The OnePlus 13 marked a return to form for the company, and let's see if they
can continue that hot streak with the OnePlus 15. I am the owner of a OnePlus
13R, which is their more budgetoriented version of the device. And I'm very
excited to see what they've done on the 15. Nothing interesting in there except
for a USBA to USBC adapter. What? Maybe
this is something to do with the charger. I don't know. We'll set that aside for now. Before we get to the phone, we'll look at the rest of the
box. One of the most exciting parts of the OnePlus 15 is that it is the debut
of Snapdragon's latest high-end chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The names
just keep getting longer, ladies and gentlemen. Inside we have a wa my gosh,
we get their Super Vuk fast charger, their proprietary still USBA charging
brick. It charges 120 watts on 240 volt and 80 watts on 120 volt. And that's
good that it's going to be nice and fast because it's a big battery. The dual
cell battery in this thing is 7,300
MIA, which is freaking large. It is
USBA, which is kind of annoying cuz you won't be able to use this with as many
devices as you'd hoped. And I guess that means that this thing is not for the
charging because you would want this to be a male USB. But that's all extra
goodies. Let's take a look at the phone itself.
Oh wow. The first thing I'm noticing is this interesting texture on the side.
Usually it's just like an aluminum or a titanium, but on this version, the
sandstorm colorway, OnePlus is using something called microarchc oxidation.
And what that basically allows them to do is apply a coating to the aluminum
that provides it with a lot of extra durability. They're claiming 3.4 times
harder than aluminum and 1.3 times
tougher than titanium. Hardness refers to like its scratch resistance and
toughness refers to its ability to bend without snapping. It's even more
iPhoneesque than it used to be. Um, I think maybe that's just the rounder
curves compared to the more square corners of the OnePlus 13R and also the
OnePlus 13. And we're also getting that hint of that vertical oval glass that is
on the very pronounced camera bump, though I don't think it's substantially
more pronounced than uh it was on phones
past. And you even get the Apple inspired uh kind of pill-shaped island
there. All three of these sensors are 50 megapixels. You have a 116 degree
ultrawide and a 3.5x optical zoom
telephoto. And on the front, we get a 32 megapixel camera with a RGBW sensor that
OnePlus claims gets 60% more light in
your low light selfies. It's hard to see, but there is this almost paper-like
texture to the coloring of it that is just really nice. No,
no. Look how they've massacred my boy.
They got rid of the slider again. It's a BUTTON NOW. NO.
AS disappointing as that is, you don't have to worry that it's going to be a one-use button, like a Bixby sort of
thing. This action button is meant to be programmed for a ton of different
actions, just like say the action button on your iPhone. What those actions are,
we'll get into a little bit later. Let's continue our way around the phone. At the bottom, we have our dual SIM tray,
USBC port, and speaker. Looks basically
identical to last gen. And at the top,
you can see our microphone as well as it looks like another port for a speaker.
And on this side, you have your volume rocker and your power button. One
downside of like these brighter colorways, especially when they wrap around the edge, is that like you really
see the edge of this phone compared to the edge of the bezels on this thing. If
it's anything like my previous OnePlus's, it's a plastic screen protector that is included on the front.
That's actually a quite nice screen protector, and I always appreciate when
they give you something like that for free. Let's turn the phone on, but not before I turn you on to our sponsor,
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Look at that. It's liquid glass. It's transparent. That means it's it's
copying Apple. The OnePlus 15 is running Oxygen OS 16 based on Android 16, which
I think is actually a very good Android skin and it offers a lot of improved
features. I think it really handles multitasking better than almost any
other operating system at the moment and has stuff like this useful side dock
that I use all the time. I am interested to see what this button is going to do
though. So, let's press that. It's a little blatant, don't you think? Look at
this. The animations are just cool. You want to be recognized. I don't want to change your settings though. Um, just
like on iOS, you get a lot of different options, but they're pushing this thing
called Mind Space, which is basically going to be like an AI assistant that's
going to be based on your notes and screenshots. And now they're integrating
it with Gemini so you can get better
insights and give all of your data to Google if that's like your thing. It's a
very similar concept to the essential space on nothing phones. And the idea
that OnePlus has is, and I quote, a unified and searchable repository for
your digital memories, which honestly, if you can take a bunch of screenshots
and then have them in here and then be like, "Oh, I need my Blue Jays tickets
or whatever." And then it'll just pull up those tickets out of your screenshots, that would be pretty cool.
