OnePlus made its name in the smartphone market as a low-cost alternative that didn’t sacrifice quality or performance. That and a refusal to build out a bulky Android overlay made OnePlus popular, and while the price has crept up since those early days, OnePlus has remained one of the strongest all-around alternatives to Samsung in Android smartphones.
That’s still the case with the OnePlus 15 — as we’ll go over in our OnePlus 15 review, top-notch performance, cooling, and display tech make the phone one of the best phones for gaming in the US,and everyone’s going to love the excellent battery life. Only the camera performance might hold it back from being up there with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S25 series.
Design and build
You can tell the OnePlus 15 is a sturdy, well-built phone straight away — it feels solid in hand and durable. It’s a 6.78-inch phone with an aluminum frame, a solid glass back, and Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protecting the display on the front. It’s a bit heavy for its size at 215g (more comparable to the larger Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra), and the weight is immediately noticeable when you pick it up.
The phone is rated IP69K for ingress protection. Yes, that’s another new rating — 68 means waterproof and dust-proof, 9 means protected against high water pressure, and that K at the end means even better protection against high water pressure. Like, industrial strength sprays. Suffice it to say for the average smartphone user, IP68 is more than sufficient to protect against drops in pools or toilets, and anything more is nice but ultimately unnecessary.
Unlike the OnePlus 13, it doesn’t look like there will be a color option that uses a vegan leather back this year, which was a nice distinguishing feature that we liked. The other break from its predecessor (to clarify: there was no OnePlus 14) is the change to the physical alert slider that let you quickly switch to do not disturb mode.
There’s been a bit of a fuss made about the replacement, which has been called an AI button. The new Plus key (found on the left side of the frame) can certainly be that, but it’s actually a programmable button that can still control alerts and notifications like before. By default it executes commands for Mind Space, an AI utility we’ll cover in the software section, but the first time you press the button, the phone prompts you to assign your preferred function. You can choose to have it control Do Not Disturb, but you can also assign utilities like flashlight, translation, camera, screenshot, or voice record. I think having a programmable button instead of a slider dedicated to alerts makes a lot of sense, so it struck me as a good change.
Performance
The OnePlus 15 runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, the latest flagship chipset from Qualcomm. All eight CPU cores get a moderate power boost, and there’s a next-gen GPU on the chipset, along with support for dual-band or tri-band Wi-Fi 7, 5G connectivity, and Bluetooth 6.0. The phone can be configured with 12GB or 16GB of RAM — no 24GB option like with the OnePlus 13.
This is one of our first looks at the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, and it doesn’t disappoint. The phone runs quickly during multitasking, videos, and gaming. For the latter, it’s one of the best devices I’ve used in recent memory. The OnePlus 15 ran Genshin Impact on max settings, 60fps, and max brightness perfectly, never dipping below 60fps during gameplay. I even played some PUBG to see how it would handle higher settings at 120fps, and never saw a frame rate dip there, either. The new vapor chamber cooling system they implemented must be working well, too, because the phone never even got warm during gameplay.
The OnePlus 15 also has a gaming performance mode that can be used to boost fps, improve HDR performance, and boost touch sampling to a max of 3,200Hz, for more responsive controls. A lot of the boosts might be overkill — as is, the phone handles the most demanding mobile gaming with ease at the highest settings.
Display and audio
The OnePlus 15 has a 6.78-inch 2772 x 1272 LTPO AMOLED display with up to a 165Hz refresh rate, more than enough to support the 120fps gameplay we reviewed in the last section. To get the most out of that display, the phone features Dolby Vision processing and support for HDR10+ and Ultra HDR images. The max brightness of 1,800 nits on the display allowed us to use the phone in direct sunlight with no problem, and helped to make HDR content shine.
No surprise that OnePlus made sure to go all-in here — the phone is perfect for running high-end mobile games, so it only makes sense to have a display that can make that gameplay look as good as it’s supposed to. With the processing power and the display, the OnePlus 15 is a top option for anyone prioritizing gaming when buying a new smartphone.
The only small downside is that the stereo speakers aren’t quite as premium as the rest of the package. They get very loud, and the bass response is better than I’m used to from smartphones (even other flagship devices), but the highs and mids, and especially vocals, often sounded a bit flat or muddy.
Battery
Here’s one big reason the OnePlus 15 feels a little heavy in hand — it’s got a massive 7,300mAh battery powering everything. A lot of times the extra power draw from flagship chipsets cancels out the larger battery capacity when it comes to battery life, but I found that to be less true here.
An hour of Genshin Impact at max settings, 60fps, and max brightness only used up 14% of battery capacity, which is better than almost any other phone I’ve reviewed in the past few years, flagships and mid-range devices both included. An hour of video at full brightness only used 4% of battery capacity, which is phenomenal. Add on the fact that the phone uses almost no power when idle (at least, without any sort of an always-on display in use), and you get a phone that can easily last a couple days on one charge for most folks.
And, as usual for phones these days, recharging is very quick. The OnePlus 15 comes with a 120W charging adapter that can get the phone back to full in less than an hour. I started recharging the phone at 20%, and was at 55% after 10 minutes and 92% after 30 minutes. By the 40-minute mark, the phone was fully charged. And, if you’ve got access to newer wireless charging gear, the OnePlus 15 is capable of up to 50W wireless charging, which is awfully quick itself.
Camera
The OnePlus 15 is the first OnePlus phone in a while to not partner with Hasselblad on the cameras. OnePlus had been using image processing developed alongside Hasselblad, but this year they are using their own DetailMax engine. That should make most of the difference between pictures taken with the OnePlus 15 and OnePlus 13, because the cameras themselves aren’t too different.
