OnePlus 13 review: A killer flagship

OnePlus has started asserting itself as a high grade flagship player in recent years, slowly shedding its plucky disruptor status. One or two niggling details kept last year’s OnePlus 12 from reaching its full potential, but the brand seems to be on a mission to sand off those rough edges with the OnePlus 13.

It’s not the most exciting prospect, though genuine excitement is increasingly rare in a mature smartphone market. Rather, the OnePlus 13 is something much more useful – a genuinely excellent flagship phone with few outright weaknesses and a couple of unique selling points.

As an all round package, you really can’t go far wrong with the OnePlus 13. There are a couple of areas that OnePlus could improve upon but even still, this is an early 2025 highlight that I suspect is going to remain there or thereabouts for many months to come.

OnePlus 13 review: What you need to know

The OnePlus 13 is the brand’s big flagship smartphone bet for 2025. It launches alongside the £679 OnePlus 13R, which provides the kind of almost-flagship experience for which the brand used to be renowned.

There’s no ‘almost’ about the OnePlus 13. It runs on the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, together with up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It’s fronted by a 6.82in OLED display with a QHD+ resolution and a peak refresh rate of 120Hz.

While the main camera is the same 50-megapixel (f/1.6) unit as last year’s model, the two back-up cameras have received some attention. There’s a new 50-megapixel (f/2.6) 3x telephoto and a fresh 50-megapixel (f/2.0) ultra-wide camera. It’s a nicely balanced set-up.

OnePlus has ramped things up on the stamina front, with a huge 6,000mAh battery and support for up to 100W wired charging and 50W wireless. It also gains IP68/IP69 dust and water resistance, correcting a long-standing issue with OnePlus phones.

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OnePlus 13 review: Price and competition

Pricing for the OnePlus 13 starts from £899 for a model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The model I’m testing here is the top spec with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, which costs £999. For the first month on sale, OnePlus is running a deal that gets you the latter model for the price of the former.

Taking those RRPs at face value, however, the entry-level OnePlus 13 represents a £50 price bump over the equivalent OnePlus 12, while the top model is the same price. Considering last year’s phone already represented a big price rise over the OnePlus 11, we’re looking at a pretty hefty £170 increase in just two years.

That still makes the OnePlus 13 very competitive with its direct rivals, however. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus (which is arguably the closest in terms of specifications) starts from £999, while the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL costs £1,099.

One company that appears to be making a play for the niche that OnePlus used to occupy is Nubia, and its Z70 Ultra provides broadly comparable specifications for just £649. The OnePlus 13R, meanwhile, gives you a slightly lesser all-round spec for £679.

OnePlus 13 review: Design and key features

OnePlus has only slightly evolved its flagship design language from the OnePlus 12 and the OnePlus 11. You still have a flat, shiny aluminium frame, front and rear surfaces that curve away slightly at the extreme edges and a giant circular camera module that’s distractingly offset to the left.

Gone this time is the wrap-around metal plate that appeared to join the aforementioned camera module to the frame. On one hand, I like how much cleaner this now looks, with a new shiny horizontal strip underlining the low key Hasselblad camera branding. Conversely, this design modification serves to draw attention to how wonkily aligned that camera is – it’s asymmetrical without committing fully to the corner.

The model I’m testing is the Midnight Ocean colour option and I’m a fan of both its deep blue tone and the vegan leather finish. The latter gives it a tactile texture that’s as nice to touch as it is to look at, as well as serving to fend off fingerprint marks. The Black and silvery Arctic Dawn variants come with a glass back.

OnePlus has moved away from Gorilla Glass this year, with the display covered in the same super-tough ‘Ceramic Guard’ as the OnePlus Open foldable. It’s also switched to a more powerful ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensor, which I found to be ever so slightly flaky. Early on, it refused to recognise any of my fingerprints, but a fresh registration process seemed to do the trick. It’s extremely rapid when it works but I experienced a few more rejections than I do with many other brands.

The left side of the phone contains the brand’s signature three-position Alert Slider, which stands out all the more since Apple abandoned its own physical mute switch. The icing on this particular design cake, however, is something that can’t be seen or felt. After years of criticism, OnePlus has finally gotten the message on water resistance. Indeed, it’s gone above and beyond by including both IP68 and IP69 certification, meaning the OnePlus 13 is resistant to more forms of water ingress than any of the rivals we’ve mentioned above. Despite being tougher, though, it’s actually slimmer (8.9mm) and lighter (210g) than its immediate predecessor.

OnePlus’s OxygenOS 15 continues to be one of the fastest and most responsive Android UIs on the market. It’s not the near-stock dream it used to be (it’s essentially an alternate branch of Oppo’s ColorOS), but is more tasteful than Xiaomi’s and less congested than Samsung’s. It’ll only get four major Android updates and six years of security updates, though, which falls short of Google’s and Samsung’s heavenly seven.

OnePlus 13 review: Display

OnePlus has stuck with an ostensibly similar display to last year’s model, with a 6.82in OLED that maxes out at a pin-sharp 3,168 x 1,440 (QHD+) resolution. However, it uses the latest LTPO 4.1 panel, which adjusts its refresh rate between 1 and 120Hz even more responsively than before. It’s mildly annoying that the biggest beneficiary of the LTPO technology, the Always On Display feature, is turned off by default, but that’s a minor quibble.

Brightness remains excellent, with a stated peak of 4,500 nits when viewing HDR content, and 1,600 nits in high brightness mode (HBM). With autobrightness turned off and in a non-HDR scenario, I recorded a top brightness of about 774cd/m2 – a strong result that’s in the same ballpark as the OnePlus 12.

Colour accuracy is similarly strong, and you won’t need to play around in the settings menu to get a nice balanced look. The default Natural screen colour mode does exactly what it says on the tin, outputting rich but realistic tones. I measured an sRGB gamut coverage of 99.9%, a total volume of 106.4%, and an average Delta E score of 1.06, with anywhere around 1 being ideal.

Throw in Aqua Touch 2.0 technology, which makes the screen usable when wet, as well as Glove Mode for when it’s cold, and you have a display that’s fit for any situation. You’re unlikely to find better for the money.

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OnePlus 13 review: Performance and battery life

With the very latest top-end Qualcomm chip installed, the OnePlus 13 delivers impeccable performance. It’s relatively early days but the Snapdragon 8 Elite is already proving to be an excellent runner, supplying top-level benchmark results and impressive efficiency.

Sure enough, the OnePlus 13 decimated both the OnePlus 12 and the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL across our usual suite of CPU and GPU tests. It should be noted that those are phones running on outdated silicon, but the OnePlus 13 also takes the fight to the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and often beats it.

That certainly tallies with my day to day experience of the OnePlus 13. Allied to a massive 16GB of RAM and OnePlus’s well-tuned UI, I didn’t spot so much as a flutter from the phone over a week or two of usage. Meanwhile, current-gen console racing game GRID Legends runs beautifully with high-quality textures installed – bolstered, it must be said, by OnePlus’s excellent haptic system.

We should note that OnePlus phones seem to be artificially restricted to 60fps in GFXBench’s GPU tests – it’s not the only brand to exhibit such a quirk – but the offscreen results are predictably stellar. Elsewhere, sustained performance is solid for a regular flagship phone, but can’t match that of dedicated gaming phones like the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro or the RedMagic 10 Pro with their outsized cooling systems.

Thanks to cutting edge Silicon NanoStack technology, the OnePlus 13’s battery is quite a bit bigger than before. At 6,000mAh, it outsizes most of its rivals, too. Despite this, our looping video test yielded a result that was about an hour short of the OnePlus 12. This could be a quirk of the current build of OxygenOS 15, something to do with that new display panel or processor, or something else entirely.

Still, a score of 27hrs 35mins is nothing to be sniffed at and the phone generally proved to be good for two days of light to moderate usage, even with the display’s resolution and refresh rate forced to the max rather than their default adaptive settings.

Note that while the OnePlus 13 supports 100W wired charging, OnePlus no longer bundles the requisite brick in the box. In my experience, supposedly fast chargers from other brands – even a 120W SuperVooc charger from sister brand Vivo – couldn’t match the official estimate of 36 minutes from empty to 100%.

Partially making up for this is a wireless charging provision of up to 50W, though again, you’ll need an official charger to hit those rates. It’s possible to use magnetised Qi2 chargers with the phone, but given that you’ll need to buy a specific case for the job (which OnePlus didn’t supply for this review) it only warrants a cursory mention.

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OnePlus 13 review: Cameras

OnePlus has stuck with the same trusty Sony LYT-808 50-megapixel (f/1.6) main camera as the OnePlus 12 and OnePlus Open. We had largely positive things to say about this camera before, and that hasn’t changed with the OnePlus 13.

Accompanied by Hasselblad’s punchy colour science, the OnePlus 13 captures sharp, vibrant shots in a whole host of conditions. The colouring might be a little too rich for some tastes, and there was certainly a somewhat hyperreal note to some of the shots that I took, but it’s more of a stylistic choice than a cheap filter effect. Night shots, meanwhile, look remarkably bright and crisp – arguably a little too bright at times, in fact. I would prefer a little more natural shadow to be retained.

OnePlus has put most of its attention into the secondary cameras this year, with new 50-megapixel telephoto and ultrawide offerings. The former provides nice sharp 3x zoomed shots as standard (below), which isn’t the deepest zoom available. However, OnePlus’s hybrid zoom algorithms work well to produce usable 6x and 10x shots.

Things start to get blurry from 20x onwards, with the 120x maximum seemingly included for box-ticking purposes. That’s pretty normal, but it’s fair to say that the OnePlus 13 won’t be giving Samsung, Honor, or Vivo a run for their money in the extreme zoom stakes.

My least favourite camera here is the new 50-megapixel ultrawide. To be clear, it’s not so much an image quality issue, with the sensor exhibiting decent sharpness and minimal edge distortion. It’s more of a colour tone issue, with OnePlus failing to match it up with the other two cameras, producing a much cooler, more processed look.

The 32-megapixel front camera produces pretty good selfies, with that Hasselblad colour science rendering rich skin tones. Portrait mode works nicely here too, producing natural-looking bokeh around a sharp subject.

OnePlus 13 review: Verdict

OnePlus just produced its most overtly competitive flagship phone yet. The OnePlus 13 addresses lingering concerns over water resistance, boasts outstanding performance and battery life and is fronted by a beautifully natural and responsive display.

While OnePlus’s camera provision isn’t the very best around, it’s sufficiently reliable to not be an issue – especially if you like your colours to be just a little larger-than-life. The OnePlus software isn’t quite as clean as it used to be, and more could be done with the company’s update promise, but it handles very snappily indeed.

It’s a shame that OnePlus has issued yet another price bump but you can see where that money has been spent and the OnePlus 13 still represents excellent value compared to some of its pricey rivals.