The OnePlus 15R is a gaming-focused phone featuring a large 7,400mAh battery and the inaugural Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset within its price category. It suits users who spend extensive time gaming or outdoors, eliminating the need for a power bank. The device offers a more practical design compared to the more luxurious OnePlus 15, although it isn’t as premium-looking. With advancements like 100x zoom and AI-generated portraits, it raises the question of whether performance alone is enough to attract users. This review covers the device’s everyday performance based on our tests.
In This Article
Design and Display
So the box contains some documents that we believe no one reads. Then we have a silicon case, which is really soft and of high quality.
The package includes the OnePlus 15R, a SIM ejector pin, the well-known OnePlus Red USB-A to USB-C charging cable, and an 80W Super V charger. This is typically what you get when purchasing from a store. Now, let’s examine the phone more closely.
We have the mint breeze colour, which is very pretty. The light green hue uses a matte-frosted glass that doesn’t get fingerprints or smudges. The OnePlus 15R also comes in black, by the way. But we really like this shade. Right in the middle, you can see the OnePlus logo. The cameras are placed in the top left corner.
The silicone case that comes with the phone has an excellent finish, giving a very high-end appearance. Even after attaching the case, it still feels as if there’s no cover. Plus, it keeps the phone safe, which is a great bonus.
The design of the OnePlus 15R is entirely flat, setting it apart from the OnePlus 12R’s curved edges.
The 13R, however, feels different in the hand than the 15R despite being the first in the series to switch to a flat frame and flat display. This flat profile, which resembles the normal OnePlus 15, has a contemporary, boxy look thanks to its flat display and frame. The design makes the phone easier to hold, which is great for gaming.
The small square camera module in the upper left corner stands out because it differs from the round “watch-dial” design of the OnePlus 11, 12, and 13 series. This newer module is simpler, featuring only two cameras compared to the previous models.
The frame is made of Grade-4 Aluminium, which makes the device strong and gives it a high-end, cool-to-the-touch sensation.
Corning Gorilla Glass 7i protects the front. It’s not as advanced as the Victus 2 used in the flagship 15, but this still does a good job of protecting against scratches and impacts.
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The overall quality of the build strikes a balance between looks and long-lasting function, making the smartphone suitable for regular usage.
The 15R has an amazing protective system, and its four IP ratings make this stand out in the industry. First of all, the mobile has an IP66 classification, which means it can withstand high-pressure water jets and will last even under tough conditions. Second, the IP68 rating means that the device can be submerged in water up to two meters deep for 30 minutes, and the gadget may be used in a variety of water sports.
Furthermore, the gadget also has IP69 and IP69K classifications, which mean it can withstand high temperatures (up to 80°C) and high-pressure steam cleaning. This shows that the product can handle tough situations. It’s really incredible.
The right side of the unit has a standard yet polished layout for user comfort and functionality. The power button is positioned at a natural thumb height for convenient access. By default, long pressing this button activates Google Gemini, its built-in AI capability. Users can also double-press the power button to quickly launch the camera, which improves user experience and efficiency. Above the power button, there is a volume rocker constructed as a single tactile bar that gives solid, clicky feedback with no wobble, assuring consistent use.
The Plus Key, which replaces the usual three-stage Alert Slider, was introduced with the device’s new left-side facelift. This new physical, clickable button, known as a Programmable Action Button, offers more functionality than the predecessor.
The Plus Key can be programmed to do various functions, including muting or unmuting the device, which replaces the slider’s primary function. A double press turns on the torch or records a voice note. A long press also activates Plus Mind, a function that captures and stores screen content like text, photos, or appointments directly to an AI clipboard.
The device’s bottom edge features a USB Type-C port that operates at USB 2.0 speeds. This port supports 80W SUPERVOOC charging and Type-C audio but does not enable high-speed data transfer or video output, setting it apart from the USB 3.2 connector available on the standard OnePlus 15.
