatic focus lock in this mode. The zoom camera also impressed me, and I believe it’s mostly the algorithms that are doing the heavy lifting here.
OnePlus is heavily pushing AI reconstructions for shots that go beyond the 7x hybrid zoom range. Once again, it can be a hit or miss. With still (and large subjects), sharp lines, and stable hands, some of the 30x and 60x shots turned out better than expected.
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As far as the video capture experience goes, the OnePlus 15 does an acceptable job with details and color preservation. The Ultra Steady mode, which can capture videos at up to 4K 60fps quality, does an impressive job of minimizing hand movements.
Software with plenty to love and explore
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The software on OnePlus phones has come a long way from the initial days of Cyanogen OS, which was clean and got plenty of love from the community for sheer depth of customization. The current avatar of OxygenOS 16 draws more from Chinese Android skins. And increasingly, iOS 26, as well.
Look, the situation is not as bad as Samsung’s mis-rangers, or other Chinese smartphone brands, but OnePlus still has some way to go at clearing the clutter of pre-loaded apps and some system-level features. But apart from this minor complaint, OxygenOS 16 is a pretty rewarding experience.
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Yes, OnePlus took inspiration from Apple’s lock and home screen customization options. But instead of doing a copy-paste job, the company built on it by offering a much deeper level of customization and design choices. I love the flexibility where you can resize icons and add quick one-tap buttons in the same enclosure.
For example, in the same enclosure, the Gmail icon takes me to the inbox, while the other one launches straight into the composer view. Then there’s the mighty sidebar, which serves as a home for frequently used apps and utilities – placed at the edge of the screen and just a swipe away. There are a handful of AI-powered health-centric display tools, such as distance and blink reminders. Despite loads of skepticism, these two features have worked reliably ever since I set them up.
Tap to transfer files is a standout feature that works well with iPhones. Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Then there are a bunch of other productivity-centric AI features, such as a scanner that intelligently turns pictures into PDFs and an automatic meeting transcription tool. The most notable of these features is the Mind Space, a digital vault where everything you deem important is saved.
The whole idea is to save you the hassle of saving important content as screenshots, bookmarks, notes, etc. Mind Space handles it all by taking a snapshot of the whole screen and then saving it as a card with additional details such as the page URL, a brief summary of the content, a title, and hashtags to assist with contextual search.
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Notably, it is integrated with Gemini, as well. Simply put, you can now ask Gemini about any specific memory saved in Mind Space, and Google’s AI will access it locally and perform the required task. This is my favorite implementation of AI on a phone so far.
Verdict
The OnePlus 15 gets the basics right, and then goes into overdrive mode for a few practical aspects. It looks fresh, feels premium, and performs like an absolute speed demon. If durability, long battery life, speedy charging, and reliable performance are what matter to you the most, the OnePlus flagship won’t disappoint you if you part ways with the $899 fee.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
The triple rear cameras are dependable, with their own set of charms and a few hiccups. I believe they need a bit of optimization to really get the best out of them. Oxygen OS 16 is an acquired taste, but it has its own practical charms and meaningful AI conveniences. The only red flag is that the phone will only receive 4 years of Android OS upgrades, while the competition is reaching up to seven years.
Overall, the OnePlus 15 is a solid value for its asking price. There are some big-name alternatives, such as the Google Pixel 10, iPhone 17, and the Galaxy S25, but they all make deep cuts compared to the OnePlus flagship. At the end of the day, you have to pick the sum of what matters the most to you. And by that metric, the OnePlus 15 will probably score higher than the rest of its competition.
