OnePlus 13 Review: The Smartphone To Beat In 2025

Look, I'm not going to tell you that you should ever want or need to put your smartphone in a dishwasher. But I am saying if you wanted to or needed to, and you had a OnePlus 13, you could; and I did.

Is this an absurd way to talk about a smartphone? Yes. Yes, it is. But here we are. Is this the reason you should buy the OnePlus 13? No, it is not. But it is one of many reasons you absolutely should buy this smartphone. It's the most ridiculous reason, which is why I love it. I don't love every part of this phone, but I love a lot of it.

I would argue, that this generation of OnePlus smartphone is something of a coming of age for this phone. OnePlus has been a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a source of fierce devotion by its fanbase. It's a "local boy done good" in the eyes of its early fans. It's the (insert the name of one of two popular phone makers in the U.S.) alternative phone maker. It can still be all of those things, but all of those sell this phone short. This is a damn fine smartphone in its own right, and I'm here to tell you about it. I've been using a OnePlus 13 review phone provided by OnePlus, and this is my full review.

When I reviewed the OnePlus 11 in 2023, I told you that you should not sleep on this flagship. Last year's OnePlus 12 got a lot of things right for the price. To this day, I stand by those words. But I feel like that was a sort of "old OnePlus" mentality. If I said "don't sleep on the iPhone 16 Pro" you all would very seriously question my reviewer credentials, and phone knowledge in general, and rightly so. It's absurd. Of course no one is going to sleep on the iPhone 16 Pro.

This year, OnePlus has upped its game in a real way. This phone can be and should be compared to the Samsungs and iPhones of the world, because it will compare very favorably to them. It's just as good. That's it; that's the review. Of course, we need to talk about why, and I think by the end, you'll see what I'm talking about. For now, let's dive in.

OnePlus has had the same design language for the past few generations. You get a slim profile with a camera island that is large, round, and not subtle. OnePlus went with a flatter edge that it has in the past, but it retains its glass backplate for two of the three colorways — Black Eclipse and Arctic Dawn (white). My review sample is the Midnight Ocean colorway (blue) but it's a faux leather backplate that is just lovely to hold.

The hardware is typical beyond that point with the power and volume rocker on the right side of the phone and the silence switch on the left. On the front, you get a 6.82-inch LTPO AMOLED QHD+ display with a dynamic refresh rate of 120Hz. Underneath, you can get RAM/ROM configurations of 12GB/256GB or 16GB/512GB. The base model only comes in black, while the premium version can be had in any of the three colorways. Personally, I'm a Midnight ocean fan.

The two main highlights of the phone are the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which was just announced this past October at Snapdragon Summit, and the 6,000 mAh Silicon Nanostack battery with 80W of wired charging or 50W of wireless charging — assuming you use the cable and charger that come in the box. The 50W wireless charger is a separate accessory you can buy for $79.99.

OnePlus also made its flagship phone IP69 complaint, which is a first for a phone sold in the U.S. You're probably familiar with IP68 water and dust ratings. That means that a phone can sit in about three feet of fresh water for up to 30 minutes. The OnePlus 13 adds jet sprays to the mix, and water temperature of up to 167 degrees.

Salt water can still be bad, so if you find yourself in an ocean with your OnePlus 13, you should absolutely try to avoid getting it wet at all, but if you do, be sure to run it under fresh water as soon as possible. But if your phone gets muddy, or dirty, you can go ahead and toss the phone under a hose or into a dishwasher. It can also survive a tumble in the clothes washer if you happen to forget to take it out of a pocket. All of this is assuming the temperature doesn't get above 167 degrees, so keep that in mind as well.

So confident was OnePlus about these claims that it brought a portable dishwasher and washing machine to our briefing and had a phone running in both.

We had a good run, but OnePlus has officially joined the AI bandwagon. The company added a number of different AI-powered features to the operating system like Circle to Search and AI unblur. One neat feature it added is called Reflection remover. If you've ever tried to take a photo through a window or maybe an art exhibit under glass, reflections can be a bit of a pain. Reflection remover removes them, and pretty darn well. The only exception to that is when I took a photo of a cruise ship model in a glass case, and it removed all the reflections except the reflections of the ship itself and you can see below (left is before, right is after).

Adam Doud/SlashGear

Another thing that OnePlus did that it was so very proud of was it rebuilt the way Android animates apps. Specifically, when an app opens, it gets bigger frame by frame until it takes up the whole screen. Well, if you were to return to the home screen and launch a second app while that first was in the process of launching, Android had to kill that other process in the middle and there was a stutter before the new app started to open. OnePlus fixed that so the new process could be started right away instead of waiting a few extra frames for the first one to be done.

To be frank, this doesn't really matter, unless you're someone who continually opens and closes apps to marvel at how smooth the experience is. But it's there now, so marvel away. Everyone else, just go about your business. Still, OnePlus was extremely excited to tell you about it — I can't emphasize this enough — so now I have told you.