Additionally, there is a dual SIM slot designed to hold two Nano-SIM cards, which is gasket-sealed to keep the device’s IP69 water-resistant classification. The structure also contains a primary speaker and microphone near the large speaker grille, which improves audio output and voice capture.
The Top Edge includes a secondary speaker vent, which works with the bottom speaker to create a balanced stereo effect. The rail also includes a noise-cancelling microphone, which improves call quality and video recording.
The OnePlus phone has a large 7,400mAh battery and is rather thin, measuring about 8.3 mm thick. The weight varies from 214g to 219g, depending on the colour you choose. The balanced weight distribution is a big plus for how this feels in your hand. Most people consider the device a two-handed smartphone because of its large 6.83-inch screen. The flat edges make it easier to hold on to, which is especially helpful when playing games in landscape mode, making for a comfortable and steady experience.
Engineered for speed and responsiveness, the OnePlus 15R now boasts a 6.83-inch 1.5K LTPS AMOLED display. The panel’s 165 Hz refresh rate is the highest for a non-gaming-specific OnePlus device. The system usually runs at 120 Hz for regular tasks, but the refresh rate may go up to the maximum 165 Hz in games that support this, like Call of Duty Mobile, PUBG, and BGMI. The 15R’s display can’t go down to 1 Hz because it uses LTPS (Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Silicon) technology. Instead, it switches between fixed refresh rates of 60 Hz, 90 Hz, 120 Hz, 144 Hz, and 165 Hz.
The screen’s 1.15 mm ultra-slim bezels on all sides make it look almost borderless, like more expensive flagship models.
OnePlus has made its handset more responsive by adding a dedicated Touch Response Chip that can sample touches at an amazing 3,200 Hz rate. This new technology gets rid of the noticeable lag between user input and screen response, which is beneficial for competitive gaming. The OnePlus 15R also has great visibility and brightness, making the screen a great choice for outdoor use.
The display features a High Brightness Mode (HBM) that reaches up to 1,800 nits in auto-brightness settings for outdoor visibility, and can go as high as 3,600 nits in small areas during HDR playback. Despite the absence of an anti-reflective coating, the screen remains easy to read even in bright afternoon sunlight. The Sun Display algorithm enhances this experience by adjusting brightness, contrast, and colours when exposed to direct sunlight, ensuring that dark UI elements, like those in dark mode, remain clearly visible.
Besides the display, the focus is also on features that enhance user immersion and eye protection. The 15R includes two excellent features perfect for watching movies at night in dim environments. It features 3840 Hz PWM dimming technology, operating at high frequencies to prevent flickering when brightness is low. This is particularly beneficial for those who experience headaches or eye strain when using devices in low-light conditions.
But that isn’t noticeable by the naked eye, and this feature helps with cognitive ease a lot. This function effectively reduces the flickering that happens with most OLED displays at lower brightness levels. This feature reduces eye strain and fatigue, making it particularly helpful during long viewing sessions such as watching a three-hour movie.
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Following that, the 15R has an amazing minimum brightness level of 1 nit, which lets the screen get very low luminance. When combined with the Reduce White Point option, this allows you to watch videos in complete darkness without the glare of excessive brightness, similar to looking into a flashlight. These features work together to enhance the viewing experience by prioritising comfort and clarity in low-light conditions.
One of the most notable features is the Aqua Touch 2.0, which allows users to type full text messages even when their hands are wet or sweaty, effectively eradicating ghost touch concerns. However, the functionality has limitations; while it handles droplets and wet fingers well, it struggles when a consistent, heavy stream of water flows directly over the sensor.
The phone’s display supports advanced HDR formats like Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and HDR Vivid. These formats make streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube look better. The AMOLED screen displays true blacks in dark scenes, eliminating the greyish washes common on less advanced screens, especially noticeable in “Stranger Things.”
The gadget also has a 10-bit panel that offers 1.07 billion colours, resulting in incredibly smooth gradients. This makes for a wonderful viewing experience for things like sunsets in videos, without the banding effect that typically happens on lower-quality screens.
