Technologies

The OnePlus 15 Is One of the Best Mainstream Phones for Gamers

How does a phone with a battery nearly 50% larger than other high-end phones work for gaming? We do the gamer science.

If you’re a mobile gamer, you know the bliss of playing anywhere you want to go — and the anxious downside of draining your phone’s battery as you do. That’s why the OnePlus 15‘s massive 7,300-mAh battery makes this a promising handset for the discerning gamer on the go. Presumably, you’ll be able to play for longer without draining your phone down to low capacity.

The reality is a little more complicated, partially because the OnePlus 15’s advantages can be diminished if graphics and the frame rate are cranked up to the max. It’s a good problem to have, as the phone’s premium specs give it a higher ceiling for performance. However, gamers who aren’t careful can drain their batteries nearly as quickly as other top-tier phones.

Still, if you don’t want a gaming-specific phone like the RedMagic 11 Pro or Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro, which aren’t easily available in the US, the OnePlus 15 is a mainstream handset that offers premium specs and features, making it a good choice.

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The OnePlus 15’s gaming experience

Good specs, good display, decent speakers

Battery life while gaming is important, but we’ll set that aside for a moment to focus on the experience of playing games themselves. While both versions of the phone pack the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, I used the pricier $1,000 version with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, which presumably performs better than the cheaper $900 model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. I tested a handful of popular games that are demanding enough to gauge the OnePlus 15’s capabilities.

The effect: high graphics and smooth gameplay. Aside from its high-end hardware, the OnePlus 15 also has a 6.78-inch OLED display with HD Plus (2,722 x1,272-pixel resolution) and 165Hz maximum refresh rate. The latter is a big deal for gaming, but most games won’t hit that cap, as they’re typically set to 120 frames per second (fps) at most.

One of the few big games that supports such a high refresh rate is Dead Cells, whose roguelike gameplay is dependent on reaction time. In theory, it supports an unlimited frame rate, but I couldn’t tell much difference between 120Hz and 165Hz — with more frames per second (roughly one per hertz, so 165fps at the phone’s maximum), it should enable players to respond faster, in the matter of microseconds.

But I’ll be the first one to admit that my clumsy fingers can’t hit the touch controls accurately enough to get that level of quick response. That’s where using a third-party controller comes in handy, and the Backbone I had in my desk drawer worked amazingly well. I plugged the OnePlus 15 in, and Dead Cells immediately switched over to external controls, already mapping my assortment of weapons and items to different buttons. In seconds, I was slipping in attacks between frantic sequences of dodge rolls and double jumps to evade enemy attacks.

When I switched to Destiny Rising, the mobile version of the venerable online shooter, the Backbone was a welcome experience, giving me a lot more button controls at my fingertips. There’s less of a performance gap when using the physical controller with Destiny Rising, as the touch controls work quite nicely, all things considered, compared to Dead Cells. Ditto with Diablo Immortal.

The mobile edition of the hack-and-slash dark fantasy game also has respectable touch controls; while there are a lot of buttons on the screen that block some of the action, they’re placed in a way that I don’t hit them accidentally and generally tap the one I mean to hit most of the time.

Destiny Rising and Diablo Immortal look good with the graphics cranked up to their maximum allowed, but curiously enough, they can’t quite reach the highest possible settings. That makes me wonder whether there’s even a phone out there that can, because the OnePlus 15’s specs are nearly the best you can get on a phone today. Regardless, with features like reflections and high graphics turned on, Destiny Rising and Diablo Immortal have good visuals, somewhere between a PS3/Xbox 360 and a PS4/Xbox One. Powerful as it is, the OnePlus 15 can’t improve the visuals on old games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, but those with a distinct style, like Genshin Impact, look good with the phone’s smooth frame rate.

This matches the OnePlus 15’s performance benchmark test results from Geekbench 6 (which tests the CPU) and 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme (which tests the graphics). The OnePlus 15 achieved higher scores and frame rates than any other phone, except for the RedMagic 11 Pro. While handsets in the iPhone 17 series were not far behind, older phones are left in the dust — my two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro Max got half the scores and frame rates that the OnePlus 15 did.

3DMark Wild Life Extreme

OnePlus 15 7,227RedMagic 11 Pro 8,074iPhone 17 4,885OnePlus 13 6,762

Note: Longer bars indicate better performance

Geekbench 6.0

OnePlus 15 3,670 11,061RedMagic 11 Pro 3,683 11,664iPhone 17 3,612 9.18OnePlus 13 3,091 9,362

Geekbench 6.0, single-core
Geekbench 6.0, multi-core

Note: Longer bars indicate better performance

The big battery helps

But fast charging is much more useful

Aside from its powerful specs, the OnePlus 15’s biggest flex is its 7,300-mAh battery, which is half again as much capacity as the 5,000-mAh batteries found on most premium phones, like the iPhone 17 Pro Max. This should lead to longer playtime, and from anecdotal experience, it does: the phone was at 2% when I started playing Dead Cells to speed up the battery drain, and I managed to play for 45 minutes before it automatically shut down to preserve the remaining 1%. It’s possible that OnePlus deliberately undercounts the bottom sliver of the battery to give people more time (similar to feeling like you’re getting more miles in your car than expected when the gas tank’s empty light is on), but it still gives the feeling of longevity.

But outside of a handful of those examples, the capacity advantage is more muted than I expected. The OnePlus 15’s battery doesn’t noticeably drain more slowly during gameplay than rival phones with smaller capacity batteries. Some of this can be attributed to the phone’s higher graphics and frame rate capability, which somewhat counteract this capacity advantage. Crank them up too high and they’ll drain battery life faster.

I tested this out by playing Destiny Rising for 20 minutes with all graphics and frame rate settings cranked up to maximum, which drained 6% of the OnePlus 15’s battery. When I dropped the performance to the minimum settings for a similarly timed session, it drained 5% of the battery — a small change, but it adds up.

The OnePlus 15’s greater advantage, especially for gamers with access to power outlets, is its recharging speed. The phone packs an 80-watt charger in the box. In my testing, it refilled from nearly empty (1%) to 73% in 30 minutes and reached 100% in 45 minutes. That’s faster than everything but the iPhone 17 series and Samsung Galaxy S25 FE in our tests, all of which have smaller battery capacities. The phone also supports up to 50-watt wireless charging, and because most wireless chargers top out at 15 or 30 watts, good luck finding one that’ll juice back up the OnePlus 15 at its maximum supported rate. The phone supports bypass charging, too, letting you play without draining the battery while it’s plugged in (as long as you can game with a cord sticking out of the bottom of the handset).

While I was disappointed that the large capacity didn’t lead to slower battery drain while playing games, I was delighted by how quickly I could top up the phone between sessions. Heck, you can recharge it even faster with the phone’s maximum 100-watt charging speed, if you pick up a separate OnePlus proprietary charger. It’s worth noting that the larger battery will still prolong casual phone use that doesn’t strain the hardware, such as browsing and using apps.

Final confrontation

What the OnePlus 15 has for mobile gamers over other phones

I found the OnePlus 15 to be a solid phone all around, and there’s something to be said about a high-performance handset that appeals to mainstream tastes. There are certainly fans of the «gamer chic» black, angled lines and RGB lights that characterize products sold to the gaming demographic — things that look like accessories for Decepticons, including the Asus ROG series of phones. Personally, I like the stylized artfulness of the OnePlus 15’s rounded corners, flat sides and smooth matte back cover.

Another advantage the OnePlus 15 has over gaming-specific phones is a normal software interface. CNET senior writer Mike Sorrentino was frustrated by numerous annoyances in the RedMagic 11 Pro’s software, from bloatware to brand watermarks on photos toggled on by default. The OnePlus 15 has a normal interface with its OxygenOS 16 skin on Android 16 — no extreme gamer aesthetic. The Game Assistant app is simple and I find it automatically collecting games within its folder to be handy.

And crucially, the OnePlus 15 has far and away better photo capabilities than other gaming phones. Its suite of three 50-megapixel rear cameras captured impressive color and detail in a series of images showcasing the streets of Lisbon, Portugal, that were shot by CNET’s talented principal editor (and professional photographer in his own right) Andrew Lanxon. While they don’t quite reach the quality of a Samsung Galaxy S25 series or a Google Pixel 10, they’re respectably close, and have the utility of main, ultrawide and telephoto cameras.

The OnePlus 15 does have some drawbacks. Other gaming phones have neat features, like the Asus ROG 9 Pro’s external cooling fan and, crucially, its side port for charging while you’re gaming. Worse, the OnePlus continues to lag competitors in offering only four years of Android updates and six years of security patches, which is notably less than the seven years that Samsung and Google offer (Apple doesn’t promise iOS updates, but generally manages six or more years depending on the device). Other gaming phones are worse, with the RedMagic 11 Pro receiving only three years of Android updates, while the Asus ROG 9 Pro receives an abysmally low two years of operating system updates. Even if the OnePlus 15 is better compared to gaming phones, it’s not great to spend about a grand on a phone only to see it stop receiving new, fun software features after half a decade.

There’s another caveat to the OnePlus 15, which I wouldn’t consider a dealbreaker for gamers. The phone’s 1,800-nit maximum display brightness is fine outdoors, but pales in comparison to its competitors; the iPhone 17 series, for instance, boasts a 3,000-nit peak brightness outdoors. But I wouldn’t expect many mobile gamers to be playing outside anyway — I sure haven’t been while I’ve done all this gamer science.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Feb. 5, #970

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 5 #970.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is kind of tough. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Star-spangled signs.

Green group hint: Smash into.

Blue group hint: Not green or red.

Purple group hint: Same surname.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Cultural symbols of the US.

Green group: Collide with.

Blue group: Blue things.

Purple group: Lees of Hollywood.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is cultural symbols of the US. The four answers are American flag, apple pie, bald eagle and baseball.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is collide with. The four answers are bump, butt, knock and ram.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is blue things. The four answers are jeans, lapis lazuli, ocean and sky.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Lees of Hollywood. The four answers are Ang, Bruce, Christopher and Spike.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Feb. 5 #704

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 5, No. 704.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one, once you clue in on the theme. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Quint-essential.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Not four, or six.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

DAYS, GIVE, WOVE, DOVE, LOVE, DOGS, SCONE, STOLE, GEEK, LODE, SIEGE, SLEW, HENS

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

TOES, OCEANS, SENSES, VOWELS, BOROUGHS, WEEKDAYS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is GIVEMEFIVE. To find it, start with the G that’s three letters to the right on the top row, and wind down.

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Technologies

The Motorola Signature Is the Moto Phone I’ve Wanted for Years

Motorola’s new phone is its best flagship yet and could be the Galaxy S26 Plus rival that Samsung didn’t see coming.

At CES 2026, among the AI humanoids, flashy concepts and next-gen foldables, was a Motorola phone that I didn’t expect to be a CES highlight. And no, I’m not talking about theMotorola Razr Fold. While it was the talk of the town (after all, it is the company’s first-ever book-style foldable), there’s a premium smartphone with top specs and a sophisticated design: the Motorola Signature.

Recent high-end Motorola phones have had good-looking hardware, but they don’t compete with the Galaxy S25 Ultras or Pixel 10s of the world. They fall short in one or more areas, including display, performance, cameras, software or battery. The Motorola Signature is the company’s first flagship phone that looks confident enough to take on heavyweights like the upcoming Galaxy S26 Plus and the current iPhone 17, without faltering on either hardware or software.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and this Motorola phone doesn’t have any major downsides, especially for the price. The biggest one could be availability: It won’t be coming to the US, but it is now available for purchase in India at an unbeatable price. It undercuts the OnePlus 15, iPhone 17 and the Pixel 10 by almost $150 or more (directly converted from INR).

With the ever-increasing prices of premium phones, the Motorola Signature is the flagship killer we’ve been waiting for. At about $660 (INR 59,999), it is hard to beat, and I can admit I’m finally excited about a Motorola phone that’s not a Razr.

Motorola Signature is lightweight, slim and rugged

The Motorola Signature has a 6.8-inch 1,264×2,780-pixel resolution AMOLED display with support for a 165Hz refresh rate. It is an LTPO panel, so it can be set to 1Hz for an always-on display (like the iPhone 17 series and Galaxy S25 Ultra), thereby saving battery life. Its resolution might not be as high as the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s, but it is a promising screen for gaming and content consumption.

I couldn’t find a game to test its 165Hz refresh rate, but watching YouTube videos, Instagram Reels and reading ebooks — both indoors and outdoors — was a pleasing experience. The screen remains legible in all lighting conditions.

Motorola’s new phone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset and is paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. While it’s not the highest-end chip available (that’d be the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5), it packs plenty of power. I had no issues in day-to-day use, occasional multitasking or gaming. My only complaint was with the camera shutter in low light, but we’ll get to it in a bit.

The Motorola Signature ships with Android 16 with the company’s in-house Hello UI on top. It is a comparatively clean interface with plenty of customization options to fine-tune your experience. One of my favorite features, Moto gestures (twist to open the camera or make a double-chop motion to turn on and off the flashlight) is always handy in unexpected ways.

You get an AI Key on the left side of the phone to trigger Moto AI (uses Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot), but it can only be triggered once you create a Motorola account. You can configure the button to do other shortcuts, like double-press it to take notes and press and hold to trigger Moto AI. But in reality, I didn’t use any of these features in my daily life and would’ve preferred the ability to remap them to a shortcut. Google’s Gemini assistant is also available.

The Signature has a 5,200-mAh silicon-carbon battery and supports 90-watt wired charging and 50-watt wireless charging. Should those speeds hold up, that battery might fill up quickly using either method. It lasted me an entire day on medium use, but on another day, I had to charge it twice when I pushed it with streaming, browsing, Google Maps navigation for 30 minutes and active camera usage. It doesn’t compete with OnePlus 15’s massive 7,300-mAh cell but does well to reduce battery anxiety.

All of this sounds more impressive when you take the Signature’s design into context: The flagship Qualcomm processor’s power, 5,000-mAh plus battery, big AMOLED screen and three 50-megapixel cameras housed in a slim and lightweight design. The new Motorola phone is 6.99mm thick and weighs just 186 grams. For context, the Galaxy S25 Plus, with a smaller battery, measures 7.3mm thick and weighs 190 grams, while most recent big phones weigh 200 grams or more.

I shifted from the iPhone 17 Pro Max and enjoyed using the Motorola Signature because it weighed less. But I didn’t expect it to be so light. The Signature feels good in my hand. I’m glad it doesn’t have sharp flat sides like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Plus, I love its linen-inspired finish on the back, which sets it apart from the competition. Like its Edge siblings, the Signature is rated IP68 and IP69 for dust and water resistance (meaning it can survive being submerged under a meter of water for 30 minutes and high-pressure water jets), so there’s no fear of dust and water damage.

Improving on the 2 weakest links

Most Motorola phones that I’ve used in recent years, including the $1,300 Razr Ultra have one or two downsides: software support and/or cameras.

The Signature marks a new beginning for the brand as it joins the ranks of Samsung and Google with seven years of Android OS software and security updates. This is on par with Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones and better than what OnePlus offers. I hope this new software update policy is implemented on more Motorola phones launching in 2026.

Secondly, the Motorola Signature (finally!) introduces an impressive camera system. On the back, you get three cameras: a 50-megapixel main camera with OIS, paired with a 50-megapixel telephoto camera with a 3x zoom lens and OIS, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera. This is the first Motorola phone with cameras that I wouldn’t trade for another setup during my vacations.

Photos from the primary and telephoto cameras have better color accuracy than previous Moto shooters. Images have a slightly warmer tone and are saturated — not as much as the OnePlus 15, which delivers much more saturated tones. I prefer Signature’s look in most scenarios.

However, the ultrawide-angle camera retains fewer details, and OnePlus does better in that regard.

The telephoto lens struggles with edge detection in low-light portraits, but I loved using it for architecture shots and capturing scenery around me. It can deliver some stunning shots even in 6x. Mind you, it has 3x optical zoom, but I shot the above photo in 6x, and it has a nice bokeh, good details and an overall pleasing look.

Motorola Signature final thoughts

Overall, the Signature has solid cameras for the price and the best optics yet for a Motorola phone. But there’s one hindrance: The camera shutter in low light is slow to process images. For instance, I wanted to snap a few action shots during a badminton game, but I missed some great smashes because the camera wouldn’t allow me to capture images faster.

The Motorola Signature marks a solid flagship comeback for the brand. It has a big and bright display, a capable processor, a versatile camera setup and good battery life. This phone is hard to fault in its price segment.

The Signature is now available to purchase in India at a starting price of INR 59,999 (approximately $660) for the 256GB variant. It will go on sale in Europe for €999 (approximately $1,170) with 512GB storage in the base version. Motorola has plans to launch its new flagship phone in more countries across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific regions. However, the Motorola Signature won’t be coming to the US.