OnePlus 15R review: unbeatable battery life, beatable value

The OnePlus 15R’s battery life is exceptional. It’s a smidge better than the very impressive OnePlus 15’s, and the 15R costs two hundred dollars less. So why am I having a hard time recommending it?

Typically, OnePlus’ R-series phone is a simplified, less-expensive follow-up to the main flagship — in this case, the OnePlus 15. And technically, yeah, it meets that criteria. But the vibe is different; the 15R doesn’t feel like you’re getting away with flagship features at a bargain price. It’s $699 to the 15’s $899, it includes a less-powerful but still beefy Qualcomm processor, and it lacks a telephoto camera. In terms of battery, it manages to exceed the stunning performance of the 15 with a slightly bigger 7400mAh capacity. You can go days — days — before you even have to think about charging your phone. I’ve been using it for the past two weeks, and I can count the number of times I’ve needed to charge it on one hand.

But here’s the “but.” The camera isn’t all that great, there’s no wireless charging, and at $700, the 15R is in kind of a no-man’s-land: about $200 too much to feel like a deal and missing a couple of features present on other phones around the same price. You may as well go for the fully flagship 15 and make do with charging your phone every couple of days rather than every three or four, or pick up the Pixel 9A for a more reliable camera and a much more reasonable $499 price.

The 15R uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset, a tier down from the “Elite” SOC in the OnePlus 15. In daily use it’s just as powerful; my litmus test is always one of the build pages on Icy Veins, which are dense with media and interactive elements. As with the 15, there’s very little choppiness when I scroll around one of these pages using the 15R.

And as a sidenote, I’m not seeing much of OnePlus’ historical tendency to aggressively close background apps. I kept Google Photos running in the background over a couple of days as I collected images for a photo book project; each time I opened the app it was right where I’d left it in my timeline. If it had fully closed, I would have had to scrub back to the spot where I’d left off. It’s the little things.

As for the big things, it’s hard to overstate just how good the 15R’s battery performance is. With a mix of light-to-moderate use in the phone’s highest performance mode, the battery typically dipped below 20 percent after three full days. That’s with the always-on display enabled full-time. Switching back to balanced performance, which is the default, seems to help stretch it out a little more. If you wanted to be really aggressive with power-saving settings, I bet you could get most of a week’s worth of use out of a single charge. That’s wild.

The downside: the silicon carbon battery tech that allows the 15R to carry such massive battery capacity tends to degrade faster than standard lithium-ion batteries. OnePlus claims the battery will retain 80 percent of its original capacity through four years of use, which is reasonable, but I wish battery technology would trend toward longer lifespans with better prospects for reusability, not worse.

Normally, I’d find the lack of wireless charging to be pretty annoying on a $700 phone. And I guess it is on principle, but when you only have to charge your phone every few days, it’s a little more forgivable. As it is, you’ll get up to 55W wired charging speeds with the brick and cable included in the box. Personally, I’d give up super-fast wired charging if it meant getting even slow wireless charging, but lots of people would make the opposite argument.

The camera system on the 15R includes the same main 50-megapixel sensor with f/1.8 lens as seen on the flagship OnePlus 15. And like the 15, there’s no more Hasselblad branding here — it’s all OnePlus’ DetailMax engine for image processing. I got some very nice photos in good lighting, though results were a little unpredictable in mixed or dim indoor lighting. Images were sometimes overly bright and unnaturally saturated, and low light remains a challenge for the 15R as it was on the 15.

There’s no dedicated telephoto camera on the 15R, which is forgivable since that’s often the case on phones under $800. The 8-megapixel ultrawide is a little harder to let slide, though. It’s a major downgrade from the more advanced 50-megapixel ultrawide found on the 15, and the difference is easy to spot in low light photos — they’re a smeary mess. Overall, it’s a camera system that’ll do the job for someone who’s not picky about photo quality, but I’d take the Pixel 9A’s camera over this one any day.

Not to make it all about Google, but the Pixel lineup illustrates the 15R’s positioning conundrum. It’s $200 more than the firmly midrange Pixel 9A, which offers both wireless charging and a more reliable camera. Or, for just $100 more, there’s the Pixel 10, where you’ll find a telephoto camera and Qi2 wireless charging with magnets built into the back of the phone. What the 15R offers — huge battery capacity, but a lackluster camera and no wireless charging whatsoever, at a medium-high price — seems a little off balance.

Still, it’s hard to argue with the battery life. If the OnePlus 15 appealed to you on that basis but felt a little too pricey, then the 15R might be for you. Otherwise, I think you’ll do well to keep your bedside phone charger around for now.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge