8.5/ 10
SCORE

OnePlus 13

Pros

• Big battery lasts a day and a half or more
• Great performance in gaming and browsing
• Neat minimalist design

Cons

• Only four years of Android updates
• $900 price for only 256GB of storage
• Slight heat management concerns

Have you ever neared the end of your day and worried your phone was about to die on you? Of course, you have — battery life remains one of the top three features we prioritize. That’s why the new OnePlus 15 is so promising, boasting a 7,300-mAh battery, which is nearly half again as large as the 5,000-mAh capacity of other high-end smartphones, including the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The OnePlus 15 is the newest handset from the Chinese phone-maker, progressing from the OnePlus 13 released in January — the company says there are so many upgrades it felt appropriate to skip a 14th entry, which is a bit of an exaggeration. But there are standout improvements beyond the battery life that distinguish the phone from the pack.

The OnePlus 15 does have a flagship cost to go along with those specs, with a $900 starting price for the 12GB RAM and 256GB storage option and $1,000 for 16GB and 512GB of storage. That’s $100 above the entry-level Samsung Galaxy S25 and Google Pixel 10, but the OnePlus 15’s faster performance and bigger battery could justify paying a bit more.

While people in Canada can pick up the OnePlus 15 on November 13, Americans will have to wait a bit longer: The Federal Communications Commission has not yet certified the phone to be sold in the country due to the US government’s shutdown. Until that’s granted, prospective US customers will have to wait, according to Spenser Blank, head of marketing and communications for OnePlus North America.

«We are hopeful that approvals can be generated quickly and as a result, we can bring the OnePlus 15 to our customers in the US expeditiously,» Blank said in a statement.

As one of the first phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, the OnePlus 15 promises higher performance than other Android handsets, and it certainly delivers, as evidenced by its benchmark test scores and the gaming capabilities I experienced while testing the phone over two weeks. Its specs are otherwise beefy, and it recharges as fast, if not faster, than most of its competitors in the premium phone space despite its larger battery.

On paper, it’s a prominent phone, especially compared to the OnePlus 13, and in my time with the phone, reality mostly backs that up. It’s got a decent suite of camera features with computational tricks that clean up images nicely. The redesign is love-or-hate, with a more downplayed visual style of rounded corners and soft matte surfaces that make it look like the love child of a Google Pixel and an off-white 80s PC. Personally, I like the departure from the sleek, streamlined curves on other phones to more intentional, artful simplicity. Bring me back to the future of yesteryear.

Its long battery life, then, is its best perk, and it does eke out a bit more daylight than comparable phones that CNET has tested. But despite packing nearly half again as much capacity as its rivals, it doesn’t correspondingly get half a day more of battery — at least when I ran it at its highest settings. When I dropped everything down, I was able to get a longer battery life between charges.

Love-or-hate boxy design and a crisp display

The OnePlus 15 has a new look over its predecessor, which may not appeal to everyone. Gone are the curved edges and circular camera block on the back of the phone. Like the latest iPhones, OnePlus has switched to fully flat sides, which aren’t quite as easy to hold but have a slightly textured finish on the metal frame for a bit of grip. If I put my conspiracy hat on, I would suspect that the shift to flat edges means slightly more volume within the body of the phone itself, which means more space for battery cells. Hmm.

In any case, the flat edges, combined with the smoothed, almost matte texture on the back glass, give the OnePlus 15 a more understated appearance, shifting it away from the sleek look of its predecessors. The camera block has switched from a big circle to a rounded square with the camera grouping offset in a vertical oval on the left and two stacked lenses on the right — once you see it looking like a sideways screaming emoticon, you won’t unsee it.

I got a OnePlus 15 in its signature Sand Storm color, which has gotten more love in social media comments than I’d expect. To me, it’s an inoffensive off-white that risks neither the pizazz of more adventurous phone hues nor the garishness of eye-threatening neon ones. It’s the safe color of the walls of a doctor’s office or a cubicle farm. But it does have a flair of 80s tech to it, so I can see the appeal — and it comes in black or light violet hues if the light tan color isn’t for you.

The display, on the other hand, is nice and crisp. At 6.78 inches, it’s on the larger side, just smaller than an iPhone 17 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and has a comparable resolution of 2,722 x 1,272 pixels. It can reach a 165Hz refresh rate, which has been nice to see in the few games and entertainment experiences that support such a high rate (few though they are, as most cap out at 120Hz). Its 1,800-nit maximum brightness is fine outdoors but not nearly as visible as the 3,000-nit brightness of the iPhone 17 Pro displays.

Better than expected cameras without Hasselblad

My CNET colleague Andrew Lanxon, who reviewed the OnePlus 13 and is a very skilled photographer, took the OnePlus 15 to Lisbon with him to test the phone’s cameras. Here are his thoughts about them and taking photos with the phone.

