A Better Android Phone, but Not the Best

OnePlus 13 review: Design

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

The OnePlus 13 is the company’s first indeed waterproof smartphone. It is rated IP69, which means it is protected from a normal dunk in water for up to half an hour and can withstand the pressure of water jets and temperatures up to 80 degrees Celsius. That’s good news for people with hot tubs. OnePlus says you can clean the OnePlus 13 in the dishwasher if the setting is not hot. Yes, I want to try this. But I didn’t because of this review. (My friend, Jason Howell, did the deed on YouTube. The phone still works for him, so.)

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

The OnePlus 13 comes with a 6.82-inch 2K display. The company does a great job on its points with DisplayMate, and in terms of pixels-per-inch, high brightness, and color gamut, the OnePlus 13 does well. But I’m just saying this because it it was said in the middle mine to appreciate. A normal person cannot immediately tell the difference in color accuracy between this phone and the Pixel 9 Pro’s Super Actua, so that’s good news for everyone.

I’m torn between smaller devices with screens under 6.3-inches, so the larger size of the OnePlus 13 feels great in comparison. The only thing that helps me hold it is the MagSafe compatible case sold by OnePlus, which I can use with various PopSocket accessories. The larger phone gets you a 6,000 mAh battery, which is what this phone is all about.

OnePlus 13 Review: Battery Life

The battery lasts forever for a long time. After six days off the charger, it’s still running at about 22%. This with Pokémon Go I keep crying in the background so that I can enter the Community Day. I also watched a lot of live YouTube games to kill the battery and edited some videos to be sent as a meme in the future. I’ve been using Google Chat exclusively on this phone, letting the OnePlus 13 sound whenever I get a message.

I have yet to run the phone through Gizmodo’s full battery benchmark to see how its massive battery fares against the iPhone 16 Pro, the reigning champion on this website. I don’t think it will happen because Apple’s hardware is closed, although OnePlus’ performance was promising. I’ll update this section when it’s done.

Like its predecessor, the biggest find in the OnePlus 13 is that it supports 100W fast charging as long as you use a red charging cable and a charging brick that allows such speeds. OnePlus promises a full battery in 36 minutes this way compared to two hours for the iPhone 16 Pro. But that is if you have all the right tools; otherwise, the OnePlus 13 charges like everyone else. I got the phone down to 13% before I charged it with a standard 30w charger. It only took an hour to repeat.

OnePlus 13 review: Software

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

OnePlus offers iOS-like styles if you want to customize your wallpaper or change the look of icons. You can download icon packs from the Google Play Store for further customization. While this is good, it is not a reason to buy this device. However, it sets the tone for what OnePlus is; it’s still a device that caters to a niche crowd, and I can appreciate its versatility. 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 online. I also like that there is a “beauty mode” built into the camera app; I don’t care who knows. There is a small angle of action in the photos taken with the OnePlus 13, thanks to the 85-degree field of view of its main camera. The colors are always rich, which proves well in photos of places and people during the golden hour. The Pixel 9 Pro’s algorithms are comparatively aggressive in an attempt to produce a natural-looking image.

I prefer the clear images of the OnePlus 13, unless there are too many of them. Then I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d rather have a smartphone produce an image that I can snap with a third-party filter to make it look the way I want it to look rather than produce an image with a strict filter. , which makes it difficult to edit after the fact. Sometimes, the OnePlus 13’s camera algorithms are too aggressive, and things look fuller and yellower than in real life.

I’m happy with the OnePlus 13’s maximum 3x zoom, even though it advertises up to 6x in the camera app. I could see snow on the mountains about 150 kilometers away. There is a 120x digital zoom on offer when you have the phone on a tripod. I’m waiting for the next Samsung Galaxy Ultra to do the zoom test. This is where I wish to see the difference.

OnePlus 13 review: Verdict

I didn’t talk much about the internals of the OnePlus 13 because, for most people, it’s how it works as an everyday device, not the numbers spit out by the 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 cutting Joost Klein’s video clips with InShot to catching Pokémon Go—I plan to use it to run a game in the next month or so as it is full of 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, which is different from OnePlus. This is the first device launched in the US with the Snapdragon Elite platform, but we’ll have more smartphones to compare it to as the year goes on. Feel free to give OnePlus its credit for being first out of the gate.

The OnePlus 13 is worth considering for people sick of Samsung and Google’s race to be Android number one. But it comes with caveats, the most important of which is that it’s not on Google’s timeline for software updates. This can be annoying as Google introduces more Gemini features to Pixel and Samsung devices that play well. But maybe it’s also a selling point for you. For a starting price of $900, you can buy an Android phone that’s all about being a smartphone instead of pushing the future based on artificial intelligence. This phone wants to use the device, which makes it a solid device, even if there is nothing about it that makes me go the way other flagships do.