OnePlus 13 review: a battery life king with beautiful design
If the Galaxies and Pixels of the world don’t appeal to you, the OnePlus 13 is the phone to get.
🏆 Review score: 4/5
✅ Pros
🔋 Huge battery with ultra-fast charging
📸 Cameras that keep up with the big dogs
😍 Beautiful design
🏎️ Powerful performance
📱 Stunning display that gets insanely bright
❌ Cons
🖼️ Ultra-wide camera isn’t great at night
🫧 OxygenOS 15 needs to grow on you
🤖 Only four major Android upgrades promised
🛜 Not available through carriers
The Shortcut review
I know it’s early, but the OnePlus 13 is shaping up to be be one of the best phones of 2025. At $999, the new smartphone is positioned to go up against the iPhone 16 Pro, Google Pixel 9 Pro, and rumored Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, complete with powerful specs and a stunning design to boot. OnePlus has never been the default smartphone choice for a lot of consumers, but it might be time to change that.
I’ve been using the OnePlus 13 for the past few weeks, and I’ve found it to be incredibly solid. It boasts a handful of upgrades over the OnePlus 12 which don’t quite make it good for upgrading year-over-year. Rather, OnePlus has positioned the phone to be its best yet for those who have considered joining the Never Settle lifestyle. By doing so, you get a phone with a gorgeous design (the first with an IP69 rating), incredible performance, and battery life that’s hard to come by in the flagship phone market.
I was impressed with the camera quality, too. I took a lot of photos with these sensors, and OnePlus has done a great job at making it possible to achieve similar results to what you’d get from an iPhone or Galaxy – even at night. The 120x AI zoom feature is hit or miss, and video quality is still behind that of popular competitors, but I’m happy to report that these cameras are the best we’ve gotten from OnePlus thus far.
Combined with OxygenOS 15, ultra-fast charging, and convenient features like the alert switch, the OnePlus 13 is a great device that deserves your attention.
Pricing and where to buy
Starting price: $999
Available in Black Eclipse, Midnight Ocean, and Arctic Dawn
Full review
Design
✨ A sleek, premium design. The OnePlus 13 design is gorgeous. OnePlus has had a lot of practice crafting premium smartphones over the years, so it’s no surprise that the company’s latest phone is in line with our expectations. The design feels more industrial than previous OnePlus phones, similar to the iPhone 16 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL with flat sides and a big camera bump (which is technically smaller than the OnePlus 12’s). With slight chamfers on the edges and a glossy accent around the border, there’s no denying this is one good-looking phone.
🌈 Gorgeous color options. The colors OnePlus chose are also beautiful, especially Midnight Ocean, which comes with a microfiber vegan leather that’s soft to the touch and eliminates fingerprints. It feels like a more refined version of Apple’s now-defunct FineWoven material. I don’t know how well the Midnight Ocean finish will hold up over time, but if that’s a concern of yours, you can always pick the wood grain-equipped Black Eclipse color or slick Arctic Dawn finish.
📏 On the slimmer side. Despite the OnePlus 13 being a big phone, it remains on the slimmer side. It measures 8.9mm thick and just 210 grams heavy. For context, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is 13.3mm thick and 227 grams heavy, while the Pixel 9 Pro XL is 8.5mm thick and 221 grams. I never found it to be too much to hold for long periods, which was nice.
🚿 Durable enough to survive a washing machine. This is one of the first phones to come with an IP69 rating, which means it’s as resistant to water as IP68 phones (30 minutes in 1.5m of water) but has the added benefit of surviving water jets from four different directions at up to 176º Fahrenheit. This means that technically, you could put the OnePlus 13 in a washing machine or dishwasher and it’ll survive. OnePlus demoed this a few times for reporters ahead of the launch, and the phone seemed perfectly fine afterward. I’m obviously going to test the dishwasher theory for myself and I’ll update this review with my results.
