Copyright Digital Trends
OnePlus has set the phone enthusiast community abuzz with its new flagship, the OnePlus 15. A successor to the acclaimed OnePlus 13, the next top-tier offering from the Chinese brand has already gone up for pre-orders in its home market at an extremely attractive asking price. To give you a hint, the OnePlus 15 is currently listed at the same sticker value as its predecessor, at least in China. Moreover, the company has already started teasing the phone on its official websites in core markets such as India and the UK, with some lucrative launch benefits in tow for early adopters. So, when is it launching? Well, “coming soon” is all that the brand has to offer at the moment. But it will be sooner than the OnePlus 13, which hit the shelves in January. What about leaks? We are hearing murmurs of a mid-November launch for the OnePlus 15, though it’s not official. Recommended Videos TimesNow and Financial Express have speculated that the phone will launch in India on November 13. Notably, this could be the global launch event, which means the phone should be up for grabs on the same day in other markets, as well, including the US. In the meantime, the company has started with the usual pre-launch goodies for interested fans. On October 30, for example, the company has scheduled a OnePlus 15 Bonus Drop that offers a fan cooling attachment and screen damage coverage for two years at a deeply discounted price. What am I going to pay for it? OnePlus, expectedly, has kept mum on the pricing of the phone for the US market, but there’s some positive news. The OnePlus 15’s unchanged price in China is a good omen. To give you an idea, the OnePlus 13 was priced at $899 in the US, while the OnePlus 15 is currently listed at the equivalent of $560 in China. Leaks suggest that the price should remain at the same level on a generation-over-generation basis, at least in Europe. There are even murmurs of a price cut worth GBP 50 (roughly $66) for one of the variants with 16GB of RAM. I’d suggest that you process this one with a fair bit of skepticism. For the Indian market, ongoing speculations suggest a price tag between $790 and $850. Now, there’s a chance that OnePlus will stick with the same price for its latest as was the case with the OnePlus 13, which hit the shelves at $899 a pop. That is assuming the company wants to avoid an uproar. The price hike accompanying the OnePlus 13 attracted a fair bit of criticism, even though the phone was well worth the premium it commanded. In hindsight, for a brand that made a splash with the “flagship killer” mantra of more-for-less, an $899 price tag put it in the same league as iPhones and other top-end devices from Samsung and Google. OnePlus would want to avoid that backlash yet again and stick with an asking price closer to $900. This is pure speculation, though, and depending on the current tariff situation, the final price in the US market could go either way. Why wait for this one? The OnePlus 15, on the surface, looks like a minor design refresh when pitted against the OnePlus 13s. It essentially borrows the same fundamental design language, but that’s where the similarities end. The OnePlus 15’s hero shade, the sand dune variant, is quite a sight to behold. For this shade, OnePlus layered the metallic chassis (and the camera island) with a nano ceramic coating atop the aluminum chassis that is claimed to be tougher than titanium. The rear glass shell also matches the color tone and the surface texture of fine sand. Overall, this is one of the more interesting material choices and colors that we have seen on a phone recently. But there’s more to this one than meets the eye. For example, aside from the usual vapor chamber cooling system, this one also relies on an aerogel-based thermal insulation material that is also used in rocket engines. OnePlus claims that even when playing games at the peak 165fps value supported by the 165Hz panel, the phone’s temperature is not going to climb beyond 40 degrees Centigrade. To go with it, OnePlus has also fitted an enhanced gyroscope that is borrowed from gaming controllers. But the list of standout perks doesn’t end there. The OnePlus 15 comes equipped with a ginormous 7,300 mAh battery that is roughly 50% bigger than the battery pack fitted inside the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL or the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. On top of that, it also supports blazing-fast 120W wired charging and 50W wireless top-up. For comparison, the wired charging pace on the Apple and Samsung flagships of 2025 doesn’t go beyond the 45W limit. The imaging hardware is no slouch either. You get a triple camera array at the back, pushing a 50-megapixel sensor behind each snapper, tagging alongside the ability to capture 8K and 4K HDR 120fps videos. In case you’re wondering, this one is going to be a beastly performer, thanks to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 silicon ticking at its heart. The display is also a gorgeous 1.5K OLED panel with a 165Hz refresh rate, 1,800 nits of peak brightness, and plenty of AI-powered vision health optimizations in tow. Overall, the OnePlus 15 is the most refined phone and a comprehensive generation-over-generation upgrade the company has delivered in years. And if priced well, this one could give some serious trouble to the big names in the game. We’ll know more about its fate in a few weeks from now.
