Tetraphobia is a powerful thing. It’s the reason high-rise hotels don’t have a 13th floor, and it’s the reason OnePlus just yeeted the number 14 into the void, skipping straight from lucky 13 to the powerhouse 15. But this leap represents more than just a superstitious calendar tear; it marks a violent shift in philosophy. The OnePlus 15 is done trying to seduce you with curved screens and Hasselblad name-dropping. Instead, it has morphed into a brute-force industrial tool disguised as a flagship. With a battery so large it technically qualifies as a portable generator, this phone is asking the market a simple, aggressive question: Do you want to look pretty, or do you want to last forever?
Design & Display: Flat, Fast, and a Little Familiar
Let’s address the elephant in the room: the camera bump. The glorious, watch-inspired circular distinctiveness of the OnePlus 11, 12, and 13 eras is gone. In its place is a rounded-square module that looks… fine. It’s clean, its matte, and its decidedly less “OnePlus” than I’d like. It blends into the crowd, which is great for introverts but bad for brand identity.
On the front, however, things get spicy. We’re looking at a 6.78-inch flat OLED panel, and while pixel peepers might gasp that it’s “only” 1.5K resolution (a step down from the QHD+ glory days), the trade-off is a buttery 165Hz refresh rate. It is absurdly smooth. Scrolling through Reddit feels less like reading and more like gliding over ice. Plus, the flat edges mean no more accidental touches or trying to find a screen protector that doesn’t peel off in three days.
Performance & Battery: The absolute unit
This is where the review turns into a love letter. Under the hood lies the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a chip so powerful it probably mines crypto in its sleep. But the real headline is the 7,300mAh Silicon NanoStack battery. You read that right. Seven. Thousand.
In a world where we’ve been conditioned to panic when our battery icon hits 20%, the OnePlus 15 is a therapeutic device. I managed to get through two full days of heavy use—gaming, navigating, and doom-scrolling—without touching a charger. And when you do need to plug in, the 80W charging (sadly capped from the global 100W for North American voltage reasons) still juices it up faster than you can finish a sitcom episode.
Cameras: The Breakup with Hasselblad
The “Hasselblad” logo is gone from the back, ending a multi-year partnership that brought us some truly lovely color calibration. In its place is OnePlus’s own generic-sounding “DetailMax Engine,” and the shift in philosophy is immediate. The primary 50MP Sony IMX906 sensor is a technical marvel, sucking in light like a black hole and delivering terrifyingly sharp photos. You can count the pores on your subject’s face, which is impressive for technology but arguably rude for social interactions. In low light, the shutter is snappy, and the noise reduction is aggressive—perhaps too aggressive, occasionally smoothing out textures until a carpet looks like a hardwood floor.
The supporting lenses are a game of two halves. The 50MP Ultrawide finally gets the respect it deserves, doubling as a macro shooter that lets you get within 2cm of a subject; it’s genuinely fun for capturing the terrifying details of insects or circuit boards. Then there is the 3.5x Periscope Zoom. It is the sweet spot for portraits, offering a lovely natural bokeh that separates your subject from the background without that fake “cardboard cutout” look. However, don’t be fooled by the marketing claims of “100x Digital Zoom”—anything past 30x turns your image into a watercolor painting from the Impressionist era.
Video performance has seen a massive bump, with 4K at 60fps now available across all three lenses, and the transition between them is finally seamless—no more jarring color shifts when you zoom in. But and this is a big “but” without the Hasselblad tuning, the soulful warmth is gone. The color science now leans cool and clinical. Greens are neon, skies are cyan, and while the images pop on Instagram, they lack that cinematic, moody character that made the OnePlus 12 feel special. It’s a technically superior camera system that has unfortunately lost its artistic license.
Software: OxygenOS 16 needs a breather
OxygenOS 16 (based on Android 16) is a mixed bag. On one hand, it’s fast, customizable, and loaded with the new “Intelligently Yours” AI features, which include some genuinely useful summarization tools powered by Google Gemini.
On the other hand, it still feels like it’s having an identity crisis between being “Stock Android Plus” and “ColorOS Lite.” I encountered a few bugs—animations stuttering when closing folders and the occasional ghost notification. It’s nothing a patch won’t fix, but for a device demanding flagship money, you expect a bit more polish out of the gate.
The Verdict
The OnePlus 15 is a device that knows exactly what it is. It isn’t trying to win a beauty contest, and it isn’t trying to be a DSLR replacement. It is a performance tank designed for people who value screen-on time above all else. If you can forgive the generic design and the loss of the Hasselblad charm, you are getting the most reliable daily driver on the market today.
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