🔔 The alert slider lives on. OnePlus has kept one of my favorite design features around for another generation: the alert slider. You can flick between silent, vibrate, and your ringer with a handy switch on the left side of the OnePlus 13, and it’s still as convenient to use as it was on the OnePlus Two nearly 10 years ago.
Display
📱 Predictably pretty. It’s no surprise the OnePlus 13 display looks so good. OnePlus has some of the most underrated displays in the entire smartphone market, and the OnePlus 13 is no different. This 6.82-inch ProXDR AMOLED display with a 3168x1440 resolution and 120Hz refresh rate is stunning. Colors pop, black levels are deep, and everything is pin-sharp. I found it to be as good as the screen on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which says a lot given the widespread praise of Samsung’s screens. It’s also protected by Ceramic Guard, OnePlus’ reinforced glass, so that you have a lesser chance of cracking your screen if you drop it.
💡 It can get insanely bright. One aspect of the OnePlus 13’s display that OnePlus still dominates is brightness. The phone can reach 1,600 nits of brightness on its own, and when combined with auto-brightness and HDR, it can go all the way up to an eyeball-blazing 4,500 nits. That’s ideal for seeing your phone screen on a bright sunny day. You’ll rarely ever reach that level, mind you, but when the iPhone 16 Pro maxes out at 2,000 nits, it’s a bragging right no other phone in North America has.
🧤 Easier to use than ever before. The OnePlus 13 display also stands out thanks to Aqua Touch 2.0 and Glove Mode. The former allows you to use your screen when wet and not experience any accidental touches or other misfires, while the latter increases the sensitivity of the display when you need it in case you have thick gloves on, such as woolen or sheepskin. I wish more phones would add this feature to help make it easier to use your phone in the winter. In addition, OnePlus includes a new technology called RadientView that helps automatically optimize the screen so it’s easier to see in direct sunlight, something I’m a big fan of since I regularly take my phone kayaking in the hot summer sun.
Specs and performance
🏎️ Ultra-fast and responsive. The OnePlus 13 is one of the first phones to ship with the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, and as expected, it’s a beast. It easily gives the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro a run for its money, thanks to its improved performance and efficiency. It’s optimized for handling everyday tasks like a champ, and when it comes time to game or edit videos on the go, it manages to keep up perfectly well. You wouldn’t know the difference between this chip and one of Apple’s chips just by using the OnePlus 13, and the same will likely be true for every other Android phone that includes the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
💾 Enough memory for everyone. This phone comes with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, plus 256GB or 512GB of storage. You won’t experience any performance slowdowns with these compliments to the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and in my usage, they both aided in keeping apps alive in the background, recording 8K videos, and using the device’s AI features (more on that later).
🧊 A chill guy. OnePlus includes its Dual Cryo-velocity VC cooling system on the OnePlus 13, which helps to keep the internal temperature down when you’re doing a lot on your phone. In my usage, I never experienced a time when the phone got too hot to touch or even got warm in the first place. It’s been super chill since I started using it, even when aboard a cruise ship with crappy Wi-Fi and downloading multiple heavy files at once.
Cameras
📸 Upgraded cameras that deliver. OnePlus has done a lot of work to upgrade its cameras and bring them further in line with what you can get from an iPhone or Pixel. For the OnePlus 13, the company has improved the camera hardware with new anti-reflective coatings, a new Dual Exposure Algorithm for collecting more data after you hit the shutter button, Clear Burst for improved burst move photos, Action mode for fast-moving subjects, and more. The result? Cameras that reliably keep up with my iPhone 16 Pro Max and Pixel 9 Pro XL.
Main camera: The main f/1.6 lens easily keeps up with what I was able to capture with my iPhone 16 Pro Max. Daytime photos look spectacular both indoors and out, while the nighttime is easy to capture thanks to the camera’s larger sensor size that lets in more light and detail than previous OnePlus devices. The results are clear photos at night that go toe-to-toe with the best phones on the market.
