OnePlus 15 Goes on Sale in China, and Its Global Launch Appears Imminent

The OnePlus 15 is now available to purchase in China, and it’s likely that a global model that would arrive in the US and the UK will be announced soon.

The Chinese edition of the phone comes in three colors: the previously announced Sand Storm model along with black and purple. Its 6.78-inch display supports a 165Hz refresh rate — which should be particularly smooth for gaming — along with a very large 7,300mAh battery. As expected among most new flagship Android phones, it will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The phone also touts a 120-watt wired charging speed, although it’s worth noting that historically those charging speeds do not typically carry over to the US model. It also supports 50W wireless charging.

The phone’s cameras include a 50-megapixel wide, 50-megapixel ultrawide and a 50-megapixel telephoto with a 3.5x optical zoom. On the front is a 32-megapixel selfie camera.

The store lists a presale price of 4,899 Chinese Yuan, which roughly translates to $689, £515 and AU$1,050. The OnePlus 15 starts with 12GB of memory and 256GB of storage and goes up to 16GB of memory coupled with 1TB of storage.

While not all of these specs are guaranteed to show up with an eventual global release of the OnePlus 15, it doesn’t appear we’ll be waiting too much longer to find out. The UK edition of the OnePlus website is teasing the forthcoming global model, showing a photo of it on its homepage. This marks an earlier unveiling than typical for OnePlus, as the OnePlus 13 released back in January of this year (we’ve asked OnePlus why 14 is being skipped, although OnePlus did skip the number 4 when moving from OnePlus 3 in 2016 to OnePlus 5 in 2017).

There’s also a few additional clarifications regarding the OnePlus 15 that weren’t readily apparent on the Chinese website. For instance, OnePlus previously announced that the Sand Storm model will be made from a material that’s 1.3 times as tough as titanium, but the current website does not make clear if there will be a price difference for that model versus black and purple. 

It also does not appear that magnetic wireless charging will be available on this phone, but it’s possible that OnePlus will ship a case that features magnets like it did with the OnePlus 13. The OnePlus 13 also went on sale alongside a lower-cost OnePlus 13R model globally, but in China it appears it’s going on sale with the OnePlus Ace 6, the latter featuring an even larger 7,800mAh battery.

Until we get that official global announcement, for now we can use this Chinese announcement to continue to glean more clues about what the OnePlus 15 will look like.