To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
- The OnePlus 15 launched on 13 November 2025
- As an introductory offer, the 512GB model is £100 off, down from £979 to £879
- In our review, we rated the OnePlus 15 five stars and gave it our Best Buy award
The OnePlus 15 arrived late in the game to snatch away the crown as my favourite smartphone of 2025. And based on my time testing and reviewing it, there’s a high likelihood that it will hold that position for much of 2026, as well.
We’ll get into exactly why I am so taken with the OnePlus 15 just below but first, the deal. The OnePlus 15 officially launched a couple of weeks ago, with the cheaper 256GB model priced at £849 and the version with 512GB of storage at £979. As an introductory offer, however, OnePlus has cut the price of the latter by £100, getting you twice the storage for only £20 more than the cheaper model.
There is a catch here, and that’s that this deal has clearly been very popular already; this deal is only available as a pre-order, with units set to ship on 15 December. So you will have to wait a couple of weeks – but on the bright side, it should arrive in time for Christmas.
What’s so good about the OnePlus 15?
It’s a rare thing for phones to feel like true advancements: mostly, we see iterative yearly updates that improve just enough to keep us buying. The OnePlus 15, on the other hand, makes several big advancements while simultaneously being a little cheaper than its predecessor – and undercutting the competition, too.
The most notable new feature here is the high-capacity 7,300mAh Silicon NanoStack battery, whose higher density allows for greater battery capacity without requiring more physical space. The result was the OnePlus 15 delivering the best battery life we’ve ever recorded, lasting for more than 45 hours in our standard looping video test.
That’s around seven hours longer than the next best result – the far more expensive iPhone 17 Pro Max.
The OnePlus 15 is also the first phone to reach UK shores with the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. This flagship processor also impressed in our testing, with the OnePlus 15 scoring higher than any other Android phone we’ve reviewed in the single-core benchmarks and surpassing all other phones in the multi-core stakes – once again surpassing the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
We also recorded the best offscreen framerates we’ve ever seen when testing the OnePlus 15’s GPU performance. In short, this is an incredibly powerful phone that is more than capable of handling any task you throw at it.
I could go on – talking about the bright, colour-accurate 165Hz display, the impressive durability, the useful AI or the 120W charging speed – but we’d be here all night. So let’s close this section out with the cameras.
The 50-megapixel main lens delivered gorgeous shots in my testing, with bold colours, crisp detail and excellent dynamic range in all lighting conditions, while the 3x telephoto camera produced striking portrait shots and hybrid zooms all the way up to 120x.
I was also very impressed with the video suite: the OnePlus 15 can shoot 4K/60fps fully stabilised, as well as options for 4K at 120fps, 8K at 30fps, Dolby Vision HDR footage up to 4K/120fps and LOG video for greater colour grading in post-production. It’s a wonderfully versatile offering and some of the best you can get on a phone right now.
Are there any drawbacks?
This section is going to be short, and that’s another compliment to the OnePlus 15. While it mostly achieves flagship quality for a price that massively undercuts most rivals, the one area in which OnePlus lags behind is software support. The OnePlus 15 is set for four years of OS updates and six years of security patches, which is good, but the likes of Samsung, Google and Honor all offer seven years apiece for their flagships.
My only other complaints were that the new design is a little more generic than the previous generation – it’s still sleek enough but it lacks character – and that far-reaching zoom photography looks too overly processed, with the AI trying to smooth out details too much for my liking.
And that’s it. I exhaustively tested this phone and that was all I could find in the way of concerns. That shows just how well-rounded a smartphone this is, and what kind of value for money it offers at this cutthroat price.
I recommended the OnePlus 15 with my whole chest at its original retail price, and I continue to do so. If you want the extra storage space, however, this deal is well worth taking advantage of, nabbing the 512GB model for a cool £879.
We’re rapidly approaching the end of the Black Friday weekend but there are still a few hours of Cyber Monday left. Check out my other favourite Cyber Monday phone deals to see what other bargain handsets are out there, or head to our Cyber Monday deals hub for the best discounts on everything from headphones to coffee machines.