The 15R has two stereo speakers, which may not be able to replace a Bluetooth speaker, but OReality Audio tuning makes the soundstage more expansive. This technological improvement makes the audio experience more immersive, allowing listeners to hear music moving in space. For instance, you can clearly hear music travelling from the left to the right side of the screen.
Performance and Cameras
The OnePlus 15R has the latest technology and performance features that are perfect for gamers and power users.
The OnePlus 15R has a different processor than the standard OnePlus 15 (Review), the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. Because of its 3nm architecture, this processor operates more efficiently and consumes less power. The device also has LPDDR5X Ultra RAM and UFS 4.1 storage technology built in.
These specs make everything a lot more efficient, so file transfers and game loading times are a lot faster than they were on the OnePlus 13R.
In real-world situations, the OnePlus 15R is extremely responsive, with AnTuTu benchmark scores reaching almost 3 million points (2,974,187). This high score means that apps open instantaneously, and you can easily navigate between more than 20 apps running in the background without any lag.
The 15R smartphone is designed as a top-tier gaming device, emphasising high-performance features essential for superior gaming. It supports gaming at an impressive 165 Hz, allowing it to run demanding titles like Call of Duty Mobile at 165 frames per second (FPS). As a result, it stands out as one of the few phones capable of handling these tasks effectively.
The toy also has a special OverPower Chip that lets it run popular games like Genshin Impact at a consistent 120 FPS, all while playing. This feature is highly important because it ensures the phone continues to run smoothly even during extended gaming sessions when it heats up, thus enhancing the overall gaming experience.
The 15R excels in touch precision with an instant sampling rate of 3,200 Hz. Its military-grade gyroscope, capable of handling movements of ±4,000 degrees per second (DPS), enhances gaming accuracy significantly. These features are particularly beneficial for games requiring precise control, such as first-person shooter targeting or rapid racing manoeuvres. Designed with gamers in mind, the 15r ensures reliable performance and responsiveness.
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The OnePlus 8 Gen 5’s thermal management has been greatly improved, mostly because of the addition of a massive 3D vapour chamber that is 5,704 mm², making this one of the largest in its class. An “aerospace-grade” aerogel layer beneath the screen enhances this cooling mechanism. This technology keeps the screen comfortable to the touch, even when the processor is working hard.
The OnePlus 15R’s OxygenOS 16 refocuses from trivial AI features to practical ones like OP Gaming Core and Mind Space, making good use of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. It features a dedicated OverPower Chip offering various functionalities. For instance, AI Gaming Super-Resolution enhances game resolution to 1.5K in real time. The HyperRendering Engine introduces AI-generated frames, boosting 60 FPS games to 120 or 165 FPS for smoother gameplay. The Adaptive CPU Scheduler also increases CPU speeds during critical gaming moments to boost performance and prevent frame drops during intense gameplay.
One of the most interesting AI features of this device is Mind Space, which is built into the Plus Key on the side of the phone. The Visual Clipboard allows users to long-press the Plus Key to copy text, dates, and images from the screen and save them in Mind Space. The customised Google Gemini on the 15R improves functionality by allowing immediate access to Mind Space. Furthermore, the AI Scan function intelligently recognises documents from skewed angles, automatically removing shadows and fingerprints and producing clean PDFs.
The 15R is focused on performance, and its AI improves the 50MP camera’s capabilities with features like AI Portrait Glow, which uses digital relighting to fix harsh backlighting on faces; AI Perfect Shot, which lets you change expressions in group photos; and AI Writer, which is built into the keyboard for summarising articles, creating social media captions, and making mind maps for students.
Parallel Processing 2.0, an AI-driven technology, improves smartphone performance through effortless multitasking and fluid transitions. It monitors your daily app usage and preloads frequently used apps into RAM, enabling instant app launches and reducing waiting times. Additionally, it employs parabolic bounce animations to ensure smooth and uninterrupted animations, even when switching between apps.