The OnePlus 15 packs a trio of 50-megapixel rear cameras (wide, ultrawide and 3.5x telephoto) and a 32-megapixel front-facing selfie shooter. While that should lead to suitably sharp photos, this is the first phone from OnePlus since the company parted ways with the camera pros at Hasselblad, which had contributed software tuning to prior OnePlus handsets. Accordingly, it’s the first test of the phone-maker’s photo capabilities without the iconic Swedish camera-maker.

Which company is really responsible for this split isn’t known, but I wasn’t bowled over by the OnePlus 13’s imaging skills — or those of almost any OnePlus phone to be quite honest.

Without the Hasselblad name, the OnePlus 15 does have some heavy lifting to do when it comes to keeping photographers happy, but in my early tests of the phone in Lisbon, Portugal, it does a solid job of capturing some decent holiday snaps.

The shots above are all bright, vibrant and packed with detail. I particularly like that the colors remain mostly true to their natural tones, yet still have enough pop to look vivid on screen. What I don’t like is the quite heavy-handed HDR processing which has pulled the brightness of the sky down and lifted the shadows more than I’d usually want to see.

This over-processed look is a problem I’ve found with most of OnePlus’s phones, and clearly the company has stayed true to form.

The HDR balance is better in the image above, with more natural-looking shadows in the seating area in the foreground, while the bright sky in the background has been effectively controlled.

At 3.5x zoom the exposure remains spot on while details are pin-sharp.

Taken with the standard lens, this scene looks great

And at 3.5x zoom I’m impressed at the details and exposure.

The image above still looks pin-sharp at 7x zoom. I’m impressed with the zoom skills here.

Switching to the ultrawide, the exposure remains good but the colors have taken a noticeable shift, especially in the oranges of the roof tiles.

But it’s especially noticeable as the phone has radically shifted its colors when switching to the ultrawide, warming the image up overall and stripping almost all of that blue from the sky. It’s not that it’s a bad image; it’s just that it shouldn’t change that much between the lenses. This discrepancy between standard and ultrawide color toning has often been a problem on OnePlus’s cameras, and it’s honestly no surprise to me that it’s still the case here.

While colors can look natural in photos taken by the phone, I’ve also found occasions when it goes really hard with the processing, turning the sky extremely dark blue and contrasty. Sure, it pops, and it’d probably look rad as heck in an Instagram post, but as a photographer myself, I’d prefer a more neutral image that I can add contrast to should I want to.

There’s been a lot of HDR processing in the image of a boat above, too, balancing the bright sky and lift the shadows on the boat. I don’t hate the look, but it’s clear the phone is working super hard to eliminate all dark shadows from its shots.

As the sun set over Lisbon, I snagged a pic from my hotel roof. It’s not quite a night mode scene, but I still like how the phone handled the darker sunset conditions.

Switching to the zoom, it’s odd to see that the phone has decided to really whack up the saturation here. Again, I don’t mind the look, but if I wanted extra saturation, I’d add it to my photos later; I don’t want it there by default.

As darkness fell, I took one last shot overlooking the city. The details are pin-sharp and there’s a great balance in the exposure here.

In the ultrawide camera, exposure remains spot on, and while there is again a slight color shift, it’s less dramatic here.

There’s no question that the OnePlus 15 can take some great-looking photos, and I am definitely pleased with quite a few of my holiday photos I took with it. But it’s still plagued by the same problems of previous generations: over-zealous image processing and color shifts when switching between lenses.

Neither problem exactly ruins your images, and if you love vibrant, punchy photos with brightened shadows to paste all over your Insta feed, then you’ll likely enjoy the results from the OnePlus 15. Those of you who want a more natural feel to your images — perhaps to use a better base for your own edits — will likely be better served by other phones.

Great specs and even better battery life

Normally, the specs podium is reserved for such critical components as the system-on-a-chip containing the brains (and processing brawn) of the phone, RAM and storage — but the OnePlus 15’s massive 7,300-mAh battery deserves a medal, too. During my time with the phone, I had plenty of moments where the OnePlus 15 eked out a longer lifespan before needing to recharge than I had initially thought.

Case in point: While trying to fully drain the battery for a proper recharging test, I opened the game Dead Cells on my OnePlus 15, which was at 2%… and played for over 45 minutes before the phone entered emergency battery-saving mode at 1%. Sure, the device could’ve been fudging that number by having more capacity than it had displayed (akin to getting more miles in your car than expected when the gas tank’s empty light is on). But it’s reassuring to see the phone get out more battery life when I’d conceivably need it most. I got over a day and a half under casual use with the display and gaming settings cranked up, so it’s conceivable that switching on the battery-saving capabilities here and there could make the phone last through the second day before needing to recharge.

