 "OnePlus 13R Long-term Review: A value-for-money powerhouse")
Pros:
Sturdy build with IP65 ingress protection
Newer design feels slimmer
Powerful processing hardware
Even the base variant comes with faster 256 GB storage
Sharp and bright AMOLED display
Good camera performance, one secondary camera finally gets an upgrade
Impressive battery backup
Latest Android, fluid UI, 4 years of OS updates
Cons:
Colours can be iffy in images captured in low light
Suboptimal placement of fingerprint scanner
Fast charging not fast enough for OnePlus standards
Rating: 4/5
Price: Rs 42,999 onwards
OnePlus phones with the R suffix have been pretty formulaic over the past few generations. Borrow the design from their current flagship phone, use the processor of the previous generation flagship, stick the 50MP + 8MP + 2MP camera trio at the back and you have the new OnePlus R phone. The OnePlus 13R finally bucks that trend to an extent. But one thing the 13R hasn’t tampered with is the value this series offers. What’s new here, what’s good about it, what’s not? Let’s find out.
OnePlus 13R Design: A different design that makes the phone slimmer yet sturdy
Barring the circular camera island at the back, the OnePlus 13R has a very distinct design as compared to the OnePlus 13 as well as the 11R and 12R. The rounded aluminium frame is now replaced by a flat one and the same goes for the display edges. If anything, it borrows design queues from certain Nord phones, not in a bad way. It makes the phone feel a tad slimmer, and it is, without compromising on the sturdiness. The weight still exceeds 200 grams by a small margin but the weight distribution is even. The phone gets an IP65 rated ingress protection, making it dust and splash resistant.
The all matte finish on the frame as well as the glass back keeps the body largely free of fingerprints and smudge marks and makes the phone look elegant. The 13R comes in two colour options - Astral Trail (hard to describe) and Nebula Noir (very dark gray) and both look good; we got the latter for review.
The right edge has the volume rocker and the power button, while the left edge hosts the alert slider.
The button accessibility is fine, but I wouldn’t say the same about the in-display fingerprint scanner, which is inexplicably placed too close to the bottom edge.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsOnePlus has been getting the placement of the scanner spot on (an inch and a half above the bottom edge) for generations, which made it ergonomic. Here, you need to stretch your thumb to access it when using the phone one-handed. This was a completely unnecessary change. The ultrasonic scanner on the OnePlus 13 makes way for a cheaper optical scanner on the 13R; it is quite responsive though. A SIM tray, speaker and a USB-C port can be found along the bottom edge. An IR-blaster is present on the top edge to use the phone as an IR remote control with certain TVs and devices.
OnePlus 13R Display: Excellent display for the segment with HDR support
The OnePlus 13R has a similar sized 6.78-inch display as its predecessor, but unlike the 12R, the display here is absolutely flat and doesn’t curve near the edges. The resolution is still the same with 2780 x 1264 pixels and is now protected by a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 7i. The LTPO4 display has a variable refresh rate ranging between 1 Hz to 120 Hz for a flicker-free experience and better power efficiency. It automatically adjusts the refresh rate depending on the content type as long as you set it to Auto or High. Standard setting limits it to 60 Hz, while High lets you adjust app-specific refresh rate and override the system default.
The display has a peak brightness of 4500 nits and is sufficiently bright even outdoors and for consuming HDR content. Speaking of HDR, the 10-bit display is compliant with HDR10+ as well as Dolby Vision, with Ultra HDR image support. Watching HDR videos from Netflix and Prime Video on the OnePlus 13R screen is highly enjoyable. The colour accuracy is quite good too. You get three screen colour modes - Natural, Vivid and Pro, along with colour temperature adjustments.
While the Natural mode is largely colour accurate and easy on the eyes, some may find it a little dull. In that case, you may try one of the Pro modes - Cinematic or Brilliant, especially the former. Vivid mode isn’t bad either but has slightly boosted colours if you prefer it that way. When using Vivid, use a warmer colour temperature option for better results. There are more display tweaks to play around with if you are game for it. All in all, the 13R display is quite impressive and customisable.
OnePlus 13R Performance: Powerful processing hardware, ample fast storage
Staying true to tradition, OnePlus has opted for Qualcomm’s last generation flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. No complaints there as it is still amply powerful for almost any task you throw at it. You get two variants of the OnePlus 13R, one with 12 GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256 GB internal storage, while the other offers 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage (our review unit). Both variants have UFS 4.0 storage, which I liked, unlike in the past where the base variant (128 GB) had slower UFS 3.1 storage.
There’s nothing new to report about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It has been around for a year and now only surpassed in raw performance by its successor, the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Mediatek’s flagship Dimensity 9400 chips on Android phones. We ran a few synthetic benchmarks to gauge its performance, and see how it compares with its predecessor. In Geekbench 6, the OnePlus 13R scored 2195 and 6532 in the single-core and multi-core tests respectively, similar to the the OnePlus 12 with the same SoC. The OnePlus 12R with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip could go as high as 1470 and 4355 respectively.
The PCMark Work 3.0 benchmark score was again higher at 12437 with the 12R scoring 10847. To test the gaming capabilities, we ran the Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay tests from the 3DMark suite. In the former, the 13R scored 5013 with 30 FPS average, while the OnePlus 12R could get to 3633 with 22 FPS. In the Solar Bay benchmark the 13R managed a score of 8707 with 33.11 average FPS, which is even higher than that of the OnePlus 12, 8255 with 31.39 average FPS. The real world gaming performance of the 13R was also one of the best around, with even the most recent of games running without a stutter at high settings.