This is arguably the best set of cameras that OnePlus has shipped on a phone thus far. They are very good. It's a typical set of triple cameras in terms of the specifications. There's a 50-megapixel main camera for f/1.6 aperture, a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera with 120-degree field of view, and a 50-megapixel telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom. On the front, you get a 32-megapixel shooter with f/2.45 aperture and 90-degree field of view. All of these cameras are quite good, even in low light. You get consistent colors — though the ultrawide tends to overexpose a bit and you can capture exquisite detail.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

If you zoom in to a 100% crop, you can find some pixelation in the darker areas, but you need to go looking. Walking video is also not amazing as the lights go down, but there's a bigger margin where stabilized video is actually pretty good. You don't get a lot of judder you normally would in footsteps when you step inside for example. In total darkness, yes stabilization still has problems, but if you're shooting while stationary, it's quite good.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

Meanwhile, the 32-megapixel selfie shooter is fine, but it's a little bit hazy in most of the shots. Ironically, the only shot in which it wasn't hazy was when I submerged it (and myself) for an underwater selfie. Go figure.

There are two areas of the camera that OnePlus was quick to emphasize — long distance and action shots. In terms of long distance, OnePlus told me to go to 30x, no question. 30x shots will be great. Ok, challenge accepted. My first shot was of the smoke stacks of our cruise ship shot from the beach half a mile away. The two shots below will illustrate. The left photo is taken of the ship from the beach to give context. The second shot is what the phone's camera did when zoomed in.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

The second set illustrates a lighthouse that was over two miles away, on a separate island from our ship's dock.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

Bear in mind — these are relatively squarish structures with straight lines. It'd be pretty easy for a computer to fix up a situation like that. But still, these shots are pretty remarkable.

The other area, action shots comes in when you activate burst mode. The phone takes multiple exposures and combines them into one sharp image. We've heard that before, but OnePlus brought the receipts. These two shots show that functionality off pretty well. The first on the left is a shot from a fountain at a water park where you can see each and every individual drop of water. The second is a splash I made in a swimming pool. 

Adam Doud/SlashGear

I've never seen photos like these processed with results this nice with such consistency. It's really remarkable.

I will tell you the same thing about battery life that I have said about every other OnePlus phone I have reviewed in the past four years — I have no idea what the battery life of this phone is. I can tell you it's really good, but I can also tell you it doesn't matter. OnePlus changes your charging relationship with your phone's battery. The phone can charge from dead to full in under 30 minutes. It can go from 1% to 50% in 23 minutes. If you need to go out somewhere, plug in your phone while you put on shoes and socks and get your coat on — you'll have enough juice to last you all night.

Similarly, with wireless charging, you can charge at up to 50W. Of course, both of these figures assume you are using the OnePlus charging brick and cable (and magnetic wireless charger sold separately) but that's mitigated by the fact that OnePlus ships the brick and cable in the box. The only annoyance with all of this is that OnePlus does not use the Qi2 standard magnets in the phone. "But Adam, didn't you just say that OnePlus has a magnetic wireless charger?" I did, but there are no magnets in the phone.

Rather, the official cases OnePlus makes include magnets in the back. Put simply, this is really annoying. When asked why they didn't just put magnets in the phone, OnePlus indicated that there were several factors that weighed into the decision — cost, antenna placement, and thickness were among them. I am not an engineer, nor do I play one on TV, but as the MagSafe fanboy that I am, I hate it.

The OnePlus 13 also carries the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor — the first in the U.S. to do so, and this processor is a beast. In benchmark testing, the OnePlus 13 beats the iPhone 16 Pro Max in most categories, save Geekbench's single core score — 3,043 for OnePlus and 3,443 for iPhone. The multi-core test (9247 vs 8160) and the 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme stress test best loop scores (24,627 vs 4,225) both handily beat the iPhone 16 Pro Max (and the Mediatek Dimensity 9400 by the way).

In terms of gaming this phone flies. "Genshin Impact" can run at high graphic settings flawlessly. Other games like "Call of Duty: Mobile" and "Asphalt Legends" also run without a hiccup. During the Wild Life Stress Test, I clocked the back of the phone at 116 degrees Fahrenheit, which is definitely hot to the touch, but not so hot that you can't hold the phone. Needless to say, the phone is a powerhouse.

This is one of the best phones I've ever tested in almost every way. This is a bit of revelation for the company. No longer is the OnePlus flagship "good enough" — it's just as good as anything anyone else produces. That's saying a lot. OnePlus has inserted itself into the conversation in a meaningful way.

There are a few minor quibbles that some of the more diehard fans might find to be deal breakers. The lack of true Qi2 is maddening, but it's hard to ding a phone maker for something that no other phone maker has done. Nighttime video is still a weak point, but that's literally every phone's weakest point (from a camera perspective). Beyond that, this phone is pretty great.

Even better, is the price. The OnePlus 13 starts at $899 for the base model and $999 for the next tier up. OnePlus has a number of deals that you can take advantage of including early bird deals, trade in deals, and a free upgrade to the next level of storage. It's available at OnePlus.com, Amazon, and Best Buy.

The bottom line is, this phone offers just as much as anything else you can buy in the U.S. and in most cases, it does so for a little or a lot less money. So, should you buy this phone? Yes. That's it.