The OnePlus 15 exposes a brutal truth
What are we settling for?
I've been a fan of OnePlus since the beginning, through the ups and downs, and I have used pretty much every flagship device since the legendary OnePlus One all the way to the latest OnePlus 15. Some of my top 10 phones of all time are classic OnePlus devices like the OnePlus 3T, OnePlus 5T, and the OnePlus 7T Pro, among others.
Right now, the company seems to be in a "down" moment, ushered in by the good but mostly unimpressive OnePlus 15, which has been rightfully criticized for downgrading many aspects of the overall experience and trying to cover all that with exceptional battery life.
It seems as if OnePlus is repositioning itself as an upper mid-range manufacturer, as it doesn't show signs of trying to wage war on its top rivals. Except for the good battery life, nothing on the latest OnePlus 15 screams top flagship phone. Its blueprint, the Oppo Find X9 Pro, was a much more exceptional device that raised eyebrows for all the right reasons in pretty much all areas.
While having great battery life is great, we can't ignore the trends that indicate OnePlus is taking its foot off of the gas pedal and letting itself coast along, mostly resting on old laurels. I'm afraid that one of my favorite phone companies is turning into a budget brand that will never compete at the top level ever again.
The OnePlus 15 and OnePlus 15R–– a sign of things to come?
The first sign of trouble is usually the camera.
These days, with phones looking identical both in terms of exterior design and with very similar interfaces, one of the main ways to differentiate your product is to slap a slightly better camera on the back and call it a day. This has been true for a while now, and the camera has proven to be the great differentiator between a proper flagship and a mid-range device.
While not an outright downgrade, the OnePlus 15 can be best described as a "sidegrade", as in swapping some key elements of the previous device for, well, alternative ones, which might not be as good.
Now, with that in mind, the OnePlus 15 isn't really a flagship phone. Neither the hardware nor the software are up to par with most flagship cameras out there, lacking in terms of image quality, features, and overall improvements from the previous generation.
Color consistency is still disappointing, the ultrawide camera is too narrow, the main camera produces overly saturated colors that are far from real life. To top things off, the Hasselblad collab is gone. Overall, it's more than questionable if you should upgrade to the OnePlus 15 if you want to have a great camera in your pocket.
The upcoming OnePlus 15R seems to take an even more drastic step in the same direction––it axes a whole camera from the specs sheet and its new camera island. That's right, instead of a triple snapper, we'd get only two cameras at the back of the OnePlus 15R, and the one getting the boot will quite possibly be the telephoto camera.
While the budget OnePlus line was never about top-end specs at a reasonable price (which was weirdly one of the key tenets of the pioneering OnePlus One back in the day), dropping an entire camera and axing its respective functionality from the camera app is a very drastic undertaking by OnePlus, one that screams "extreme corner-cutting" to me. Not a fan, personally, but we'll see how things unravel once the OnePlus 15R goes official.
Is OnePlus transitioning to a budget brand?
It seems as if OnePlus is repositioning itself as an upper mid-range manufacturer, as it doesn't show signs of trying to wage war on its top rivals. Except for the good battery life, nothing on the latest OnePlus 15 screams top flagship phone. Its blueprint, the Oppo Find X9 Pro, was a much more exceptional device that raised eyebrows for all the right reasons in pretty much all areas.
I've always dreamt of OnePlus flagships being treated on the same level as their Oppo counterpart, just with a different name and interface inside, but I'm afraid this will remain a pipe dream of mine.
Follow us on Google News
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed:
To help keep our community safe and free from spam, we apply temporary limits to newly created accounts: