Design
The OnePlus 15R continues the design trend for OnePlus phones introduced in 2025, featuring vertically stacked cameras at the back and a camera island that expands in size sideways, depending on the number of additional cameras.
Speaking purely subjectively, this is the most blah design trend OnePlus has had in a while, and it makes all the phones look generic and forgettable. The design looks especially bland on the OnePlus 15R, which has a half-hearted extension to the vertical camera stack that only includes the flash but is otherwise empty. It lacks the clean look of the Nord 5 or the fleshed-out look of the OnePlus 15 camera and is just stuck somewhere in between.
The OnePlus 15R comes in three colors: Mint Breeze, which is the light green pictured here, Charcoal Black, and Electric Violet. That final shade is exclusive to India and is also the only one to feature a fiberglass back instead of the Panda Glass panel used on the other two. OnePlus is selling it as the ‘Ace Edition,’ and it has ‘ACE’ written on the back. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is the Chinese OnePlus Ace 6T, but with the global specs, and since they couldn’t get rid of the ‘ACE’ text, they just decided to call it the Ace Edition.
Dimensionally, the Ace Edition is an exact match to the Nord 5, along with near-identical weight. It’s only when you compare the glass-backed versions that the 15R is slightly thicker and heavier. The 15R uses an aluminum middle frame, whereas the Nord 5 uses an all-plastic build. Both phones have Corning Gorilla Glass 7i on the front.
The OnePlus 15R does, however, have significantly bolstered ingress protection. While the Nord 5 makes do with just an IP65 rating, the OnePlus 15R is rated for IP66, IP68, IP69, and IP69K.
Display
The OnePlus 15R has a 6.83-inch, 2800×1272 resolution LTPS Super AMOLED display. This display is more or less identical to that on the Nord 5, save for a couple of differences.
For one, the display on the Nord 5 refreshes up to 144Hz, but the OnePlus 15R can go up to 165Hz. However, much like the 144Hz mode on the Nord 5, both the 144Hz and 165Hz modes on the OnePlus 15R are only available in games, that too a handful of titles that have been approved by the company. Unlike on the OnePlus 15, there isn’t even an option to enable 165Hz in select apps through the developer settings. In practice, this is just a 120Hz display, as that’s as high as you can go, especially if you don’t play any of the supported games.
Since this is an LTPS panel, it cannot go down to 1Hz to save power, and the lowest supported refresh rate is 60Hz.
The other difference compared to the Nord 5 is that the OnePlus 15R features an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner instead of an optical one. While the Nord 5 fingerprint scanner works well enough, it isn’t as fast as ultrasonic sensors and is also affected by things such as dirty or wet fingers. The OnePlus 15R also moves the scanner to a more comfortable position towards the center of the display, while the Nord 5 scanner was all the way at the bottom of the display.
The display on the OnePlus 15R is good, as it was on the Nord 5. It gets fairly bright and has good color accuracy. OnePlus claims the 15R display can go up to 3600 nits, whereas the Nord 5 could go up to 1800 nits. In use, we found the OnePlus 15R display to be only slightly brighter visually in SDR content. However, in HDR content, the Nord 5 would get dramatically brighter. This is despite double-checking all settings, including the video battery saver setting buried under the battery settings. We are unsure of what causes this discrepancy and if it is intended.
Like the Nord 5, the OnePlus 15R is claimed to support HDR10 and HDR10+. There is no official mention of Dolby Vision, but both phones can play Dolby Vision content, so we are perplexed as to why OnePlus doesn’t just advertise it.
The bezels around the display are relatively thin but not as thin as on the flagship OnePlus 15. They are also a tad thicker around the corners since the corner radius of the display and the phone don’t match.
Charging test
The OnePlus 15R supports up to 80W fast charging using the company’s SUPERVOOC technology. Despite the massive 7,400mAh capacity, the phone managed to reach full charge in just under an hour, which is very impressive.
Speakers
The OnePlus 15R has a set of stereo speakers and supports the company’s OReality spatializing effect. There is no Dolby Atmos support anymore as the feature was dropped by the company with last year’s devices.
The speakers on the OnePlus 15R have impressive audio quality and also get extremely loud. The speakers sound notably better than those on the Nord 5, which also got loud but sounded a bit tinny in comparison. These speakers even sound a bit nicer than those on the OnePlus 15, as they are more balanced and slightly richer-sounding. These may quite possibly be the best speakers OnePlus has implemented on a smartphone.