Ultra-wide camera: The 50MP 120-degree ultrawide camera is also capable of some really nice shots. However, it’s not quite as capable as the main sensor, which is the story for most ultra-wide cameras. It doesn’t collect as much light or detail, which results in slightly worse picture quality, and that also means you’ll be dealing with more artificial smoothing, which looks worse and worse the further you zoom in.
Periscope telephoto camera: OnePlus engineered a thin, compact tetriprism telephoto camera for the OnePlus 13 that supports 3x lossless zoom. That’s not quite as far as the iPhone 16 Pro or Galaxy S24 Ultra, but it still means you can punch in without losing quality. The camera performed well in most lighting situations, and I was surprised to see how well it worked at night thanks to the inclusion of optical image stabilization (OIS). You won’t have to worry about being too far from your subject at night to capture the moment.
Selfie time! (Credit: Max Buondonno / The Shortcut) Selfie camera: The 32MP selfie camera does a fine job at taking selfies and groupies during the day and at night, but I noticed that if you don’t use the on-screen flash in the dark, you’ll get a lot of artificial smoothing that makes photos look like watercolor portraits. Definitely not ideal, to say the least.
🔭 AI zoom (technically) works. OnePlus includes 120x zoom by using the tetriprism camera, software tricks, and artificial intelligence. I tested it on a cruise ship out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and it worked about as well as you’d think: at 120x, everything looks like watercolors, but it’s still neat you can zoom that far. The AI function tried to fill in missing data that it thought was there, but after comparing results with and without AI at 120x, I found it wasn’t worth keeping on, so I disabled it.
🏃♂️ Action mode is really impressive. OnePlus’ Action mode is quite good. The company has a special algorithm designed to detect fast-moving subjects and capture the moment with minimal amounts of blur, and the results are great. You can take a picture of just about anything moving quickly past you and not have a blurry, motion-filled image. Most pictures look like a frozen moment in time, which is neat.
🎥 Video quality is improved, but still behind. I took a lot of videos with the OnePlus 13 in both 4K and 8K, and I found the results to be very good. OnePlus hasn’t aced video quality in the same way the iPhone has, but between the controls you have for the perfect shot and the overall clarity of the shots I took, I have no issue relying on the OnePlus 13 to take a nice video when I need it to.
🟠 Is “Hasselblad” actually worth it? That’s a question I kept asking myself during my review. Sure, OnePlus includes a professional shooting mode that’s reminiscent of the controls on a Hasselblad camera, and you can fake the effects of Hasselblad lenses when taking portraits, which can be fun. But like many OnePlus phones before this, the Hasselblad name doesn’t mean much outside of a few enhancements.
🕯️ Holding a candle to iPhone and Pixel. OnePlus’ cameras have been getting better each and every year, and the OnePlus 13 is the first phone I can report that holds a candle to the best smartphone cameras out there. The entire system gives my iPhone 16 Pro Max and Pixel 9 Pro XL a run for their money, which is awesome to see. If you buy this phone, you won’t have to worry about sacrificing camera quality.
Battery life
🔋 Multiple days. That’s how long the OnePlus 13 can last on a full charge. It’s all thanks to the massive 6,000mAh battery that OnePlus includes which, when paired with the Snapdragon 8 Elite and OnePlus’ efficiency optimizations, can keep going for 2-3 days without needing to be plugged in. Obviously, getting to three days is a bit challenging, but with normal to heavier use, two days is perfectly attainable. Plus, it has great standby time; I’ve left the phone alone overnight at 48 percent and it only dipped to 45 percent by the morning.
⚡️ Incredibly fast charging. Like many OnePlus phones in the past, the OnePlus 13 charges way faster than any iPhone or Galaxy can. The device comes with an 80W SuperVOOC charger that can take it from zero to 100 percent in just 36 minutes. I’ve recharged the phone a few times from dead to 100 percent and it always took less than 40 minutes to complete. I just wish the brick that came in the box was USB-C and not USB-A, but whatever.
