OnePlus 15, Almost a Year Later: The Battery Life Is Everything Reviewers Promised. The Camera Isn’t.

Few flagship reviews this year have split as cleanly down the middle as the OnePlus 15. It launched last November at $899 for 12GB/256GB and $999 for 16GB/512GB, and ten months on, it’s still one of the more polarizing phones you can buy — not because reviewers disagree on the facts, but because they weighted the same facts completely differently.

Android Authority came away disappointed, calling it “a beast with no bite” and flatly recommending readers buy the older OnePlus 13 instead. Tom’s Guide called it “the best phone to come out this year” and handed it an Editor’s Choice. Having read both reviews closely and matched them against the spec sheet, I think Tom’s Guide has the better argument for most buyers — but Android Authority’s complaints are real, and you should know exactly what you’re trading away before you hand over $899.

Where it genuinely delivers

The battery is not a marginal improvement, it’s the headline. Tom’s Guide’s screen-on battery drain test clocked 25 hours and 13 minutes, and in real-world mixed use, the phone lasted 2 days, 11 hours, and 5 minutes before dropping to 2%. That’s not “good for a flagship” — that’s a category above nearly everything else on the market, Android or iPhone, and it comes from a genuinely huge 7,300mAh cell paired with a Glacier cooling system that OnePlus says dissipates heat twice as fast as the OnePlus 13’s.

Charging keeps pace: 120W wired gets you a full charge in roughly 39 minutes with OnePlus’s own brick, and 50W wireless is available too, which is still rare at this price. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip handles everyday tasks without a hint of strain, the 165Hz BOE X3 OLED display is sharp and fluid for gaming, and the phone is IP68/IP69/IP69K rated — meaning it’ll survive a lot more than a splash, including brief submersion.

Where it falls short

Here’s the part Android Authority is right about: the camera system took a real step back from the OnePlus 13. All three rear sensors — the 50MP main, 50MP ultrawide, and 50MP 3.5x telephoto — are physically smaller than last year’s, with narrower apertures letting in less light, and OnePlus dropped its Hasselblad color-tuning partnership entirely. Zoomed shots in particular show heavy-handed sharpening that reads as artificial rather than detailed, which the review attributes partly to teething issues in OnePlus’s new in-house DeltaMax image engine.

The design lost a signature touch too: the alert slider — a physical switch OnePlus fans have defended for a decade — is gone, replaced by an Action Button that’s a clear nod to Apple’s iPhone. And under sustained load, like long GPS navigation sessions, the phone runs hot enough that Android Authority’s benchmark suite reportedly had to abandon test runs partway through due to thermal throttling.

Software is the other soft spot. OnePlus is committing to four years of Android OS updates on the 15, while Samsung and Google both guarantee seven years on their current flagships. If you tend to hold onto a phone for a while, that gap alone might be a dealbreaker regardless of how good the battery is today.

If your priority is “the phone that will still have charge left at 11pm,” nothing else at this price competes. If your priority is camera quality or long-term software support, look elsewhere.

The verdict

I’d buy the OnePlus 15 for one reason and one reason only: nobody else is touching its battery life at $899. If you’re a heavy phone user who’s tired of anxiously watching a battery percentage drop through the afternoon, this solves that problem better than a Galaxy S25 or a Pixel 10 Pro does. But if photography is a priority, or you’re the type who keeps a phone for four-plus years, Android Authority’s advice holds up — look at the Pixel 10 Pro or Galaxy S25 series instead, both of which shoot noticeably better photos and will keep getting security updates long after the OnePlus 15’s four-year clock runs out.

Sources: Android Authority, Tom’s Guide, PhoneArena. Featured image by Daniel Romero on Unsplash.