I’ve used the OnePlus 15 early – here are my 5 favourite upgrades

Although we’re still days away from the official release of OnePlus’ new flagship phone, I’ve been testing the phone for a few weeks.

And, although various embargoes mean I can’t yet reveal my complete thoughts on the OnePlus 15 experience, one thing I can do is run you through some of the highlights.

With last year’s OnePlus 13 (the number 4 is considered unlucky on OnePlus’ native China), the company’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach generally paid off, and while camera performance wasn’t quite up there with the best camera phones money can buy, it still went on to become one of the best value Android flagships of the last 12 months.

As such, expectations for the OnePlus 15 remain pretty high, and with the company teasing so much already, it looks to have the makings of one of the next best phones to hit the market.

Big design changes

While obviously a subjective quality, I personally didn’t fall in love with the look of the OnePlus 13; it lacked cohesion.

There was a mishmash of surface finishes, clashing colours, conflicting patterns and geometry that didn’t really flow. Whilst it was an undeniably well-made smartphone (not least because it features both IP68 and IP69-certified protection against dust and water), it didn’t offer up the same level of aesthetic refinement as the competition.

Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd

The OnePlus 15 looks and feels like a different beast entirely.

Although perhaps losing a touch of individuality in the process, the OnePlus 15 rings in a new aesthetic era for OnePlus’ flagships. It’s essentially a larger version of the design which debuted on the compact OnePlus 13s, which came to select markets like India earlier this year.

Straight sides, a flat front and back, more heavily-rounded corners, and a square camera deco feature in place of its predecessor’s timepiece-inspired circular one.

It’s closer, in style, to sister brand Oppo’s new top dogs: the Oppo Find X9 and Find X9 Pro. But it does one thing better than any other phone I can think of, right now: OnePlus has nailed this year’s colourways, with a trio of surface finishes that all bring something unique to the table.

The most conventional is also the most eye-catching. Ultra Violet offers the most vibrant look, with a base lavender across both the phone’s glass back and aluminium frame, punctuated by an iridescent treatment that creates an attractive colour shift as the angle of the back glass changes against the light. An almost neon blue “brilliant edge” – as OnePlus describes it – is also present, where the back glass meets the frame.

According to OnePlus, the Infinite Black option has proved the most popular in testing, and it’s easy to see why. The textured AG glass on the back of the phone is so diffused that it essentially looks like matt. OnePlus went so far as to speculate that it’s the “darkest black ever on a phone,” and the end result is a quiet sophistication.

This year’s lead colourway – and my personal favourite – is the new Sand Storm finish, which doubles down on the black model’s matt look, with a unique ceramic treatment over the phone’s mid-frame and camera surround.

It’s achieved using a process called micro-arc oxidation (or MAO – a first in the smartphone space), which not only carries the matt look across the phone’s entirety, but also makes it the most durable of the three OnePlus 15 colourways. OnePlus claims it’s 1.3 times tougher than titanium, and it also feels cooler to the touch than the more conventional metalwork on the other two finishes.

Plus Key, Plus Mind & Google

The three-stage alert slider has long been one of the defining hardware features on OnePlus’ phones, but a number of the company’s 2025 entries (again, most notably the OnePlus 13s) have marked a transition to the Plus Key: the programmable button that, by default, grants access to Plus Mind, a digital ‘second brain’ of sorts.

With the arrival of the OnePlus 15, this transition is essentially complete, being the first of the company’s flagship phones to swap out the slider for the Plus Key, and thus making the OnePlus 13 the last alert-slider toting OnePlus flagship. In some ways, it marks the end of an era.

Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd

While we’ve seen Plus Mind (OnePlus’ dedicated experience for notes and screenshots processed, summarised and made actionable with AI) evolve throughout the year, the OnePlus 15 also debuts a new facet to the experience, with close collaboration with Google meaning Gemini has gained awareness of content you’ve captured and saved in Plus Mind.

As such, you can now ask queries such as, “What are some of my saved Barcelona spots in Plus Mind that would be good to visit in tomorrow’s weather?” and it will give you a tailored response.

OxygenOS 16

This next iteration of OnePlus user experience isn’t a seismic shift, but the move from the OnePlus 13’s out-of-the-box OxygenOS 15 to OxygenOS 16 on the OnePlus 15 brings a wealth of small quality-of-life upgrades.

Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd

There are more playful animations throughout the UI, adding a little more polish to an already smooth and responsive user interface. Better formatting of communications of settings and controls. A new Predictive Back Gesture better telegraphs which app experiences you’re moving to and from. And there’s even a new dedicated AI section in the phone’s settings.

From here, you can toggle key features like AI Search, AI Writer and control how the phone’s Plus Key interacts with Plus Mind. That’s on top of existing quality-of-life improvements like dynamic and customisable Flux Themes, which OnePlus introduced previously.

A new gaming experience

The OnePlus 13 remains an undeniably fast and powerful phone, but one of the major upgrades the OnePlus 15 holds over the majority of the current flagship phone competition is that it’s set to be one of the first phones in a lot of international markets to arrive running on Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip.

While I can’t speak to benchmarking performance for the OnePlus 15 specifically just yet, our first encounter with the 8 Elite Gen 5 inside Qualcomm’s reference design earlier this year saw it trounce the likes of the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max‘s hot new A19 Pro silicon by about 30% in CPU tests, while also offering exceptional graphical performance.

Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd

The OnePlus 15 also debuts OnePlus’ CPU Scheduler, which works to optimise the types of processes being performed on-chip; prioritising gaming performance, whilst reducing CPU load. OP Gaming Core tech, meanwhile, promises great sustained performance, even at 120fps.

What’s more, the party piece of the OnePlus 15’s display is OP FPS Max, which includes a new refresh rate ceiling of 165Hz within titles such as Call of Duty: Mobile. In practice, I can only assume it was these enhancements which led to an unprecedented winning streak in my time on COD: Mobile.

The DetailMax camera system makes its debut

While not as bittersweet as the move away from a physical alert slider, the OnePlus 13 also serves as the last of the brand’s phones to benefit from the company’s long-standing partnership with famed camera brand Hasselblad. The question when this news first broke was, “what is OnePlus going to use instead?” and the answer is its own DetailMax Engine.

Compared to the 13, initial side-by-side camera comparisons show a consistent improvement in colour, contrast, dynamic range and noise suppression from the triple 50Mp setup on the new OnePlus 15 when compared to its predecessor.

It does seem to edge towards a Pixel-like brightening of shadows in low light scenes; something the OnePlus 13 doesn’t do, but whether that’s better or worse is much more a matter of personal taste.

As you can see, there’s a lot to look forward to on the new phone. You don’t have to wait long for my full, in-depth thoughts: the OnePlus 15 launches globally this Thursday, 13 November, and OnePlus has already teased a UK price.