The phone didn’t heat up too much either after 30 minutes of gaming. There was absolutely no lag in day to day operations with multiple apps open simultaneously; no surprises there. This phone has two speakers, one behind the earpiece and the other at the base of the phone. Collectively they produce a surprisingly loud and punchy sound output with good stereo separation. The phone is Bluetooth 5.4 compliant and has dual-band WiFi with support for a/b/g/n/ac/6/7 standards. The call quality and reception were perfectly fine during the course of our testing and the phone supports eSIM.
OnePlus 13R Battery performance: Solid battery backup but charging could have been faster
The battery capacity has seen a significant jump from 5500 mAh on the 12R to 6000 mAh here without any significant increment in weight or thickness of the phone (in fact the 13R is slimmer). This can be attributed to the new Silicon Carbon cell used in this phone. It supports 80W fast charging and the company bundles an 80W SuperVOOC charger along. Given the higher capacity battery here, we did expect the charging times to be higher but not as high as we recorded.
Even after enabling Smart Rapid Charging from the Battery section under Settings, it took the bundled charger and cable 70 minutes to take the phone from 1% to 100%. If you disable it, it takes 5 extra minutes, so might as well leave it on. I also tried using an older 80W OnePlus charger with this phone, and the charging times were quite similar. The company states a figure of 52 minutes for a full charge, and while 70 is by no means a deal breaker given the large capacity battery, under an hour would be good to see. Probably a future software update can fix that.
The charging times may be a tad slow for OnePlus standards, but the battery life of the OnePlus 13R gave us no reason to complain. It lasts between a day and a half to two of moderate use with minimal gaming. We already know that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip is as power efficient as it is powerful. So these numbers didn’t surprise us. Of course, extended gaming sessions will drain the battery faster, but it will still last longer than most phones.
OnePlus 13R Camera performance: Good cameras for the segment but there’s scope for improvement in low light
As I mentioned at the start, the last three generations of OnePlus R series phones had a 50MP primary + 8MP ultra-wide + 2MP macro camera combination. Camera department on the OnePlus 13R sees a noticeable upgrade in the form of a 50MP telephoto camera with an ISOCELL JN5 sensor in place of the long redundant 2MP macro shooter. Though modest, the 2X optical zoom it offers is handy and helps in portrait photography too.
The 50MP primary camera on the 13R has a Sony LYT-700 sensor with OIS (optical image stabilisation). The 8MP ultra-wide camera from before has been retained and so is the 16MP selfie camera; neither have auto-focus. Similar to its predecessors, the 13R isn’t blessed with Hasselblad’s colour tuning or portrait photography tricks. Let’s look at how good the cameras actually are.
The primary camera clicks some excellent shots with impressive dynamic range in good lighting. Colours are close to natural and images exhibit a good amount of detail. The main camera does a more than decent job in low light photography too. While the details are quite good and noise is kept in check, certain colour shades like yellow aren’t always reproduced accurately in low light even with Night Mode enabled. Mind you, the image doesn’t look bad at all as long as one doesn’t compare it to the actual subject or lighting.
Interestingly, the colours captured by the ultra-wide camera are a lot more accurate in low light. However, the 8MP sensor cannot capture as much detail as the other two cameras. Same is the case in well lit conditions too. The age of 8MP cameras is behind us, and about time OnePlus looks to upgrade them on some of their tier 2 phones at least if not the more affordable ones. The ultra-wide camera lacks auto-focus and cannot be used for macro photography. However, the telephoto camera can be.
The telephoto camera here is quite versatile. Though the optical zoom is modest at 2X, it can be used to capture some good portrait shots, some decent macros and is quite handy in low light too. The portrait shots have good foreground and background separation, especially with human subjects, and also works reasonably well with other subjects like flowers. The macro shots could have done with a bit more sharpness but they are very much usable and certainly better than what the 2MP cameras on its predecessors could deliver. The selfie camera is serviceable at best.
Moving on to videos, the two 50MP cameras can record videos in 4K resolution at 30 or 60 FPS. The other two cameras go as high as 1080p at 30 FPS. The OnePlus 13R doesn’t support 8K video recording. Super slo-mo 1080p and 720p videos can be captured at up to 240 and 480 FPS respectively. You get OIS and EIS support to compensate for shaky hands only on the main camera. Captured 4K footage looks decent and is very much usable but lacks the contrast and vibrance of more high end phones.
OS and user interface: Latest Android with fluid user interface, with many more updates promised
The OnePlus 13R runs the latest Android 15 with OxygenOS 15 out of the box. OxygenOS is pretty much ColorOS now with a couple of minor OnePlus extras thrown in like fonts and themes. Having said that, it is fluid, free of ads or excess bloatware and remains one of the best Android UIs around with a handful of tweaks to customise it further. The UI is smooth, lag-free and easy to comprehend even if you haven’t used a OnePlus, Realme or Oppo smartphone before.
You now get a bunch of AI tools built-in like ‘circle to search’ and a few image editing options like AI Eraser, similar to Magic Eraser found on Google Pixel devices. One can expect further additions and enhancements as the company has promised four years of Android updates and a couple more years of security updates for the 13R from the date of launch to keep it secure and relevant for long. Samsung and Google commit 7 years for their flagship phones, but four major Android updates isn’t bad at all for a phone selling for about half their price.
Final words:
The OnePlus 13R is priced at Rs 42,999 for the 256 GB storage variant and Rs 47,999 for its 512 GB variant, with a one year warranty on the device and lifetime warranty on the display in case you get the green lines issue. We liked the fact that the base variant of this phone has 256 GB storage, and that too UFS 4.0. In addition, you get flagship-grade processing hardware, a sleek design, sharp display, competent cameras, excellent battery backup and at least 4 major Android updates, making the 13R a good investment for years to come and an easy recommendation for its competitive price tag.
For OnePlus 13R alternatives, you may check our top smartphone picks under Rs 50,000.
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