The OnePlus 15 is a good phone made great by its stupendously good battery life. Its display, build and cameras are all above average, but it’s the longevity afforded by the 7,300mAh silicon-carbon cell that elevates this phone.

Using a device whose battery can last three days completely changed how I approached charging it, while also ruining other phones for me.

As a reviewer, I am lucky enough to have a few handsets to switch between at any given time. After a couple of weeks of using the OnePlus 15, I found its battery life so good that moving back to another phone feels pointless. Why would I want to use a smartphone I have to charge every day?

As I write this, it’s 11:35am on Wednesday. The OnePlus 15 has 43 percent battery. I took it off the charger with 100 percent at 8am on Monday. That means it lasted 51 and a half hours and only used 57 percent of its charge.

That is astounding. Granted, I am not the heaviest phone user, but after a normal day of use, my iPhone 16 is begging to be plugged in, often hitting 20-30 percent after just 12 hours of use by 8pm.

Even the 5,000mAh battery in the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is nothing to write home about compared to the OnePlus 15’s. It might just stretch to two days, but Samsung’s phone also depletes considerably overnight.

Not so with the OnePlus 15, which seemingly sips slowly at power when not in use, barely going down two percent overnight. I now have such confidence in my phone’s battery that reaching a percentage as low as 20 is no longer cause for concern. I could probably leave the house for a night out with that much charge left and still get home OK. I would never leave the house with 20 percent charge on my iPhone.

It means I now have a dilemma. Why would I put up with significantly worse battery life on any other phone when I know the OnePlus 15 exists?

All this habit-changing elation over the battery life in the OnePlus 15 serves to mask that I find the phone itself a little dull. The firm overhauled its flagship’s design, going with flat edges and a flat screen and a utilitarian, plain look. Gone are the curved corners and edges and circular camera bump of the OnePlus 13, 12 and 11.

That means the OnePlus looks and feels quite like an iPhone 16 Pro or Google Pixel 10 Pro – no bad thing per se, but a loss of personality for sure, as all phones move towards looking identical.

In the UK, the phone’s charger is not included in the box, which is very annoying. OnePlus also declined to send me the compatible charger to test that can supposedly refill the phone from zero to 100 percent in 40 minutes. On OnePlus’s website it costs £69.99.

Most phones don’t come with a charger in the box nowadays, but it irks more when the battery life and charging speeds are the main perks of the phone.

I reviewed the Sand Storm version of the OnePlus, which has an interesting, unique finish. It picks up zero fingerprints thanks to a fibre-glass finish on the back that feels very silky, with specially treated aluminium on the sides feeling grippy. I wouldn’t have picked a sand coloured phone, but it has grown on me.

The other options, with different materials and textures, are black and violet. It’s a large phone at 6.78-inches, with only one size available. Apple, Samsung and Google offer different sizes of their flagship phones, but there’s only one OnePlus 15 option.

On the camera side, OnePlus’s partnership with famed brand Hasselblad is over, but the camera quality here is excellent. The bottom line is that the quality of still images is not quite as good as the Oppo Find X9 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL or Vivo X300 Pro that I have tested.

Granted, at £899 the OnePlus 15 is cheaper than those devices, but the camera here is not improved over the OnePlus 13’s.

Don’t get me wrong – the camera is very, very good. For all but the most picky mobile photographers, this camera will do just fine, it’s just not the best out there. This is noticeable in low light, where the main sensor struggles to capture detail and things can look washed out. In daylight, colours are a tad oversaturated but everything is sharp and in focus.

I’ve enjoyed OnePlus’s OxygenOS 16, which is based on Android 16. I also just reviewed the Oppo Find X9 Pro, whose ColorOS 16 is what OxygenOS is based on, and have found I prefer OnePlus’s software. It feels less cluttered, and despite some quirks I have settled into the phone well. One annoyance is that swiping down on a notification on the lockscreen dismisses it, whereas on most other Android phones it expands it to read hidden text.

Otherwise, it is pleasingly customisable and feels snappier than high-end Samsung or Google phones, though those firms offer seven years of software updates. OnePlus says the OnePlus 15 will get four years of Android updates and six years of security updates. I feel the firm could do better than this for its top-of-the-line phone.

The OnePlus 15 runs the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and, on my RRP £999 review sample, 16GB RAM (the £899 version has 12GB). It’s well optimised, though one very annoying bug means the New York Times Games app crashes every time I open it. When a phone keeps a man from his Wordle streak, it’s a black mark against the phone (I’ve never had this issue on other devices).

Call quality is excellent, and the screen has a refresh rate of 165Hz with compatible mobile games. That is not something I use my phone for, but it’s a great perk if you’re a gamer. The new chip means these games perform at top level though. My go-to testing game Call of Duty Mobile ran flawlessly.

There’s really nothing much to complain about with the OnePlus 15, a phone that costs less than its rivals and has much, much better battery life. If that equation makes sense to you, it’s a phone you’ll love.

The OnePlus 15 is available from £899 directly from OnePlus