It remains to be seen. I think OnePlus's has a kind of a bad track record with
special features. Like they do have a dynamic island like feature, but very
few things use it. As far as I can tell, only Spotify and Uber uh use that.
Though I don't know if Apple has a better track record with the dynamic
island support. So like, who knows? Maybe could be really awesome. Maybe
it'll be just another thing on your phone. The plus key is assignable to
several other tasks. Like you can make it be your alert slider again but with a
press and hold or you can make it a camera button or flashlight button.
Whatever your heart desires as long as it's one of these eight options. There
might be apps that will allow you to implement it into more complex automations. But right now you have a
solid selection of tasks that you would probably want on a hotkey like this. Uh
let's keep it at mind space for now. And that is pretty bright. It's blowing out
the camera for sure, right? Hell yeah. OnePlus claims 1,800 nits for its high
brightness mode, but according to our lab's testing, it reaches 1,951
nits in a 1% window. By fiddling around with the settings, we were actually able
to get it as high as 2,859 nits. It's not the brightest screen on
the market, but in my opinion, it's about bright enough as you'll ever need
for almost any setting. And I think that the brightness arms race is kind of
coming to an end on phones. But as somebody who was chronically on my phone before bed, what I think is a pretty
cool feature is that this reportedly gets to 0.5 nits, which is really low
brightness. But what isn't low on this is the 165 Hz refresh rate display,
which it will only be some of the time. In day-to-day usage, this will just be a
120 Hz display, LTPO, so the refresh rate can go down to 1 Herz if there's a
static image on there to help with battery life. But if you want access to
the 165 Hz display, you do need to be in game mode. So, it's really just kind of
a gaming thing. And if mobile gaming is your thing, you'll be happy to know that
they have a super high sample rate digitizer for super responsive touches,
sweeps, and whatever you do in a game. You'll whle like never before. And with
the new Snapdragon chip, this thing is
pretty damn fast. Across our suite of benchmarks, the OnePlus 15 performed
better than the OnePlus 13 by 19 to 22%
and better than the S25 Edge by 14 to 19%. That's a pretty impressive
generational uplift, assuming that this isn't just sucking back even more juice
than the last Snapdragon Elite chip did, because if your phone is sucking back 20
watts, it's just going to overheat and throttle. Qualcomm claims that they made
substantial efficiency gains on this generation of chip, but let's see what
it looks like in our stress test benchmark. And in that stress test, on
average, the OnePlus 15 outperforms the OnePlus 13 by 10%. But destroys the S25
Edge by 56%. You can tell that cooling is very important for keeping these high
power chips running smoothly, but it's not quite the same uplift that we saw on
our shorter benchmarks. While the thermals might not be 100% solved,
efficiency gains should translate into improved battery life. And boy howdy, do
we have improved battery life. The OnePlus 15 gets 29 hours in our battery
test. Compare that to the 20 hours of our OnePlus 13. That's like a 50%
increase in screen on time. We actually ran the whole battery test again just in
case there was a fluke. But no, this thing is a battery life champ. And that
big battery will charge super fast with their included Super Vuke charger. Our
charging test doesn't use proprietary chargers. We stick to a standard 45watt
USBC charger. And to get this phone from 0 to 100, it took about 1 hour and 20
minutes, which is about 20 minutes better than the Galaxy S25 Edge. So
cool. It does support chi charging, but
it doesn't include magnets, so no Mag Safe, but you're probably just going to
use the included charger. Oh, and one more cool feature that OnePlus tossed in
there is bypass charging. So, if you're playing a game and you're plugged into
the wall, you don't have to worry about heating up the battery by charging the battery. You can just power the phone
directly from the wall.
