OnePlus 15 Review: This is Not Normal!

All right, I'm not going to bury the lead. This phone is so good.

There's a new chip and then a bunch of extra stuff on top. There's a new design and a bunch more extra stuff with that. A new display with a bunch of extra stuff and new silicon, extra battery. There's just so much extra stuff.

This is OnePlus 15. So, I already really liked the OnePlus 13 earlier this year.

I made a whole video about it, enjoyed it, and they of course did skip 14 because four is super unlucky. So, now here comes the OnePlus 15. And all I really expected from it is just a little spec bump refresh cuz that would have been normal.

OnePlus has done it before. Back when they did the T version of phones, they'd basically refresh a phone 6 months later and, you know, just be the first ones to ship with the new chip for those sweet bragging rights.

And honestly, that would have been pretty solid. The new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, as you've probably seen, is really good. It's 20 to 40% faster than the 8 Elite.

Record setting multi-core performance, 4.6 GHz clock speeds.

It's already goated. I could have just packed that up in the same phone and just said, "All right, ready to go." But instead, they just decided to sprinkle in a whole bunch of extra overkill. a bunch of little tiny stuff that honestly even the most insane enthusiasts would barely even notice or care about. Type of stuff that like people who watch an MKBHD video of a new phone that they're not even going to buy might appreciate. So, on top of this new chip and a huge vapor chamber, they also dropped in super fast UFS 4.1 storage. And the base version of this phone has 12 gigs of LPDDR5X Ultra RAM, which is really fast, but it might not even be enough for you. So, the upgraded version has 16 gigs of LP DDR5X Ultra Plus RAM. That's as fast as it gets. This is not normal. They also, of course, updated the design of this phone. So, it's simpler, cleaner, it's more squared off. I like it. the sides of the phone and the camera bump and and basically everything is is flattened and more squared off. Now, I kind of like how the cameras right in the middle are perfectly aligned with the center of the phone through the logo. It's clean and it's also all matte all the way around.

So, the back and the sides, no gloss needed. And there's three colors: matte black, matte sand, and matte violet, which is pretty unique. Okay, so even if they did just that, the new chip and this new design, that would have already been about what I expect from a spec bump refresh a couple months later.

Uh, but this is not that. This is the OnePlus 15 we're talking about.

So, bring on the overkill. So, all of the colors of this phone have this newly developed super tough finish from a process called microarchc oxidation.

Essentially, it creates a ceramic coating on the metal. And normally I wouldn't notice stuff like that too specifically, but this matte black phone has turned out to be one of the most impressive matte blacks I've ever seen on a phone. Not only is this nice micro texture kind of soft to the touch, but also matte blacks are actually typically pretty fingerprinty and a little harder to keep clean, I admit, but somehow this one does not fingerprint at all.

And then normally when I pull something matte black out of my bag and it has scratches on it, that hurts a little bit inside like and that happened with this one and I pulled it out and it has scratches and that was devastating. And then then I realized these scratches wiped off every single time because it turns out those scratches are actually just the material from the other things in my bag scratching off onto the ceramic. Since ceramics are like an eight or nine on the MO scale, anything that's not literally diamond is going to be softer than it.

This phone isn't taking the damage, it's doing the damage.

That's not normal. It's like call an ambulance, but not for me. Now, I don't know exactly how thick this coating is or exactly how well it'll hold up to a Jerig Everything knife event or even a big drop, but I do feel pretty good about normal wear and tear here. And on top of all of that, they've also certified it for IP66, IP68, IP69, and now IP69K dust and water resistance. So, not only can it be dunked in water for minutes at a time, but it can also be blasted from close range with high pressure, high temperature water jets up to 80° C.

Pretty sure it can literally survive a laundry cycle and be fine. That is also not normal.

And it's also hilarious because of OnePlus's history of not wanting to pay for official IP certification for years to save a few bucks.

Now they're just doing all the things. Oh, and by the way, it does all this while being slightly thinner than the OnePlus 13 and while getting a massive battery upgrade to a 7,300 mAh silicon carbon battery.

So, the OnePlus 13 this year already set the tone with an awesome 6,000 mAh silicon carbon battery, which I praised because it dwarfed the S25 Ultra and the other flagship phones, but now it's just getting ridiculous. It's literally twice as much battery as some other phones from just a few years ago, thanks to more silicon content in the anode and higher energy density than ever before.

So, yeah, this thing just lasts forever. Now, I recently talked on the Waveform podcast about why I don't do battery benchmarks because so few of them actually represent real world usage. You can optimize for different things.

But just know that not only is there no way a phone with 7,300 mAh doesn't do well on benchmarks, but also OnePlus is one of those companies that notoriously aggressively kills background tasks and manages standby time really well.

So, the fact that I'm getting 7 to 8 hours of screen on time easily on one charge and can basically never kill it in a day is no surprise. Sometimes I'd end a day with like 50%, go to sleep, wake up, and it would have 49% ready for a whole another day.

Also, the fast charging brick comes in the box, which is sadly also not normal. Uh, but it also fast charged to the tune of 80 watts here in the US, but it'll do 100 watts in other countries with more powerful outlets.

