With the global launch of the OnePlus 13, the Shenzhen-based company is putting its best foot forward as it looks to set the tone for what a flagship phone can offer in 2025.
Let’s start with something reassuring. The OnePlus alert slider is still here, with a physical movement. You can move the OnePlus 13 to mute, vibrate, or ring fully without looking at your new smartphone. The alert slider is one of the three key features that OnePlus is known for. The others intensely focus on fast charging and offer premium specifications and features at a price just below the competition.
How will the new global flagship, OnePlus 13, meet the challenge in 2025? Let’s focus on those key elements to find out.
OnePlus 13 Battery Life And Charging
OnePlus was among the first manufacturers to focus on rapid charging and battery capacity. The latter comes in at 6,000 mAh, an impressive number given the svelte design and expansive camera hardware. It’s a dual-cell design, which allows for the faster charging tradition to show up. In the case of the OnePlus 13, the SuperVOOC wired charger offers 100W of power and a flat to 100 percent time of between 35 and 40 minutes.
Wireless charging is not forgotten either, with 50W of power available using OnePlus’ custom AIRVOOC charge. To get the full wireless charging speed, you need to have OnePlus’ magnetic case, which fixes the handset in the correct location for charging. Otherwise, the OnePlus 13 offers standards-compliant wireless charging, so the full range of Qi chargers can be used.
If you want these fast charging options, you’ll have to buy the accessories and chargers separately; like many smartphones, OnePlus does not include a charger in the box.
OnePlus 13 And The Snapdragon 8 Elite
The key to the power of the OnePlus 13 is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite. This is the current “top of the line” chipset, with benchmarking scores that put it ahead of 2024’s Samsung’s Exynos 2400 on the Galaxy S24 family and Google’s Tensor G4 on the Pixel 9 family, both in single-core and multi-core settings.
The OnePlus 13 is one of the first smartphones to ship with it. That gives OnePlus a few months’ advantage over the competition, but note that the 8 Elite will be in the vast majority of flagships by the summer.
However, OnePlus has packed a lot around the 8 Elite, and the alternatives won’t always match that. The first is the option to have 16 GB of memory. The voracious needs of on-device AI will take up some of that space, but the extra 4 GB over several other handsets leaves the OnePlus 13 with more headroom for the future.
In the real world, Genshin Impact is always a great workout for a device. The OnePlus 13 handles 60 fps through this 3D world with only the occasional dropped frame in gameplay. This speaks well to the work that OnePlus has put into keeping the chipset as cool as possible. OnePlus has two vapor chambers inside the chassis, one focused on cooling and one on distributing the heat. There were no uncomfortable temperature spikes evident during my testing of the handset.
OnePlus 13 And The Hasselblad Camera
OnePlus has traditionally been weaker than the competition in terms of the camera. The inclusion of technology from Hasselblad has brought the camera closer to the competition.
The OnePlus 13 comes with a triple-lens rear camera system: a fifty-megapixel main camera lens, a fifty-megapixel ultrawide lens and a fifty-megapixel telephoto lens that offers x3 magnification through a periscope lens. The telephoto lens feels the weakest of the three, but not so far as to let the overall package down.
The Hasselblad contribution is most prominent in the portrait mode with three Hasselblad filters that “replicate classic film styles” alongside filters for the lighting options. It certainly offers an artistic choice you can use on the fly as you take pictures.
Any camera system will be judged based on the choices made by the developers. In the case of the OnePlus 13 camera, a choice has been made to push the exposure levels during processing. This leads to a washed-out feeling, yet in many cases, it feels closer to natural color than the vibrant, saturated photos of older OnePlus models.
There’s a clear desire from OnePlus to deliver in two areas-capturing close-up portrait and personal shots, and fast-moving sports and action shots. Neither of these particularly needs high magnification. Given every phone has to compromise somewhere to get to a realistic price, there’s a solid justification on where to ahem, to focus resources. We’ll have to see what the competition brings over the next few months, but for now, the OnePlus 13 delivers a solid experience.
OnePlus 13 And OxygenOS
OnePlus’ version of Android is OxygenOS. The latest version, built on Android 15, ships with the OnePlus 13 and retains the idea of a stripped-back version of Android with as little clutter as possible.
That’s diluted slightly by the volume of AI packed into the OS, and OxygenOS will make sure you know it’s there. Much of OnePlus’s efforts can be found in photo editing. You have AI Detail Boost, which uses generative AI to upscale images and add in details from tightly cropped new images to older and smaller images, AI Unblur brings a focus back to your pictures, and Intelligent search allows for faster searching of local files and data on the handset.
OxygenOS also taps into the broader generative AI features found in Google Gemini, such as Circle to Search, altering the tone and summarising paragraphs of text, and the vocal interface to Gemini.
One welcome addition to the OxygenOS package is Open Canvas. This first featured on the OnePlus Open foldable, allowing multitasking on the expansive screen. You can choose between a vertical split screen or a floating window on the OnePlus 13, depending on your circumstances.
OnePlus offers four years of software updates and six years of security updates. That falls short of the seven years of software and security you find in Google’s Pixel 9 family. Four and six feels a little short at the flagship level, although from a practical point of view, six years with a single phone, when you are comfortable buying a flagship, may not be a deal-breaker.
Final Thoughts On The OnePlus 13
The OnePlus 13 knows where it wants to be… at the top of a pile of premium smartphones. It has the looks to do so thanks to the vegan-friendly leather surrounding a well-defined camera Island. It has the specifications to match every other smartphone looking to achieve the same. It also has IP68 and IP69 certifications to protect it from water and dust when it gets there.
The camera remains a weak point of the overall package, and we’ve yet to see the advances the competition may offer—going early is both an advantage and a disadvantage for OnePlus. Nevertheless, the OnePlus 13 is a highly competent smartphone that should retain a competitive price advantage once other manufacturers reveal their hand.
Disclaimer: OnePlus provided a OnePlus 13 and accessories for review purposes…
