OnePlus 15R review: Good value but utterly forgettable execution
OnePlus has been in the spotlights this past month, but all for the wrong reasons. Its most recent OnePlus 15 flagship, while pretty decent, was met somewhat lukewarm by the Android and OnePlus communities, which criticized the company for many downgrades that the device has scored in comparison with the older OnePlus 13.
Now there's an even newer OnePlus device on board, the OnePlus 15R, and so far, aside from dropping a telephoto camera, this one is mostly a net upgrade over the previous OnePlus 13R and improves a lot of areas.
The price gets upgraded, too––the OnePlus 15R starts at $700 for the entry-level 256GB model, while the top-tier 512GB will cost you $800.
Is it any good? I have used it for a week and feel confident to pass on my judgement!
Table of Contents:
OnePlus 15R Specs
A decent value-oriented flagship
|
|
| OnePlus 15R | OnePlus 13R |
| Dimensions | |
|---|---|
| 163.4 x 77 x 8.1 mm | 161.72 x 75.77 x 8.09 mm |
| Weight | |
| 213.0 g | 206.0 g |
| Size | |
|---|---|
| 6.8-inch | 6.8-inch |
| Type | |
| AMOLED, 165Hz | OLED, 120Hz |
| System chip | |
|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 (3 nm) | Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (4 nm) |
| Memory | |
| 12GB (LPDDR5X)/256GB (UFS 4.0) 12GB/512GB |
12GB (LPDDR5X)/256GB (UFS 4.0) |
| Type | |
|---|---|
| 7400 mAh | 6000 mAh |
| Charge speed | |
| Wired: 80.0W | Wired: 80.0W |
| Main camera | |
|---|---|
| 50 MP (OIS, PDAF) Aperture size: F1.8 Focal length: 24 mm Sensor size: 1/1.56" Pixel size: 1.0 μm | 50 MP (OIS, PDAF) Aperture size: F1.8 Focal length: 24 mm Sensor size: 1/1.56" Pixel size: 1.0 μm |
| Second camera | |
| 8 MP (Ultra-wide) Aperture size: F2.2 Focal Length: 16 mm Sensor size: 1/4" Pixel size: 1.12 μm | 8 MP (Ultra-wide) Aperture size: F2.2 Focal Length: 16 mm Sensor size: 1/4" Pixel size: 1.12 μm |
| Third camera | |
| 50 MP (Telephoto) Aperture size: F2.0 Focal Length: 47 mm Pixel size: 0.64 μm |
|
| Front | |
| 32 MP | 16 MP |
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OnePlus 15R vs OnePlus 13R specs comparison
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OnePlus 15R Design and Display
Flat and modern
In terms of design language, the OnePlus 15R serves no surprises to anyone who's been paying attention to the company's design trends in the past year or so. The 15R showcases that modern flat design that has become pretty much universal across the industry. However, there's little OnePlus here––swap the logo at the back with any other and you'd be able to fool a large portion of the Android userbase.
Previous mainstays of OnePlus design, like the three-way ring switch, are gone, substituted for a customizable button on the left-hand side. Useful, but a bit generic addition to the lineup, which follows closely in the footsteps of the OnePlus 15.
Another cool OnePlus feature that I used to love––the custom backplates emulating leather or sandstone––aren't available on the company's new devices, the OnePlus 15R included, which is a shame. Instead, we get the now standard frosted glass back, which feels great to the touch, but lacks originality. The phone also comes with the familiar aluminum frame.
Size-wise, the phone is just slightly larger than the previous OnePlus 13R, and is very comparable to the OnePlus 15. It's 8.3 mm thick, which is on the thicker side, but easy to stomach considering it hauls a massive 7,400 mAh battery in the back.
Notable is that the OnePlus 15R employs the highest IP ratings available––IP68/69/69K. IP68 is the standard these days, protecting against immersion in fresh water for up to 30 minutes, but IP69 and 69K improve on that by providing the device with protection against high temperature, high-pressure water jets, which should give you an even grander peace of mind.
Size-wise, the phone is just slightly larger than the previous OnePlus 13R, and is very comparable to the OnePlus 15. It's 8.3 mm thick, which is on the thicker side, but easy to stomach considering it hauls a massive 7,400 mAh battery in the back.
