OnePlus 13 review: a flagship at last

At the end of the second full day of use on a single battery charge, I truly grasped it: the OnePlus 13 is a damn good phone.

I liked it right off the bat. I’m a sucker for a soft-touch back panel, and the dark blue “vegan leather” had me from the moment I unboxed it. “Touch this phone,” I commanded my friends as we gathered for holiday drinks. The OnePlus 13 isn’t just a looker, either. In two weeks of testing, it has proven itself again and again, with top-tier performance and battery life for days. Literally.

Most nights I set the OnePlus 13 on my bedside wireless charger. New Year’s Eve was different; fireworks threw off my routine, and I wound up camping out on the pull-out bed next to my fireworks-averse toddler. Sleep was fitful and my phone charger was out of reach.

I could have plugged in the phone the next morning, but it didn’t even cross my mind. In fact, I forgot completely about the missed overnight charge until I set it on my charger that evening with 40 percent left. Sure, it was a light day spent on Wi-Fi, but to cruise through two days on a single charge without a care? That’s pretty special.

There were plenty of moments like that as I tested the OnePlus 13 — things that made me sit up and pay attention. I snapped a series of portrait-mode photos of my kiddo running around in dim lighting, and every frame came back sharp. I spent 30 minutes playing my little games while the phone only grew slightly warm. I carried it in some extremely linty pockets and bags, and the vegan leather looks as good as it did when it came out of the box.

This is a true flagship phone, and it comes with a flagship price starting at $899. That’s a jump up from the $799 OnePlus 12, but crucially, the 13 comes with everything I’d expect from a phone at that price: a high rating for dust and water resistance, wireless charging, support from all three major US wireless carriers, and a strong software support policy (four years of OS updates and six years of security support). These are precisely the things that OnePlus hasn’t gotten right in its previous attempts at a true flagship device. It took a few tries to get here, but OnePlus has done it. This is a damn good phone.

The OnePlus 13 is a good phone, but it is by no means a small phone. It’s every bit as big as its 6.82-inch screen suggests it will be. It’s a tight fit getting it into the small outer pocket of my bike bag, and it sticks out the top of the side pocket on my yoga pants. It’s tall, so it’s fairly comfortable in one hand, but reaching the far corner of the screen is all but impossible without two hands on the device. Also, this phone is lighter than its size implies, and more than one person who handled it told me they thought it felt light. 

The slim aluminum rail that runs along the edge of the OnePlus 13 is flat rather than curved this time, which I find easier to grab. I appreciate it every time I pick it up off a table. The phone itself carries an IP69 rating, meaning it can withstand spray from water jets. I don’t often find my phone subjected to spray from water jets, so I’m not sure how valuable that rating is.

More importantly for most people, the phone is also rated IP68 for resistance against water immersion, an area where previous OnePlus phones have come up short. Personally, I sleep better at night knowing that my phone will likely survive a dip in a body of water.

The OnePlus 13 uses Qualcomm’s latest, fanciest chipset: the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The version I’m testing comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, which costs $999 and also comes in arctic dawn (white-ish) or black eclipse (it’s black). There’s a 12GB / 256GB version too, but it only comes in black. Bummer. In any case, the system handled every task I threw at it with ease, including 30 minutes of tooling around my Pocket City 2 city in the 3D-rendered free roam mode which will usually make a phone pretty toasty. The OnePlus 13 was barely warm.

Battery life is another strength, and it’s no wonder why the OnePlus 13 can go so long on a single charge: it has a 6,000mAh cell inside. That’s huge, considering most other Android phones top out around 5,000mAh. It would take a lot to drain the whole thing in a single day; I sure didn’t while I was testing it. I turned on every battery-draining feature I could find: high-performance mode, always-on display, and maximum settings for screen resolution and refresh rate. 

Even with all that enabled, the battery was typically between 60 and 70 percent by the end of the day. Using the default “balanced” performance mode got me through a day with 80 percent to spare. This is a multiday phone battery no matter how you cut it.

Despite its massive battery, recharging is fast because, well, that’s OnePlus’ thing. The phone supports 80W charging with the included charger (the last in-box charger you’ll find with a flagship phone these days) and 50W wireless charging if you pick up OnePlus’ $49 compatible wireless charger. The phone doesn’t support Qi2 charging, but OnePlus has a handful of cases for the OnePlus 13 that include Qi2- and MagSafe-compatible magnetic rings, so you’ll at least be able to use magnetic accessories and charge (slowly) on a Qi2 charger.

The OnePlus 13’s rear camera array is broadly the same as the OnePlus 12’s: a 50-megapixel main camera with stabilization, a stabilized 3x camera, and an ultrawide. You can record up to 8K/24p video with the main camera, and there’s a 32-megapixel selfie camera with fixed focus on the front.

The Hasselblad-branded color calibration that’s been a fixture on OnePlus’ high-end phones over the past few years is here, and it’s generally good. It tends to pump up reds and oranges, especially in indoor lighting, to the point of channel clipping — you’ll know that’s happening when red tones start looking pink. But it handles mixed lighting well and knows exactly what to do with warm golden hour sunlight. Overall, I like the color treatment: punchy without going over the top. 

The OnePlus 13’s camera uses a new Dual Exposure Algorithm that merges a short exposure with a longer exposure to help freeze subjects in low-light conditions — the perpetual smartphone camera problem. This is the kind of approach Apple and Google have been taking for years now, and it’s a welcome improvement in the OnePlus 13. I’m definitely seeing fewer blurry images indoors in dim lighting than I got with the OnePlus 12, especially with the telephoto and the cropped 2x focal length. It finally feels like OnePlus has created a camera that can hang with the best.

The OnePlus 13 is a bit more expensive than its predecessor. But it’s a better phone in some big ways: the camera is meaningfully improved, the water resistance rating is higher, and it’ll receive software support for longer. Battery life wasn’t a concern on the OnePlus 12, but it’s class-leading on the 13. OnePlus is asking flagship money, but for the first time, it has created a phone that feels worthy of that price. 

That said, the competition is strong. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus and Pixel 9 Pro XL — the other leading Big Android Phone candidates — are $999 and $1,099 respectively. And honestly? I don’t think there’s a clear winner between the three of them. 

That’s kind of a new situation, where Samsung’s S-series device has been the go-to premium Android phone for quite a few years running. Google played some major catch-up with the Pixel 9-series, and now OnePlus is in the conversation, too. That’s awesome.

Samsung and Google would have you believe that the AI features exclusive to their phones are indispensable, but I don’t think that’s true — not yet, anyway. The OnePlus 13, of course, offers all the AI features available to high-end phones through Android, like Circle to Search and Gemini, which is plenty. I’d bet that more people care about better battery life than AI tricks right now, and that’s where the OnePlus 13 delivers.  

Google and Samsung both offer richer ecosystems than OnePlus, which is still in the early stages of building out its family of earbuds, wearables, and tablets. That could be a deciding factor between this trio for some people. But setting that aside, we’ve got one more option for a high-end Android phone in the US now, and it’s a damn good one at that.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge