OnePlus 15 Teardown Reveals Industry's First Hand-Tearable Steel Vapor Chamber, MAO Ceramic Coating, Si/C NanoStack Battery & More

OnePlus 15 just got released, and I was very excited about it. I am a fan of OnePlus phones as I have good experience with the original OnePlus Nord smartphone. It's been more than 4 years, and I am still daily driving the Nord - the performance is still very good. I didn't update the software to keep it as smooth as possible. So, I am always cusrios and excited about a new OnePlus phone. The new OnePlus 15 has some crazy cool technologies and features. OnePlus 15 teardown reveals many of its secrets - let's check them.

OnePlus is playing little games with OnePlus 15, the Sand Storm version has fiber-reinforced plastic back and the other two colors have glass back design. Here is the crazy part, whether it's glass or plastic back, all models have the Micro-Arc Oxidation (MAO) that creates a ceramic-like coating on its frame and back side. The most interesting thing about this MAO-tech is the fact that it creates a soft-touch feel on the surface of the material - almost like a soft-touch glass-back smartphone.

Teardown and durability test by JerryRigEverything shows that the MAO-coating performs way better than a standard glass, plastic or metal back-cover in terms of scratch resistance. The coating on the OnePlus 15 is pretty thick, which helps with the scratch-resistance feature. Normal keys, coins and soft metals cannot do damage to the OnePlus 15's metal frame and back because of the MAO-coating. This is insane that those soft metals were taking the damage caused by the high-end MAO-coating present on the OnePlus 15 smartphone. Fingerprints also don't show up, I am very impressed by this ceramic-like coating.

OnePlus is advertising their vapor chamber as Industry's First Hand-Tearable Steel vapor chamber. I think this is a bit too much of a marketing tactics. Many other high-end smartphones, especially the gaming phones are using vapor chamber as a part of their cooling system for a long time. Some vapor chambers are thinner than others. So I think many of the existing ones are already hand-tearable, it's just that they never claimed it like OnePlus just did. In my opinion, this is not that big of a deal.

In Zack's video, he was able to rip the steel vapor chamber by hands. The vapor-chamber cooling-system contains liquid and mesh to help with the heat dissipation and cooling of the phone. OnePlus is calling their cooling solution as 360° Cryo-Velocity Cooling System. That is a catchy name, but OnePlus has a proven record of providing smooth and fast experience under load. Their aerogel pad works as an insulation layer so that the heat can be managed in an efficient way - pretty cool technology for sure.

OnePlus jumped from 13 to 15, so the previous OnePlus 13 had a much smaller 6,000 mAh vs OnePlus 15's 7,300 mAh battery pack. Both the old and new one utilize silicon-carbon battery technology. It is fundamentally a type of Lithium-ion battery, but this type replaces the traditional graphite-based anode (negative electrode) with a silicon-carbon composite material. The main goal here is to store as much charge as possible without making the pack physically larger or heavier.

OnePlus 15 teardown reveals the 2-cell battery pack that has Li-ion and SUPERVOOC label along with other technical details. Each cell is labeled as 3650 mAh, which makes sense as the total is claimed as 7300 mAh. About the SUPERVOOC charging, the maximum charging power is 120 watts, but in the US it is limited to 80 watts for regional power constraints. So from 0 to 100 percent, it takes about 40 to 45 minutes to fully charge the OnePlus 15 smartphone. A quick 15 minutes of charge can make it half-way juiced up. Additionally, the OnePlus 15 supports 50W AIRVOOC wireless charging and 10W reverse wireless charging - crazy specs.

At the end of 2025, OnePlus is pulling ahead of others with its latest OnePlus 15 flagship. The OnePlus 15 carries multiple IP ratings like IP66, IP68, IP69 and IP69K - this is so crazy. All that means, the phone is dust-tight and water resistant against high-pressure jets, also immersible up to 2 meters for 30 minutes. Another crazy spec, the OnePlus 15 is powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (3-nm) processor. Very few smartphones currently have that processor, we will see more next year.

When we are talking about latest specs and features, it has many of them. The OnePlus 15 comes with Wi-Fi 6, 6E and Wi-Fi 7. For Bluetooth, it has BT 6.0 with high-end aptX HD codec. In terms of on-board audio, OnePlus 15 has dual speakers in stereo configuration. It also supports 24-bit/192kHz Hi-Res audio. The display is LTPO AMOLED with 165-Hz high refresh-rate and Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection. Among the cameras, the main and telephoto camera have Optical Image Stabilization.

Check out those articles from above, you can click on those linked images to read the articles. A while ago I published a review of the Samsung Galaxy A14 5G smartphone, check that out if you are into budget phones. In case you are interested in portable speakers, I compared 3 Boombox type speakers from 3 different brands such as Soundcore, Tribit and JBL. So don't forget to also check out that detailed comparison article about the JBL Boombox 3 vs Tribit Stormbox Blast vs Soundcore Boom 2 Plus.

Even though I really like my OnePlus Nord, after Carl Pei left OnePlus and the Oxygen OS started to feel like Color OS, My curiosity went down for OnePlus brand but gone up for Carl Pei's "Nothing" brand. However, OnePlus still delivers fast and smooth phones with innovations. The OnePlus 15 is a spec-monster in almost all domains. The cameras are just not that top-notch like the iPhone 17 and Pixel 10 smartphones. But in terms of performance, fast and smooth user experience, the OnePlus 15 is up there with the latest flagship phones.

In my opinion, the 360° Cryo-Velocity Cooling System is cool but not as cool as the marketing team is trying to sell it. Also, recent battery test shows that the OnePlus 15 was unable to finish some benchmark tests, which can indicate some overheating issues. The most impressive things to me are the MAO-coating that prevents scratch from keys and coins + the 7300 mAh huge battery pack. The battery on the OnePlus 15 can give you a screen-on time of around 9-hours, which is very impressive. Check out official OnePlus 15 page for more info.

Also, please check out the JBL Charge 6 vs Charge 5 story for highlights.
IF you're interested in mid-sized portable speakers, check my JBL Charge 6 vs Bose SoundLink Plus article. The JBL Charge 6 did better in the head-to-head comparison.