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The OnePlus 13 marked a return to form for the company, and let's see if they

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can continue that hot streak with the OnePlus 15. I am the owner of a OnePlus

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13R, which is their more budgetoriented version of the device. And I'm very

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excited to see what they've done on the 15. Nothing interesting in there except

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for a USBA to USBC adapter. What? Maybe

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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

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box. One of the most exciting parts of the OnePlus 15 is that it is the debut

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of Snapdragon's latest high-end chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The names

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just keep getting longer, ladies and gentlemen. Inside we have a wa my gosh,

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we get their Super Vuk fast charger, their proprietary still USBA charging

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brick. It charges 120 watts on 240 volt and 80 watts on 120 volt. And that's

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good that it's going to be nice and fast because it's a big battery. The dual

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cell battery in this thing is 7,300

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MIA, which is freaking large. It is

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USBA, which is kind of annoying cuz you won't be able to use this with as many

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devices as you'd hoped. And I guess that means that this thing is not for the

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charging because you would want this to be a male USB. But that's all extra

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goodies. Let's take a look at the phone itself.

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Oh wow. The first thing I'm noticing is this interesting texture on the side.

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Usually it's just like an aluminum or a titanium, but on this version, the

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sandstorm colorway, OnePlus is using something called microarchc oxidation.

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And what that basically allows them to do is apply a coating to the aluminum

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that provides it with a lot of extra durability. They're claiming 3.4 times

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harder than aluminum and 1.3 times

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tougher than titanium. Hardness refers to like its scratch resistance and

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toughness refers to its ability to bend without snapping. It's even more

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iPhoneesque than it used to be. Um, I think maybe that's just the rounder

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curves compared to the more square corners of the OnePlus 13R and also the

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OnePlus 13. And we're also getting that hint of that vertical oval glass that is

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on the very pronounced camera bump, though I don't think it's substantially

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more pronounced than uh it was on phones

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past. And you even get the Apple inspired uh kind of pill-shaped island

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there. All three of these sensors are 50 megapixels. You have a 116 degree

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ultrawide and a 3.5x optical zoom

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telephoto. And on the front, we get a 32 megapixel camera with a RGBW sensor that

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OnePlus claims gets 60% more light in

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your low light selfies. It's hard to see, but there is this almost paper-like

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texture to the coloring of it that is just really nice. No,

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no. Look how they've massacred my boy.

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They got rid of the slider again. It's a BUTTON NOW. NO.

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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

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thing. This action button is meant to be programmed for a ton of different

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actions, just like say the action button on your iPhone. What those actions are,

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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,

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USBC port, and speaker. Looks basically

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identical to last gen. And at the top,

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you can see our microphone as well as it looks like another port for a speaker.

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And on this side, you have your volume rocker and your power button. One

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downside of like these brighter colorways, especially when they wrap around the edge, is that like you really

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see the edge of this phone compared to the edge of the bezels on this thing. If

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it's anything like my previous OnePlus's, it's a plastic screen protector that is included on the front.

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That's actually a quite nice screen protector, and I always appreciate when

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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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off, by the way, and not like 50% off the terrible products. I'm talking 40%

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off Ghost and Grip bundles, $45 off Kill Switch kits, plus they're giving away a

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free deck of Dbrand themed playing cards

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with every order. They wanted me to show off the cards by just playing a quick

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game. It's empty. What game am I supposed to

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play? >> All right, I got the cards right here. You ever played 52 pickup?

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From here, Lionus spends the next couple of minutes picking up the cards and

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commenting on them as he goes. I will do

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no such thing. I'll pick up one card. You get one card, Dbrand. I'll pick up

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the king. And you know what? I got to give you credit. It looks pretty badass.

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It's like a beast king. And that's pretty cool. Don't forget to save money

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with Dbrand's Black Friday sale. That's

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k k k k k k k k k k u p.com.

