OnePlus 13 Review: A Better Android Phone, but It’s Not the Best

What’s so special about the OnePlus 13? Not much beyond its massive battery pack. That’s one reason to consider the OnePlus 13, but that would mean ignoring other core features that Samsung and Google do better for around the same price. The truth is, there’s nothing special about the OnePlus 13. It just is.

That’s not to say it’s not a stable choice for your daily carry. But you’ll miss out on what everyone else is up to, like digital lenses that look far away and a design that exudes personality. The circular camera system on the back loudly signifies you’re carrying a OnePlus device, but what does that mean when Google and Samsung’s backsides carry more cachet? You have to have something special to stand out, and with great-but-average camera performance and an interface that’s overwhelming to navigate, OnePlus isn’t doing much to make heads turn.

OnePlus 13 Review: Design

Looking at the OnePlus 13, I feel like I’ve written about this phone a few times already. The design looks similar to the OnePlus 11 and the OnePlus 12, except for some slight differences. The phone comes in three colors: Artic Dawn, Midnight Ocean, which has a “vegan” leather back, and Black Eclipse, which you see here. The large circular camera bump contrasts the backside’s brushed “grain-glass” design. The bump houses a 50-MP primary camera, a 50-MP telephoto with up to 3x optical zoom, and a 50-MP ultrawide.

The OnePlus 13 is the brand’s first truly water-resistant smartphone. It is IP69 rated, which means it is protected against the standard dunk in water for up to half an hour and can withstand the pressure of water jets and water temperatures of up to 80 degrees Celsius. It’s good news for people with hot tubs. OnePlus claims you can sanitize the OnePlus 13 in the dishwasher if the setting isn’t hot. Of course, I want to try this out. But I didn’t for this review. (My buddy, Jason Howell, did the deed over on YouTube. The phone still works for him, so.)

The edges on this generation’s OnePlus 13 are much squarer than before. They’re sharper than those on Apple’s iPhone, the Google Pixel 9, and, soon, Samsung. But not OnePlus. It marches to the beat of its own square motif. 

The OnePlus 13 comes with a 6.82-inch 2K display. The company makes a big to-do about its score with DisplayMate, and in the realm of pixels-per-inch, maximum brightness, and color gamut, the OnePlus 13 performs well. But I’m only mentioning this because it was mentioned in my briefing. The average person won’t be able to immediately tell the difference in color accuracy between this phone and the Pixel 9 Pro’s Super Actua, so that’s good news for everybody.

I am shuffling between smaller devices with a sub-6.3-inch screen, so the OnePlus 13’s larger size feels gigantic in comparison. The only thing that helps me hold it is the MagSafe-compatible case that OnePlus sells, which I can use with various PopSocket accessories. The bigger phone does get you a 6,000 mAh battery pack, which is what this phone is all about.

OnePlus 13 Review: Battery Life

The battery lasts a long time. After six days off the charger, it still hovers around 22%. This is with Pokémon Go constantly blaring in the background so I can log on to Community Day. I also watched several live YouTube performances to kill the battery and edited some videos for future meme posting. I’ve been using Google Chat exclusively on this phone, letting it buzz the OnePlus 13 whenever I get a message.

I still have to run the phone through Gizmodo’s complete battery benchmark to see how its bigger battery pack performs against the iPhone 16 Pro, the reigning champion on this website. I don’t think it will because Apple’s hardware is on lockdown, though OnePlus’s performance has been promising. I’ll update this section when it’s finished.

Like its predecessor, the big get on the OnePlus 13 is that it supports 100W fast charging as long as you use the proprietary red charging cable and charging brick that allows for such speeds. OnePlus promises a full battery in 36 minutes with this method compared to the iPhone 16 Pro’s two hours. But that’s if you have all the proper accouterments; otherwise, the OnePlus 13 charges like everyone else. I got the phone down to 13% before I charged it with a general 30w charger. It took only an hour to replenish.

OnePlus 13 Review: Software

I don’t like the stylings of OxygenOS 13, not since Oppo has taken the helm from OnePlus. OxygenOS used to resemble stock Android closely, but now it looks like a mix of what it once was and what ColorOS is now on Oppo devices overseas, which is Oppo’s version of iOS slapped on top of Android’s menu screens. The stock Android bones are still on the OnePlus 13, but you must move carefully through the interface to avoid accidentally turning something on, like the split Quick Settings menu. This will split your notification shade and quick settings into two, so you’ll have to aggressively drag down from either left or right to access either/or. I don’t like change, especially in gestures, so I stick with Classic mode: One pull-down for the Quick Settings and another for everything else.

OnePlus offers some iOS-like stylings if you want to make your own wallpaper or change the look of the icons. You can even download icon packs from the Play Store for more customization. While this is nice, it is not the reason to buy this device. However, it sets the tone for what OnePlus is; it’s still very much a device that caters to a particular niche crowd, and I can appreciate its gumption. However, I still miss the old OnePlus UI.

OnePlus 13 Review: Camera

The OnePlus 13 is a great camera for people who don’t want to think about anything before posting to the internet. I also love that there’s a built-in “beauty mode” in the camera app; I don’t care who knows it. There’s a bit of an action angle to the photos taken with the OnePlus 13, thanks to its primary camera’s 85-degree field of view. The colors are always rich, which bodes well for images of landscapes and people during golden hour. The Pixel 9 Pro’s algorithms are much more tempered in comparison in an attempt to produce a somewhat natural-looking photo.

I prefer the OnePlus 13’s vivid images, except when they are too much. And then that’s when I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d rather the smartphone produce a photo that I can churn through a filter on a third party to look the way I want it to than produce the image with the filter intact, making it harder to edit after the fact. Sometimes, the OnePlus 13’s camera algorithms are too aggressive, and things look more saturated and yellow-hued than in real life.

© Florence Ion / Gizmodo
Morning dawn. Enough optical zoom to make out what’s in the distance.

I was pleased with the OnePlus 13’s maximum 3x optical zoom, even though it advertises up to 6x in the camera app. I could see the snow on the mountains about 150 miles away. There is a 120x digital zoom offering if you have the phone on a tripod. I’m waiting for the next Samsung Galaxy Ultra to do a zoom test. That’s where I’m curious to see the disparity.

OnePlus 13 Review: Verdict

© Florence Ion / Gizmodo

I didn’t mention much about the internals of the OnePlus 13 because, for most people, it is how it performs as a day-to-day device, not the numbers spit out by a benchmarking suite. As you can imagine, this is a new phone from a brand that makes a new one every year; the OnePlus 13 does my bidding, from chopping up Joost Klein video clips with InShot to catching Pokémon in Go—I plan to use it to run the game the next month or so since it’s packed with extra memory. It runs on the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite processor and offers up to 16GB of memory with a maximum of 512GB of storage, the variant that OnePlus sent over. This is the first device to launch in the U.S. with the Snapdragon Elite platform, but we’ll have more smartphones to compare to as the year draws on. Feel free to give OnePlus its kudos for being first out of the gate.

The OnePlus 13 is worthy of consideration for people sick of Samsung and Google’s race to be the number one Android. But it comes with caveats, the most significant being that you’re not on Google’s timeline for software updates. This may become annoying as Google introduces more Gemini features to the Pixel and the Samsung devices that play nice. But maybe it’s also a selling point for you. At a starting price of $900, you can buy an Android phone that’s about being a smartphone rather than pushing a future based on artificial intelligence. This phone wants to serve the utility, which makes it a solid device, even if nothing about it gets me going the way other flagships do.