is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
Have you ever laid down for the night, only to realize your phone charger is across the room? And then thought to yourself, “Nah, I’m not going to get up and plug it in”?
And then known without a shadow of a doubt that you won’t regret that decision tomorrow — that your phone will last comfortably into the next evening without dipping into low power mode? No? Well, that’s because you haven’t used the OnePlus 15.
Like its close relative from Oppo, the $899 OnePlus 15 comes with a battery capacity so enormous it will challenge any power user to drain it in a day. That’s thanks to its silicon-carbon battery, a tech being adopted quickly outside of the US that allows for thinner, high-capacity batteries compared to lithium ion.
The OnePlus 15 has other things going for it: a great screen and top-notch performance, for starters. And there are things I like less, like OxygenOS’ creeping tendency toward bloatware. It’s not like, Samsung-bad yet, but it’s a far cry from the OnePlus of five or six years ago. As I see it, this is a phone for the battery anxious. And given the recent trend toward “lighter, thinner phone but with worse battery,” this “huge battery capacity, but a regular-sized phone” feels like a winning proposition.
8 Verge Score OnePlus 15 $ 899 $ 899 The Good Easily a two-day battery for almost any kind of user
Big, sharp screen The Bad OxygenOS is looking a little cluttered these days
Silicon-carbon battery may limit device longevity
Proprietary super-fast wireless charging feels increasingly irrelevant $899 at OnePlus How we rate and review products
When I first set up the OnePlus 15, I took its 7,300mAh battery capacity as a challenge. Display resolution, always-on display, screen timeout, performance — I set everything to their most battery-draining settings. Across two days with no overnight charge and nearly nine total hours of screen-on time, the battery was down to only 32 percent. If I’d tried that with any other flagship phone sold in the US, I would have had a dead battery halfway through the second morning, if not sooner. That’s astonishing.
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