And there's 50 watt wireless charging as a cherry on top. It's still super vuk, so it's still USBA on the brick, but I don't mind this because it comes with the cable anyway. Uh, you can also turn on battery management features, limit your charge capacity. There's bypass charging. Actually, this phone's battery is so big that you could turn on charge limits to 85% every time, which you don't need to, by the way, but if you just wanted to guarantee the long-term battery health of the phone and limit it to 85% charge, it would still have more battery than the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Now, one of the biggest stories in smartphones and computers over the past couple years has been custom silicon, and this phone also does that. So, I mentioned already it has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, but what I didn't mention is there's also two other custom chips on this phone that help OnePlus continue to chase that fast and smooth dream.

There's a new Wi-Fi chip and a new touch response chip. So, the Wi-Fi chip you can think of as their equivalent to Apple's new C1 and C1X modems in the iPhones.

instead of using a built-in Qualcomm modem, they've developed their own, calling it G2. And I don't know much about it other than the fact that it occasionally pulls higher speeds than other devices on the same network sometimes.

But then the touch response chip is even more impressive actually because they're pairing it with this new display which can refresh now up to 165 Hz, but it only refreshes at 165 Hz sometimes. It's funny when you go to display settings under refresh rate, you can turn it up to high, which says up to 165 Hz.

But when you flip through and actually use the phone, you can see it's mostly going between 1 herz and 120 Hz. It's 120 when scrolling, 120 when in apps, 120 when multitasking. So when is it 165 Hz? Well, it's just for gaming.

So, if you open a supported game like Call of Duty or Clash of Clans or Real Racing 3, there's a list of them. That is when it kicks up to 165 hertz.

So, the list of supported games is is pretty short right now. But in these specific games, it basically pins the frame rate at 165 and keeps it there. So, for the specific mobile gamer whose eye is so well tuned that they can see the difference between 120 and 165 and actually care about that in the game of their choice, well then this phone is clearly for you. I'm more the type of person that's just happy to have a higher refresh rate and high resolution on at the same time because so many phones make you pick one or the other.

And the dedicated touch response chip enables a ridiculous 3200 Hz touch sample rate.

For reference, most normal flagships are typically 1440 hertz to about 2400 htz. So that is also clearly not normal. But there are some downsides to this phone though. And that brings me to one of them. So I mean there's a couple small ones and then one really big one. The display is technically a higher refresh rate sometimes and a little bit brighter sometimes, but it's also a slightly lower resolution than before. Cuz see, OnePlus 13 was 1440p and OnePlus 15 is 1272 across. You probably won't notice. They're both very sharp, but hey, there's been lots of little overkill stuff in other parts of the phone that you won't notice either. So, I had to mention that.

And OnePlus also continues to abandon the alert slider, which I personally loved.

Uh, but they are replacing it with just this one customizable button. Most people end up being fine with this. I know there's a lot of vocal people like me that miss the thing, but you can customize it to make it a long press silent switch, but I just really like being able to know the state without turning on the screen or taking it out of my pocket. But of course, people will map this to other things that they find useful. So, that's fine, I guess. The haptic motor also got a downgrade from the 13 on paper, but I can confirm that you absolutely will not notice that it's still really good haptics in the OnePlus 15.

But the really big one is the cameras. And I feel like this has been this has been a story of OnePlus phones for forever now. Every time they have a great phone with great specs, great performance, and they always botch the cameras. And with this one, it's not like just a, oh, you know, the phone's really great, it's just not the best cameras. No, this is actually a a pretty substantial downgrade.

Like the sensors are smaller, the apertures are smaller, and the photos and videos are just worse and disappointing across the board. So, it's a triple 50 megapixel camera system back here, which sounds promising, but this primary sensor has been a surprisingly weak performer. This is actually the same one that's in the $400 Honor 200, and it kind of acts like it. There's more noise than you'd want to see in some medium lighting shots where other flagships do just fine.

There's also a decent three and a halfx telephoto zoom and a 116 degree ultra wide that's a little soft around the edges. They get the job done, but in general I found colors pretty dull and just too much noise and not enough detail in most shots from any of these cameras. And then you've probably also noticed there's no Hasselblad logo on the back of this phone anymore.

And it kind of looks like they're done with that camera partnership.

The orange shutter button is gone. The XPAN mode is gone. They still do call their pro mode master mode though and they still use this incredibly loud leaf shutter sound.

So I guess they're not totally done wiping out any trace of it. But yeah, in a world where they have done so much and even done overkill with the performance and the usability of this phone, once again on a OnePlus phone, the cameras are an area where you'll have to be okay with being disappointed again.

So look, I've really enjoyed using this OnePlus phone for the same reasons I've enjoyed using a lot of previous OnePlus phones. They make these things so fast and smooth.

So even as their software has changed and Oxygen OS has kind of devolved into a Color OS clone, which is also kind of an iOS clone, at least it stayed buttery and packed with features and there's still plenty of customization to set it up the way I want. Uh, you can choose to use any of the AI features or not, like always. I didn't. You can also choose to adjust some of the default behaviors or not, like always. I did. It's just a a really confidence inspiring phone. No matter how hard you push the phone, no matter how much you try to get it to do crazy stuff, it always loads things ridiculously fast and lasts all day. So, that's great. But yeah, it's it's not normal.

This phone is so not normal. And I appreciate that so much for all the little performance stuff, but they do now have a longer way to go to get me to daily a phone like this if the camera is going to be lagging so hard.

But thankfully, it is very competitively priced. So, this phone is $8.99 US uh or $9.99 if you want that sweet sweet 16 gigs of LP DDR5X Ultra Plus RAM.

Um, but yeah, can you guys can you guys make like an ultra version with a really nice camera, please? That'd be nice. Okay, thanks. Bye. Peace.

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