The OnePlus 15R is excellent for video and selfies, but not so great for long-distance zoom because the company has put lens quality ahead of versatility. The main sensor is a 50-megapixel Sony IMX906, and the ultrawide sensor is 8 megapixels. Both are improved by the OnePlus DetailMax Engine, which has features like Ultra Clear Mode, Clear Burst, and the Clear Night Engine that are meant to make images more detailed. A 32-megapixel sensor is also added to improve focusing and the quality of the images as a whole.
The DetailMax Engine, derived from the OnePlus 15, is at the heart of its image capabilities. This engine does a fantastic job of taking pictures that look natural, which is something that many AI-enhanced images don’t do well. The camera works great in bright light, and pictures shot in bright light seem almost exactly like those taken by high-end flagship mobile phones. It has a wide dynamic range that keeps details in both bright and dark areas, such as skies and shadows.
This makes sure that the image stays clear in different lighting settings. The Clear Night Engine does a good job of reducing noise in low-light conditions, although it may take 1 to 2 seconds to process photos. This feature takes accurate nighttime pictures, which makes nighttime photography look better instead of artificially brightening dark conditions.
The 15R has an 8MP ultra-wide lens that works well for group photographs in bright light, but it’s important to remember that the image quality drops a lot in low light. Also, the device only has digital zoom and no telephoto lens. Because of this, anything more than a 2x zoom tends to look hazy, which is a major issue for people who like to zoom in on things that are far away, like during concerts or when looking at wildlife. This is the biggest drawback with the 15R, especially for people who love photography.
The 15R smartphone has video specs that are better than those of many more expensive competitors. The smartphone can record 4K video at 120 frames per second (FPS), which is rare for cameras in this price range. This lets people make exceedingly smooth 4K videos. The gadget also has dual stabilisation technology, which combines optical image stabilisation (OIS) and electronic image stabilisation (EIS). This combination gives users gimbal-like stability, which makes it ideal for vlogging or shooting video while walking.
The 15R features a 32MP front camera with autofocus, distinguishing it from other phones that typically have fixed-focus selfie cameras. This autofocus ensures that your face remains sharp regardless of the distance, ranging from 5 inches to 3 feet. Additionally, the camera supports 4K video recording, making it ideal for users who require high-quality visuals for professional purposes. The AI Portrait Glow enhances portrait shots by intelligently adjusting the lighting on your face, especially in low-light conditions or against bright backgrounds like sunsets. This helps prevent the common issue of pictures turning out as silhouettes.
The phone’s best feature is its big 7,400mAh silicon-carbon battery, which is bigger than the 5,000mAh batteries in Samsung’s and Apple’s high-end phones. Users can use it for up to 10 hours of Screen-On Time (SOT), which is enough for moderate users to use it for up to 2 days. The charging capability features 80W SUPERVOOC technology, which means the battery can go from 1% to 50% in about twenty-five minutes. This is slower than the 120W of prior models, unfortunately. The smartphone also has a bypass charging feature that is ideal for gamers. The feature lets you power the hardware directly without charging the battery, which reduces heat and extends battery life.
The phone’s battery life and charging capabilities are big selling points because they make it an excellent option for people who want their devices to last a long time and function efficiently.
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Verdict
The OnePlus 15R is a high-performance smartphone made for gamers and power users. The device has flagship-level speed at an affordable cost. The phone has a premium look and feel, with a focus on longevity, thanks to its great materials and build quality. The device has an IP69 classification, which means it can be washed under a tap or used in heavy rain without any problems.
The OnePlus 15R doesn’t have the high-end Hasselblad camera name, but this makes up for it with a bigger battery and faster screen responsiveness that is better for gaming. This phone is designed to last a long time on a single charge, so the smartphone operates smoothly even though it doesn’t have some of the high-end camera features that more expensive phones have.
Price starts at Rs 47,998
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Pros
Massive Battery life
Elite gaming
Sturdy
Eye friendly
Cons
No telephoto lens
Not so great ultra-wide camera
Bulkier