They don't get that loud, but they do sound quite good. One thing I do
appreciate is that they've added a vent at the top for better stereo sound. So, it's not like a big bottom speaker plus
a tiny earpiece speaker. You get a little bit better performance from the
top, which is going to be great if you're somebody who likes watching movies cameras. The camera experience on
Oxygen OS is very reminiscent of iOS and
has not deviated substantially from previous camera modes. And
let's see about that low light performance. Honestly, pretty impressed.
You do you did make you look pretty pale, Belle. Overall detail in the
darker parts of the scenes are pretty good. And the studio lights didn't
absolutely destroy all the detail in the corner. The color
uh might need some work, but the the quality on the telephoto
is quite like quite good for this low light shot.
It did do the longer exposure. Does this have optical image stabilization? I sure
hope so.
Taking the video right now, the phone struggles with matching the image
between the lenses, at least in the viewfinder. That's something that
Apple's gotten really good at. So, it's a lot less jarring when you zoom all the
way in on something and then zoom all the way out. A pretty stable video. I
was shaking the camera that whole time. What we're doing right now is not enough to give a full conclusion on the cameras
for this, especially for those who are worried about the lack of the Hasselblad
partnership that ended. I'm pretty impressed by it in this room, but
obviously your mileage may vary. I'm not really a videographer, but OnePlus has
included a bunch of cool new features for creators, which includes log video
recording in OnePlus's proprietary color space. OnePlus has also added what they
claim is an industry first, and that is live LUT previews. So, if you're
recording in RAW, instead of monitoring a washed out gray image, it'll apply a L
that will make your footage look more like how it should after editing. And
that's going to be cool if you're somebody who's maybe a travel vlogger because this also has an underwater
mode, which allows you to use the camera app with just the buttons on the phone.
And you might be thinking, "Oh, wow. It must be IP rated to be underwater." And
oh boy is it ever IP rated. It's IP66, IP68, IP69, and IP69K,
which means it can be submerged and blasted with water up to 80° C. Who's
doing that to their phone? I don't know. But it is really nice to see the focus
on durability. And OnePlus claims you can even use this in minus 20. And Labs
actually confirmed that by tossing this in our environmental chamber and it
still works. So, if you are a Canadian who forgets their phone in their car,
you don't have to worry unless it's lower than minus 20, which happens.
It's I I don't know. I'm not That's not an impressive selfie. Being a flagship
phone, there's an endless list of features. So, we're going to just speedrun through some of the interesting
ones. It's got Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, UAVra gyroscope. It's got the world's
fastest smartphone RAM. We're talking LPDDR5X
running at 10,667 megabits per second in the 16 gig
variant. It's got a dedicated Wi-Fi chip for 50% faster Wi-Fi. 360 cryo velocity
cooling where it's trying to avoid sending too much heat to your display.
It's got 4K 120 FPS Dolby Vision HDR,
real-time tone mapping, and a bunch of AI stuff if you're really into that.
Combine that with the performance, the battery life, the screen, you have a
solid package in this phone. And speaking of the screen, it's actually
fully flat, so it's easy to apply a screen protector and it's less fragile.
the OnePlus 13. It was not completely flat and it was super annoying, but now
it's it's it's good. It's nice. Yeah, I
think that if you are looking for a phone, this should be a real contender.
However, the question remains, what does it cost? OnePlus has gone from flagship
killer to flagship and it will be available for $899 for the 1256 gig
version or $999 for the 16 gig 512
version. So, what do you think? Is that a fair price? Let us know in the
comments below. And if you enjoy this video, why don't you check out some of our other phone videos? Uh maybe the
Pixel 10 perhaps.