The phone’s other specs are reasonably impressive, with the aforementioned Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and either 12GB or 16GB of LPDDR5 Plus RAM and 256GB or 512GB of onboard storage, respectively, which yield some impressive benchmarks (we tested with the latter configuration).

In the Geekbench 6 processor test, the OnePlus 15 outperformed every phone except the iPhone 17 series, and it also achieved higher scores on 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, a graphics and video test, than any phone we tested, except for the RedMagic 11 Pro (another gaming-specific phone). That’s impressive compared to today’s best phones, but even more so with older handsets: The OnePlus 15 got double the score and frame rate of my own personal two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro Max.

In practice, this meant smooth performance all around, with little slowdown when switching between apps. When gaming, somehow this device didn’t quite unlock some of the highest graphics settings in titles like Diablo Immortal, but it got nearly there with high-resolution visuals, reflection effects (presumably from ray tracing) and dynamic lighting. The phone gets a little warm to the touch when playing for long stretches, but nothing too concerning. And although it’s worth noting that the OnePlus 15 did overheat when running the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, which I haven’t experienced in other phones, none of the games I tested strained the OnePlus 15 to this degree.

The OnePlus 15 packs Android 16 out of the box with its OxygenOS 16 skin, which is mostly lightweight and relatively free of bloatware. Yes, there are a handful of proprietary apps, but they’re mostly benign, with a few returning favorites like Zen Mode and Game Assistant wrangling all your games into one app container. The phone also has several AI features, which are all opt-in and must be activated from Settings to appear as apps on the Home screen and within other apps (like summarizing information in Notes).

But there is a downside to the phone’s software — it doesn’t get nearly as long a runway for updates as its competitors. OnePlus is promising only four years of software updates (currently through Android 20) and six years of security patches, meaning owners will stop getting new Android features in 2029 and it won’t be safe to use the phone after 2031. Compare that to the seven years of guaranteed software and security updates on the Samsung Galaxy S25 series and Google Pixel 10 series, as well as an expected six or more years for the iPhone 17 models.

With the 80-watt charger included in the box, the OnePlus 15 was able to juice back up from nearly empty (1%) to 73% after 30 minutes, and 100% in 45 minutes — a rate only rivaled by the iPhone 17 series and Samsung Galaxy S25 FE in our tests (each of which have much smaller batteries), with a few other phones coming close (none have nearly the same battery capacity). While the phone supports up to 100-watt charging with an optional proprietary OnePlus charger, it wasn’t included in our review materials and thus wasn’t incorporated.

The phone also supports up to 50 watts of wireless charging, and considering most wireless chargers top out at 15 or 30 watts, you’ll need to buy a specialty device just to hit that high rate.

Conclusion: Best for battery hogs

By focusing on battery life, OnePlus is addressing one of the biggest priorities people have when looking for a new smartphone: They want their devices to last longer before needing to recharge. With good performance and respectable camera capabilities, the OnePlus 15 is a powerful phone and a solid competitor to premium Android phones like the Galaxy S25 series.

But a larger battery doesn’t guarantee, say, an extra day of use — there are plenty of ways all that extra capacity can be whittled down to just a few hours of use over rival phones, like ratcheting up the refresh rate, recording high-resolution video and streaming media. It’s up to the users to smartly tweak settings to get the most out of that huge 7,300-mAh battery.

Combined with fewer years of updates than rival premium phones and a slight concern over heat when the phone is under extreme duress, which could be exacerbated in hot climates, and the OnePlus 15 isn’t quite the perfect Android phone. But its advantages outweigh its drawbacks. If, like most people, you just want the longest-lasting phone possible, the OnePlus 15 might be the best option for you.

How we test phones

Every phone CNET’s reviews team tests is used in the real world. We test a phone’s features, play games and take photos. We examine the display to see if it’s bright, sharp and vibrant. We analyze the design and build to see how it is to hold and whether it has an IP rating for water resistance. We push the processor’s performance to the extremes using standardized benchmark tools like GeekBench and 3DMark, along with our own anecdotal observations navigating the interface, recording high-resolution videos and playing graphically intense games at high refresh rates.

All the cameras are tested in a variety of conditions, from bright sunlight to dark indoor enviornments. We try out special features like night mode and portrait mode, and compare our findings against similarly priced competing phones. We also check out the battery life by using it daily, as well as running a series of battery drain tests.

We take into account additional features like support for 5G, satellite connectivity, fingerprint and face sensors, stylus support, fast charging speeds and foldable displays, among others that can be useful. We balance all of this against the price to give you the verdict on whether the phone, whatever price it is, actually represents good value. While these tests may not always be reflected in CNET’s initial review, we conduct follow-up and long-term testing in most circumstances.