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 budget oriented 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 USB-A to USB-C 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, whoa my gosh,
you get their Super VUK fast charger, their proprietary still USB-A charging brick.
It charges 120 watts on 240 volt and 80 watts on 120 volt.
And that's good that it's gonna be nice and fast because it's a big battery.
The dual cell battery in this thing is 7,300 milliamp hours,
which is freaking large. It is USB-A, which is kind of annoying
because 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 titanium,
but on this version, the Sandstorm Colorway,
OnePlus is using something called micro arc 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 it's scratch resistance and toughness refers to its ability to bend without snapping.
It's even more iPhone-esque than it used to be.
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 it was on phones past.
And you even get the Apple-inspired, kind of pill-shaped island there.
All three of these sensors are 50 megapixels. You have a 116 degree ultra-wide
and a 3.5 times 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 gonna 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, USB-C 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 these brighter colorways, especially when they wrap around the edges,
that 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 OnePluses,
it's a plastic screen protector that is included on the front. It'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.
Look at that, it's liquid glass. It's transparent, that means that it's copying Apple.
The OnePlus 15 is running OxygenOS 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 it has stuff like this useful side dock
that I use all the time. I am interested to see what this button's gonna 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 as music. I don't want to change your settings though.
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, I'd 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 BlueJays 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 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 use that,
though I don't know if Apple has a better track record with the dynamic island support.
So like who knows, maybe Mind Space 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.
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 Hertz refresh rate display,
which it will only be some of the time. In day-to-day usage, this will just be a 120 Hertz display.
LTPO, so the refresh rate can't go down to one Hertz if there's a static image on there
to help with battery life. But if you want access to the 165 Hertz 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 the game. You'll whirdle 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 gonna 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 SuperVook charger. Our charging test doesn't use proprietary chargers.
We stick to a standard 45 watt USB-C charger
and to get this phone from zero to 100, it took about one hour and 20 minutes,
which is about 20 minutes better than the Galaxy S25 Edge.
So, cool. It does support Qi charging,
but it doesn't include magnets, so no MagSafe.
But you're probably just gonna 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.
The phone is powered by a USB-C charger.
The battery is powered by a USB-C charger.
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 tinny earpiece speaker. You get a little bit better performance from the top,
which is gonna be great if you're somebody who likes watching movies. Cameras.
The camera experience on OxygenOS is very reminiscent of iOS
and is not deviated substantially from previous camera modes.
And let's see about that low light performance.
Honestly, pretty impressed. They 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 might need some work,
but the quality on the telephoto
is 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 LUT that will make your footage look
more like how it should after editing. And that's gonna 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 well, 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 degrees Celsius.
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 like, 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 gonna just speed run through
some of the interesting ones. It's got Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, UAV grade 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 a 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 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 12 256 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 enjoyed this video,
why don't you check out some of our other phone videos, maybe the Pixel 10 perhaps?
Perhaps?