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Look at that. It's liquid glass. It's transparent. That means it's it's

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copying Apple. The OnePlus 15 is running Oxygen OS 16 based on Android 16, which

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I think is actually a very good Android skin and it offers a lot of improved

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features. I think it really handles multitasking better than almost any

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other operating system at the moment and has stuff like this useful side dock

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that I use all the time. I am interested to see what this button is going to do

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though. So, let's press that. It's a little blatant, don't you think? Look at

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this. The animations are just cool. You want to be recognized. I don't want to change your settings though. Um, just

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like on iOS, you get a lot of different options, but they're pushing this thing

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called Mind Space, which is basically going to be like an AI assistant that's

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going to be based on your notes and screenshots. And now they're integrating

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it with Gemini so you can get better

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insights and give all of your data to Google if that's like your thing. It's a

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very similar concept to the essential space on nothing phones. And the idea

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that OnePlus has is, and I quote, a unified and searchable repository for

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your digital memories, which honestly, if you can take a bunch of screenshots

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and then have them in here and then be like, "Oh, I need my Blue Jays tickets

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or whatever." And then it'll just pull up those tickets out of your screenshots, that would be pretty cool.

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It remains to be seen. I think OnePlus's has a kind of a bad track record with

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special features. Like they do have a dynamic island like feature, but very

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few things use it. As far as I can tell, only Spotify and Uber uh use that.

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Though I don't know if Apple has a better track record with the dynamic

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island support. So like, who knows? Maybe could be really awesome. Maybe

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it'll be just another thing on your phone. The plus key is assignable to

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several other tasks. Like you can make it be your alert slider again but with a

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press and hold or you can make it a camera button or flashlight button.

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Whatever your heart desires as long as it's one of these eight options. There

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might be apps that will allow you to implement it into more complex automations. But right now you have a

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solid selection of tasks that you would probably want on a hotkey like this. Uh

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let's keep it at mind space for now. And that is pretty bright. It's blowing out

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the camera for sure, right? Hell yeah. OnePlus claims 1,800 nits for its high

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brightness mode, but according to our lab's testing, it reaches 1,951

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nits in a 1% window. By fiddling around with the settings, we were actually able

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to get it as high as 2,859 nits. It's not the brightest screen on

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the market, but in my opinion, it's about bright enough as you'll ever need

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for almost any setting. And I think that the brightness arms race is kind of

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coming to an end on phones. But as somebody who was chronically on my phone before bed, what I think is a pretty

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cool feature is that this reportedly gets to 0.5 nits, which is really low

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brightness. But what isn't low on this is the 165 Hz refresh rate display,

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which it will only be some of the time. In day-to-day usage, this will just be a

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120 Hz display, LTPO, so the refresh rate can go down to 1 Herz if there's a

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static image on there to help with battery life. But if you want access to

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the 165 Hz display, you do need to be in game mode. So, it's really just kind of

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a gaming thing. And if mobile gaming is your thing, you'll be happy to know that

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they have a super high sample rate digitizer for super responsive touches,

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sweeps, and whatever you do in a game. You'll whle like never before. And with

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the new Snapdragon chip, this thing is

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pretty damn fast. Across our suite of benchmarks, the OnePlus 15 performed

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better than the OnePlus 13 by 19 to 22%

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and better than the S25 Edge by 14 to 19%. That's a pretty impressive

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generational uplift, assuming that this isn't just sucking back even more juice

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than the last Snapdragon Elite chip did, because if your phone is sucking back 20

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watts, it's just going to overheat and throttle. Qualcomm claims that they made

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substantial efficiency gains on this generation of chip, but let's see what

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it looks like in our stress test benchmark. And in that stress test, on

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average, the OnePlus 15 outperforms the OnePlus 13 by 10%. But destroys the S25

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Edge by 56%. You can tell that cooling is very important for keeping these high

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power chips running smoothly, but it's not quite the same uplift that we saw on

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our shorter benchmarks. While the thermals might not be 100% solved,

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efficiency gains should translate into improved battery life. And boy howdy, do

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we have improved battery life. The OnePlus 15 gets 29 hours in our battery

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test. Compare that to the 20 hours of our OnePlus 13. That's like a 50%

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increase in screen on time. We actually ran the whole battery test again just in

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case there was a fluke. But no, this thing is a battery life champ. And that

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big battery will charge super fast with their included Super Vuke charger. Our

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charging test doesn't use proprietary chargers. We stick to a standard 45watt

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USBC charger. And to get this phone from 0 to 100, it took about 1 hour and 20

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minutes, which is about 20 minutes better than the Galaxy S25 Edge. So

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cool. It does support chi charging, but

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it doesn't include magnets, so no Mag Safe, but you're probably just going to

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use the included charger. Oh, and one more cool feature that OnePlus tossed in

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there is bypass charging. So, if you're playing a game and you're plugged into

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the wall, you don't have to worry about heating up the battery by charging the battery. You can just power the phone

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directly from the wall.