Notable is that the OnePlus 15R employs the highest IP ratings available––IP68/69/69K. IP68 is the standard these days, protecting against immersion in fresh water for up to 30 minutes, but IP69 and 69K improve on that by providing the device with protection against high temperature, high-pressure water jets, which should give you an even grander peace of mind.
The OnePlus 15R is available in two colors: Mint Breeze and Charcoal Black.
Inside the box, you'll find:
- OnePlus 15R
- SIM ejector
- 80W wall adapter
- USB-C cable
At the front of the OnePlus 15R, we find a 6.83-inch display covered with Gorilla Glass 7i. The screen is an FHD+ OLED panel with 1,800-nit high-brightness mode, but more impressive here is the screen refresh rate.
Just like the OnePlus 15, the OnePlus 15R can refresh as fast as 165 Hz, but the "gotcha" is that this can only happen in s limited pool of compatible mobile games, like Call of Duty Mobile, LoL: Wild Rift, and Delta Force. If you play any of these, great, but if not, the OnePlus 15R's display won't reach such high refresh rates in normal conditions and will only go up to 120 Hz.
It's not really a big deal––the difference between 120 and 165 Hz is tiny and few can even notice it, let alone on a small phone screen anyway.
In our independent display tests, the OnePlus 15R delivers excellent peak brightness of 3,500 nits and acceptable minimum brightness of 1.9 nits. The default color temperature is a bit off from the ideal, but you can switch away to a natural or a vivid color profile in the display settings, as well as turn on an adaptive tone
The OnePlus 15R uses a ultrasonic fingerprint scanner in the front, which is quite fast and very accurate, a far-cry from the optical fingerprint sensor on older OnePlus models. There's also face unlock on deck, but it's picture-based, better be used for convenience only.
OnePlus 15R Camera
A two-horse race
Probably the biggest downgrade with the OnePlus 15R is the camera. No two ways around it: the phone drops the telephoto camera and retains a more limited camera setup consisting of a single 50MP F1.8 main camera with a 1/1.56" IMX90d sensor and an 8MP F2.2 ultrawide with a fairly narrow 112º FoV (similarly to the OnePlus 15, not very good).
This camera setup is pretty much identical with the OnePlus 13R, save for the lack of telephoto of course, so our expectations of the camera's image quality weren't much higher than that.
OnePlus 15R camera samples
The image quality is good for the price you're paying, though I'd admit I am definitely missing a telephoto lens here.
The dynamic range is quite decent while the colors are leaning towards "natural" and not "oversaturated", which is great. Sharpness and details are generally okay, but you'll notice some artifacts if you zoom in to pixel peep. There's some minor over-sharpening as well, but it's on the softer side.
For general photography, the OnePlus 15R will do you just fine, but don't expect wonders out of its dual-camera systems––that's not a camera-centric flagship, so adjust your expectations accordingly.
Video Quality
Videos taken with the phone are okay. 4K at 30 and 60fps are supported, but notable here is the inclusion of 4K120fps video-recording, which lets you shoot slo-mo videos that can be easily transformed to cinematic clips in post.
OnePlus 15R Performance & Benchmarks
Hey, that's pretty good!
The OnePlus 15R arrives with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip, which is different from the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 that powers the OnePlus 15 and is only a little slower and less efficient. Still, it's a proper flagship chipset that introduces key performance gains over the preceding Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Would you notice any major difference between the two chips? You wouldn't notice a difference outside of a synthetic benchmark.
OnePlus has added a pretty impressive thermal management system to keep the phone cool under load, with a large vapor chamber, dedicated screen cooler, and an extra layer of graphite for extra heat dissipation.
Gaming is one of the areas in which the OnePlus 15R prides itself, and OnePlus has equipped it with some intriguing features like a 3,200 Hz touch response chip that ensures instantaneous touch sampling and a pro-grade gyroscope that promises improved accuracy in supported games. But the most important promise here is about consistent framerates, which could be the most important gaming pledge here.
In terms of synthetic performance, there's a pretty significant rift between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in both the Geekbench 6 single- and multi-core tests. In fact, in the multi-core exercise, the OnePlus 15R is on par with the OnePlus 13 and only beats its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-equipped predecessor.