The rear camera array has three 50MP sensors — a main wide angle 24mm camera with phase-detect autofocus (PDAF) and optical image stabilization (OIS), an ultrawide 16mm camera with a 116-degree field of view and PDAF, and a periscope zoom 80mm camera with PDAF and OIS capable of up to 3.5x optical zoom. The selfie camera has a 32MP sensor with autofocus.
Doing away with the Hasselblad partnership doesn’t seem to have affected camera quality too much. With the main camera, pictures came out clear and detailed, without much noticeable blurring or artifacts at a quick glance. Shots come out well balanced, the sky doesn’t get overexposed, and in this particular shot the camera handled a little bit of glare from sunlight on the mural pretty well.
At 2x zoom, the 50MP periscope zoom camera is used, and shots still look pretty great. Having both PDAF and OIS on the zoom camera is a huge help, and keeps zoom shots crisp. Same goes for the 3.5x zoom picture seen below.
Normally I wouldn’t comment on digital zoom, but I tried to take a picture at 7x with the AI-assisted digital zoom on this camera, and it’s worth giving credit where credit’s due. The picture below still looks sharp with distinct details, and the AI-assisted processing managed to do its work without making the results look uncanny or unrealistic.
The ultrawide camera is the weakest of the three, but still not too bad. On an overcast day like the one in the picture below, there’s a little fuzziness and the trees ended up too dark against the sky. It fares better on brighter days, but it’s worth noting that the ultrawide camera is not quite as versatile as the main camera and the periscope zoom camera.
Night photos didn’t disappoint — in the shot below, the light reflected off the water comes through clear, and the lights on the Bay Bridge aren’t over-exposed. Overall, balance is excellent, with the sky remaining dark instead of over-exposed like you get on a lot of cheaper smartphone cameras. The OnePlus 15 might not be best in class here, but the results are good enough to keep this phone in the flagship conversation.
Pictures taken in portrait mode turned out excellent — the outlines of subjects were well-defined and the bokeh effect came out well without looking artificial. You can take shots at 1x, 2x, and 3.5x zoom in portrait mode, and I found that subjects came out detailed and well-defined at all levels (the picture below was taken at 2x zoom).
Software
The OnePlus 15 runs their custom Oxygen OS 16.0 over Android 15, and as usual for OnePlus, it’s pretty clean. Not a lot of overwrought features, and very little bloatware aside from pre-installed Netflix and the OnePlus system apps.
As with any other Android smartphone these days, AI implementation is a big focus. What’s becoming the standard raft of AI features — photo editing, live translation and interpretation, transcription, search, and a writer that can turn your quick notes into something more organized. And, as usual with AI features, sometimes they work great, and sometimes they don’t.
More unique to OnePlus is Mind Space, which is what the physical Plus key on the side of the phone launches by default. This is a bit like the delayed Recall feature on Windows that landed Microsoft in hot water, but with more control on your end. You can use that physical key to take screenshots of your phone or take voice notes, which will be used by Mind Space to create a sort of planner and personal assistant for you. Mind Space uses Google’s Gemini AI, then uses your input to personalize Gemini, hopefully creating what feels like an AI assistant tailored to you over time.
Some folks will get more out of it than others, and it will certainly work better the more notes and screenshots you take, but mostly we’re glad that the user is in charge of what data gets saved and used, rather than the software potentially harvesting anything on screen at any given time.
Sustainability
A huge battery and a durable build go a long way to ensuring that the OnePlus 15 can be a phone that will last for a long time. While the new IP69K rating doesn’t necessarily make us feel better or worse about durability (unless you’re actually using the phone in an industrial environment), a dust -proof and waterproof phone with top-of-the-line protective glass is as good a bet as any to not fall victim to physical drops or water immersion.
OnePlus typically provides four years of OS updates and five years of security upgrades, which isn’t as long as the seven years provided by Samsung. Longer is always better — year-on-year performance upgrades are getting harder and harder to spot for the average user, and we’re finding phones more and more often holding up decently after six or seven years.
Bottom line
The OnePlus 15 is setting a high bar early for 2026 flagship smartphones. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset can handle the most intense games you can throw at it without breaking a sweat (or making your hands sweat, for that matter). The fact that it can do that and still survive two days on a single charge makes the OnePlus 15 a very easy phone to recommend.
And while gaming and entertainment certainly seem to be the focus here, OnePlus has avoided missteps in other areas, too. Ending the Hasselblad partnership doesn’t seem to have affected camera quality too much, although the camera array isn’t much of an upgrade over the OnePlus 13, either. Oxygen OS is a still a snappy and efficient Android overlay, the AMOLED display gets the most out of HDR content, and the phone feels as durable as a tank.
The changes to the physical alert slider and the loss of the Hasselblad partnership might get some attention for bucking OnePlus tradition, and while I wouldn’t say those changes are positive, they don’t end up being negatives, either. I’m going through my notes over and over to find something to complain about, and I’m not finding anything with substance — the bar has been set for 2026 flagship smartphones.
Pricing and availability
The Oneplus 15 will retail for $999 for the 16GB / 512GB model. In addition to infinite black, it will also be available in sand storm or ultra violet.
Unfortunately, OnePlus has had to delay its U.S. sale date due to the government shutdown delaying final FCC certification but you can get notified to find out when the phone will become available for purchase, which should hopefully be soon.