Verdict
The OnePlus 13 is a solid phone that represents a great alternative to flagships from Samsung and Google. It’s really powerful, can go for ages on a full charge, refills quickly, has a brilliant display and versatile camera system. It’s all the things you’d want a OnePlus phone to be.
Pros
- Exceptional battery life
- Impressive performance
- Top-end screen
- Versatile camera setup
Cons
- Issues with camera focus and halo effects
- More bloatware
- Limited AI smarts compared to some brands
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Snapdragon 8 Elite powerWith the Snapdragon 8 Elite at its heart, the OnePlus 13 is among the most powerful smartphones available right now. -
Versatile camera setupWith three 50MP cameras comprised of a main, 3x telephoto and ultrawide, the OnePlus 13 offers a versatile camera system. -
Impressive battery lifeWith a massive 6000mAh battery within, the OnePlus 13 just keeps on going.
Introduction
For OnePlus, the battle to become mainstream has been a long and hard-fought one. Still, its focus on bringing us really powerful phones with customisable software is still here.
The latest top-tier phone from the Oppo sub-brand, there’s a lot to love about the OnePlus 13, from its upgraded performance courtesy of the Snapdragon 8 Elite to boosted battery power, faster charging and more.
It might not be as tempting an upgrade for OnePlus 12 owners, but for everyone else, it’s safe to say there’s plenty to get excited about here.
Design
- Appealing vegan leather finish
- IP68/69 dust and water resistance
- Display bezels look slightly uneven
When it comes to design, build and aesthetics, the OnePlus 13 – for the most part – looks exactly as you’d expect it to. Just like those from its sister company, Oppo, its cousin Vivo and other Chinese manufacturers like Honor and Xiaomi, it’s got a huge camera island on the back of the phone dominating the view.
Unlike Oppo and Vivo, however, it’s not placed bang in the centre, so doesn’t have that pleasing symmetry we saw on the likes of the Find X8 and Find X8 Pro.
It’s not just about looks though. This phone – particularly in the Midnight Ocean vegan leather finish – is all about the feel. It’s coated in a synthetic leather-like material. It’s soft to the touch and grippy, easy to keep hold of and rarely, if ever, slides off furniture. Plus, it feels wonderful in the hand.
That’s also partly thanks to the curves on the front and the back, which help soften the shape of what would otherwise be a bit of a brick. That alone is a reason to be happy about this phone. In a world of large, slippery glass rectangles, this is different, in a very good way.
Where the curves in the glass on the front, and towards the edges on the back meet the metal frame isn’t quite as seamless as those areas of the Find X8 Pro, but it means there isn’t a sharp right-angled join between the sides and the top and bottom surfaces.
All of that means it’s comfortable to grip, although it’s still pretty big and does require a bit of stretching if you decide to use it one-handed.
It’s built with practicality in mind too. In that it has an alert slider switch to quickly move between ring, silent and vibrate modes. Plus, it’s got a dual IP68 and IP69 rating to ensure that it should come through unscathed if it comes into contact with moisture or dust.
My only gripe, apart from the off-centred camera island, is the bezels around the display. The corner radiuses don’t perfectly match the shape of the outer frame, and so have this look of being a bit uneven.
Screen
- 6.82-inch AMOLED screen
- LTPO 4.1 support
- Bright, detailed and accurate display
There’s not much to say about the display on the OnePlus 13. Not because it’s not great, but, because it almost feels like we’ve hit a bit of a plateau with improvements.
That means you get a big 6.82-inch LTPO 4.1 panel that’s capable of hitting up to 120Hz refresh rates and 4500 nits peak brightness. That’s pretty standard for the top flagship phones of this time. Its got a peak resolution of 1440 x 3168 too, so sings all the right notes in terms of fluidity, sharpness and brightness.
It’s worth noting here – by default out of the box – the phone is set to 1080p resolution to conserve battery juice. But even in this mode, the display appears sharp and details are sharp enough that you won’t notice the lack of pixels, not unless you look at it really closely.
Testing during the winter means I haven’t been able to see what the display looks like under a bright summer sun, but the display is so bright that its auto-brightness most of the time I’ve used it has been set to 25-30 per cent.