CPU Performance Benchmarks:
Gaming performance is decent as seen in 3DMark Extreme benchmarks. The phone performs quite well in the "high" test, which indicates the initial peformance peak. There, the OnePlus 15R is sandwiched between the OnePlus 15 and the OnePlus 13R, which is a great place to be in.
However, the OnePlus 15's more efficient chip and better thermal management propel that one very far ahead of the OnePlus 15R in the "low" 3DMark test, which aims to showcase the stability and throttling effect after longer gaming sessions. The OnePlus 15R is still decent and performs better than the OnePlus 13R here. We'd take that as a win.
GPU Performance
The phone comes with 12GB of very fast LPDDR5X Ultra RAM in both the 256 and 512GB of fast UFS 4.1 storage.
OnePlus 15R Software
The OnePlus 15R comes along with Android 16 running underneath the company's own OxygenOS 16.
AI, as is trendy these days, is the recurring theme with the latest OxygenOS software. The new Plus Mind feature (similar to the Mind Space on Oppo phones) is here as well––this one is your personal AI tool that lets you save specific articles, notes, events and bookmarks, acting as an on-device digital butler of sorts.
But it's Gemini that's the default AI assistant on board and the one you're most likely to use right out of the box. There's nothing stopping you from getting pretty much any other AI tool that has an Android app on your phone either. On the AI front, we also have an AI Writer and AI recorder features available
The software experience is great here, as usual with OnePlus devices. Animations and screen transitions are usually silky smooth and quite decadent in terms of
The OnePlus 15R will be supported for four years, which is slightly less than the seven years that the industry is moving towards as the new standard. This means the phone will be supported until 2029, which isn't great if you're planning on using it for any longer than that.
Plus, with the OnePlus 15R, you get three months of Google AI Pro along with 2TB of cloud storage gratis.
OnePlus 15R Battery
Pretty good!
The OnePlus 15R comes with a 7,400 mAh battery, just marginally larger than the 7,300 mAh one on the OnePlus 15. Yes, a far cry from the rumored 8,300 mAh battery that actually made its way into the OnePlus 15R's China-bound cousin, the OnePlus Ace 6T.
Still, a 7.400 mAh battery is nothing to scoff at!
In our independent battery tests, the OnePlus 15R achieved some pretty decent results, but sadly, overall ranks lower than the OnePlus 15 flagship in our compound Battery Life Estimate score, which proves to be more efficient. The OnePlus 15R scores an impressive 18 hours and change in our web browsing test, achieves 13 hours in our video playback test and almost 15 hours in the 3D gaming test.
PhoneArena Battery Test Results:
The OnePlus 15R comes with a 80W SuperVOOC charging brick in the box, a true rarity these days, and one that definitely improves the value of the whole package. The device takes 62 miuntes to charge fully; a 30-minute charge gets you 55% of battery charge.
The OnePlus 15R doesn't support wireless charging.
OnePlus 15R Audio Quality and Haptics
The OnePlus 15R delivers surprisingly decent audio, with deep, room-filling sound that doesn't really distort at hgiher levels. Sure, flagships like the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the Galaxy S25 Ultra sound noticeably better, but there's nothing inherently wrong here in terms of audio quality. You wouldn't be disappointed, that's for sure.
The haptics are okay, crisp and fairly strong.
Should you buy it?
The OnePlus 15R is one okay phone. Sure, it does cut some corners in comparison with its predecessor while also increasing the price tag, but viewed in.a vacuum, it's one that you should consider if your budget is around $800.
It has some pretty decent performance and excellent battery life, as well as one lovely screen. Unfortunately, the lack of a dedicated telephoto irked me a bit more than I anticipated, and I quickly realized that I don't really want to use a phone without zooming capabilities in 2026. The design is also painfully safe and lacks that signature OnePlus DNA here.
It's a device offering great value at its starting price of $700 for the 256GB version. This way, it undercuts popular devices like the Pixel 10, Galaxy S25, and the iPhone 17, which all usually start at $800.
Is it a better device than any of these? Not necessarily, but it isn't any worse either.
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