💨 Wireless charging is also speedy. The OnePlus 13 also comes with 50W wireless charging, which is achievable by using OnePlus’ new AirVOOC wireless charger. Equipped with a fan to keep it cool, your phone will go from zero to 100 percent in less than an hour, which is wildly impressive for such a big battery.
🧲 No Qi2, and you pay separately for magnets. However, while the charger works with the phone itself, the magnets included for perfect alignment require one of OnePlus’ first-party cases. That’s because the OnePlus 13 doesn’t have Qi2, the new wireless charging standard that’s faster than regular Qi and features magnets in its design. OnePlus wanted to save room inside the phone for the huge battery, so it decided to move the magnets to its cases. That’s a fair compromise, I suppose, but it would be a lot more convenient to just have the magnets built into the phone. Maybe the OnePlus 14 will properly support Qi2.
Software
🫧 OxygenOS is better, but not great. I’ve been very critical of OnePlus’ software over the years after it stopped focusing on a vanilla, Pixel-like experience to one that’s heavily skinned and bogged down with animations. Fortunately, OxygenOS 15 on the OnePlus 13 is the best version of the system in years, but it’s still not perfect. OnePlus has improved animation speed, responsiveness, and the mechanics of the system, but there’s still a lot of childish iconography everywhere and certain UI elements that feel like nothing more than iOS ripoffs. The best parts of the system are all the settings you get to control things like the display and performance, Open Canvas for multitasking (pulled right from the OnePlus Open), and the various Flux Themes.
🤖 OnePlus AI can be handy. Like a lot of companies, OnePlus is trying its hand at some AI features on the OnePlus 13, and my overall opinion is that they’re nice to have. Things like a tool to remove blur from your photos, a message composition assistant, a notes organizer, and smarter search tools for researching information within files are all handy. I will say, though, that I’m not using a lot of AI features outside of Google Gemini on a daily basis, at least not yet. I found the AI functions that OnePlus included to be cool to toy with and use once in a while, but I was never drawn to them as a reason to buy the OnePlus 13.
🔧 Decent software support. OnePlus says it’ll ship four major Android upgrades to the OnePlus 13 and provide six years’ worth of security patches. That’s behind both the Pixel and Galaxy, which get seven years of updates after they ship. Granted, most people aren’t using their phones for that long anyway, but if you’re one who likes to run their phone into the ground before upgrading, you’ll be behind on the latest features sooner than other phones.
Tidbits
Some smaller notes on the OnePlus 13 I have after reviewing it include:
the vibration motor is excellent;
the speakers are loud and clear, although lacking a bit of bass;
the IR blaster is a blast from the past and a fun surprise;
I wish the buttons were a bit more satisfying to click;
and microphone quality for phone calls is solid.
Should I buy the OnePlus 13?
Yes, if…
✅ You want a reliably good phone
✅ You need really good water resistance
✅ You want multi-day battery life
✅ You need a phone that can charge quickly
✅ You like a bright display
✅ You need some seriously good performance
✅ Camera quality is important to you
No, if…
❌ You need the best video quality (get the iPhone 16 Pro or Galaxy S24 Ultra)
❌ You want clean, minimal software (get the Pixel 9 Pro XL)
❌ You prefer buying your phone through a carrier
❌ You want to use your phone for longer than four years (get the Pixel 9 Pro XL)
Max Buondonno is an editor at The Shortcut. He’s been reporting on the latest consumer technology since 2015, with his work featured on CNN Underscored, ZDNET, How-To Geek, XDA, TheStreet, and more. Follow him on X @LegendaryScoop.
Nice review, thanks for sharing. I used the OnePlus 12 for a while and liked it, have used OnePlus phones on and off alll the way back to the OnePlus One.