In its default natural mode, colours are realistic, and don’t push into the realm of being hyperreal or oversaturated. You can engage a D65 mode, or Vivid mode which boosts those if you’d rather something more eye-catching. I found those would typically make anything in the warm spectrum far too red/orange, however.
However, the joy of the OnePlus 13’s software is that you can adjust it in quite granular ways, manually changing the white balance or colour temperature to your preference.
Cameras
- Triple 50MP camera setup
- Generally solid performance
- Struggled to focus in some shooting modes
Like its predecessor, the OnePlus 13 has a strong camera system made up of three lenses. There’s a main, ultra-wide and a 3x optical zoom lens. All three have 50-megapixel sensors, and because of that, the 3x zoom lens can be pushed to 6x zoom without losing too much in the way of detail.
In fact, sometimes you can get beyond that and still get a half-decent image, although lines do start to blur and details get really soft the further you push it.
By default, the colour processing on OnePlus’ phone is quite neutral. You don’t get extremely saturated colours like you might on a Samsung phone. Similarly, there’s no golden or warm tone over everything like Pixel and iPhones tend to produce. However, you can switch the colour tone by adding a filter if you want to make it a bit more lively.
It wasn’t a perfect experience by any means. I had some issues with zooming and using the macro feature. To be specific, it would often struggle to focus automatically when zooming, especially while shooting video. And even when tapping the display to set a focus point, it would miss, and leave me with a blurry, soft frame.
It was the same with the macro mode, set at 6x or 3x – I often found it difficult to actually get the shot in focus, even when I was the right distance away from the close-up subject. It made taking those photos take longer, and left me with more failed shots than even the Oppo Find X8 Pro which has a similar camera system.
The other thing I found often with the zoom camera, was it would leave objects with a bit of a blurry outline, or a halo effect.
So subjects that were bright would seem almost like they’re glowing, and darker foreground objects with bright backgrounds would have undefined edges. Or, they’d have a light highlight line running along the length of the edge, where the camera processing struggled to process that light and dark cleanly alongside each other.
Similarly, with macro mode, I often found the background blur generated by the camera was quite aggressive, and sometimes unnatural looking because the blur would sometimes swallow up items in the foreground that were at a similar distance from the lens as the main focus of the picture.
When the contrasting light between object and background isn’t as extreme, the shots are generally crisp and detailed, with defined lines and good depth of field.
At night time, the phone can capture sharp, detailed shots with enough light and defined lines to make lowlight photography easy. Just kick it into night mode, it’ll capture a 1-2 second image, and sort out the stabilisation.
Most of the time this worked well, but there was – again – the odd occasion where blur crept into the shots.
In the end, when it came to taking photos, while there’s definitely the ability to take good shots, the inconsistency at times meant I’d have rather had a different phone with me.
Performance
- Snapdragon 8 Elite power
- Beats Apple’s A18 Pro in benchmarks
- Sustains performance as the phone gets warm
It’s safe to say that when it comes to raw power and performance, you’re not likely going to find a more powerful phone than the OnePlus 13 for another 12 months.
Inside, the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite is running the show, and it’s a huge step up from the previous 8 Gen 3. It benchmarks high enough that it even beats Apple’s A18 Pro chipsets in the latest iPhones, and if you know anything about benchmarking, that’s a pretty big deal.
OnePlus 13 benchmarks
The end result is a phone that doesn’t struggle at all with anything. In fact, even under pretty heavy load, running the more demanding games titles it stays cool and keeps frame rates and responses speed and fluid. Running Genshin Impact at 60fps with the graphics set to ‘High’ didn’t trouble it, even after 10-15 minutes of gameplay.
In fact, the only time I felt the phone heat up was when running an extreme stress test benchmark which pushes the phone to its limits on repeat for about 20 minutes. And even then, despite warming up, it kept scoring high numbers. That means, even if it gets warm in daily use (which is unlikely) it can keep running smoothly.