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They don't get that loud, but they do sound quite good. One thing I do

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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

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a tiny earpiece speaker. You get a little bit better performance from the

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top, which is going to be great if you're somebody who likes watching movies cameras. The camera experience on

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Oxygen OS is very reminiscent of iOS and

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has not deviated substantially from previous camera modes. And

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let's see about that low light performance. Honestly, pretty impressed.

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You do you did make you look pretty pale, Belle. Overall detail in the

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darker parts of the scenes are pretty good. And the studio lights didn't

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absolutely destroy all the detail in the corner. The color

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uh might need some work, but the the quality on the telephoto

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is quite like quite good for this low light shot.

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It did do the longer exposure. Does this have optical image stabilization? I sure

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hope so.

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Taking the video right now, the phone struggles with matching the image

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between the lenses, at least in the viewfinder. That's something that

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Apple's gotten really good at. So, it's a lot less jarring when you zoom all the

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way in on something and then zoom all the way out. A pretty stable video. I

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was shaking the camera that whole time. What we're doing right now is not enough to give a full conclusion on the cameras

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for this, especially for those who are worried about the lack of the Hasselblad

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partnership that ended. I'm pretty impressed by it in this room, but

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obviously your mileage may vary. I'm not really a videographer, but OnePlus has

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included a bunch of cool new features for creators, which includes log video

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recording in OnePlus's proprietary color space. OnePlus has also added what they

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claim is an industry first, and that is live LUT previews. So, if you're

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recording in RAW, instead of monitoring a washed out gray image, it'll apply a L

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that will make your footage look more like how it should after editing. And

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that's going to be cool if you're somebody who's maybe a travel vlogger because this also has an underwater

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mode, which allows you to use the camera app with just the buttons on the phone.

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And you might be thinking, "Oh, wow. It must be IP rated to be underwater." And

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oh boy is it ever IP rated. It's IP66, IP68, IP69, and IP69K,

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which means it can be submerged and blasted with water up to 80° C. Who's

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doing that to their phone? I don't know. But it is really nice to see the focus

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on durability. And OnePlus claims you can even use this in minus 20. And Labs

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actually confirmed that by tossing this in our environmental chamber and it

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still works. So, if you are a Canadian who forgets their phone in their car,

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you don't have to worry unless it's lower than minus 20, which happens.

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It's I I don't know. I'm not That's not an impressive selfie. Being a flagship

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phone, there's an endless list of features. So, we're going to just speedrun through some of the interesting

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ones. It's got Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, UAVra gyroscope. It's got the world's

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fastest smartphone RAM. We're talking LPDDR5X

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running at 10,667 megabits per second in the 16 gig

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variant. It's got a dedicated Wi-Fi chip for 50% faster Wi-Fi. 360 cryo velocity

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cooling where it's trying to avoid sending too much heat to your display.

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It's got 4K 120 FPS Dolby Vision HDR,

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real-time tone mapping, and a bunch of AI stuff if you're really into that.

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Combine that with the performance, the battery life, the screen, you have a

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solid package in this phone. And speaking of the screen, it's actually

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fully flat, so it's easy to apply a screen protector and it's less fragile.

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the OnePlus 13. It was not completely flat and it was super annoying, but now

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it's it's it's good. It's nice. Yeah, I

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think that if you are looking for a phone, this should be a real contender.

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However, the question remains, what does it cost? OnePlus has gone from flagship

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killer to flagship and it will be available for $899 for the 1256 gig

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version or $999 for the 16 gig 512

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version. So, what do you think? Is that a fair price? Let us know in the

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comments below. And if you enjoy this video, why don't you check out some of our other phone videos? Uh maybe the

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Pixel 10 perhaps.