Software
- OxygenOS 15 based on Android 15
- Hugely customisable approach
- New AI features exclusive to OnePlus 13
Customisation is the name of the game with OnePlus software in general. Like the Oppo Find X8 series, the personalisation screen has a huge number of different options.
Changing wallpapers, general themes, accent colours, always-on display, icon size, shape and style are all within a couple of taps from the Home Screen.
This version of OxygenOS, built on Android 15, continues OnePlus’ customisable approach to software, adding some bloat, but not excessively loading the interface with additional, redundant apps.
You get OnePlus’ own weather, calculator, files, internet and clock apps, but that’s about it. There are a couple of extras, in the form of the Zen Space for launching into a notification/distraction-free session and the IR Remote app that you can set up to control your TV, fan, set-top box or any number of remote controllable devices you might have in your house.
There’s a splash of AI too, but it’s definitely not as prevalent as some other manufacturers. Most of the AI abilities are just Google’s apps installed by default, like Gemini for researching and having conversations.
The Photos app has some smart removal eraser tools, which are a little hit and miss and don’t seem to work as well as the Google Photos tools do, and don’t seem to feature anywhere near as much generative power as Google’s. In short, just use the Google Photos app if you want to do things like remove people or objects from your pictures.
There are other exclusive features like Intelligent Search that can search through files on your phone to provide answers to natural language questions, but without support for cloud services like Google Drive, its potential is rather limited.
The software experience should continue to improve though, with OnePlus offering the same four OS upgrades and five years of upgrades as recent releases in its premium smarpthone collection.
Battery life
- 6000mAh silicon-carbon battery
- 100W SuperVOOC charging
- No charger in the box
Just like the OnePlus 12 before it, the OnePlus 13 is very efficient with its battery consumption.
Even with the display set to its maximum resolution, with the auto refresh rate and auto brightness enabled, it drained very little battery with the screen in use. I could play half an hour of Mario Kart Tour and only lose 3-4 percent of battery life.
Over the course of a whole day, I struggled – even on my busiest days – to completely drain the battery. In fact, most days I’d struggle to even drain half of it with my typical casual use. This is usually 2-3 hours of screen time mixed between casual social media browsing, reading sports news, watching YouTube, playing casual games and testing the camera.
A big part of this performance is also down to the sheer size of the battery. With a 6000mAh capacity, it’s a cool 600mAh more than the OnePlus 12 from last year. That’s thanks predominantly to the switch over to Silicon Carbon, which packs more power into a smaller space than the previous batteries used.
It can charge up pretty quickly when empty too – though in a break from the OnePlus norm, the company hasn’t included a power adapter in its box this year. This means if you want that 100W goodness refilling its massive empty battery in 36 minutes, you’re going to have to buy one.
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Should you buy it?
You want a great all-rounder
With top-end power, a high-end display, versatile cameras and all-day battery life, the OnePlus 13 offers a well-rounded experience.
You want the best camera performance possible
As versatile as the triple camera setup is, there are issues with focus and halo effects, and its zoom lens isn’t quite as capable as others in the product category.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the OnePlus 13 is a solid phone. It’s really powerful, can go for ages on a full charge, refills quickly, has a brilliant display and versatile camera system. It’s all the things you’d want a OnePlus phone to be.
Does it move the needle much beyond what the OnePlus 12 offers? In some ways – specifically around performance and battery life. But, there’s an argument to be made here that not many people will feel the benefit of that extra power, because you need to push it really hard to make the most of all that extra ‘oomph’.
Still, if you want a fast, long-lasting, versatile flagship phone alternative to Google and Samsung’s, it’s a great choice. I’d still be tempted to pick up the Oppo Find X8 Pro, for a little more refinement in design instead or the Vivo X200 Pro for the epic zoom camera.
How we test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as a main phone for over a week
Thorough camera testing in a variety of conditions
Tested and benchmarked using respected industry tests and real-world data
FAQs
Despite offering 100W SuperVOOC charging, you won’t get a SuperVOOC charger (or any other charging brick) in the box.
Yes, it offers both IP68 and IP69 protection that shields it from water damage in a variety of scenarios.
OnePlus has committed to four OS upgrades and five years of security patches.
