A High Benchmark For Bargain Phones

OnePlus’ latest flagship wowed us with a stylish package that set expectations high for top-tier smartphones in the year 2025. But lurking under its shadow is the OnePlus 13R, which also redraws the lines for what a phone can accomplish on a tight budget. Starting at $599, this one is essentially a 2024 flagship phone, minus the high-end niceties usually reserved for the top dogs.

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Just like its top-end sibling, the OnePlus 13R also adopts an entirely new design with more minimalist (sharp lines married to flat sides) and a healthy infusion of AI on the software side. The big upgrades include a massive 50-megapixel telephoto camera and a huge battery that puts Samsung and Apple to shame, at capacity as well as juice-up speeds.

There is a lot to like about the OnePlus 13R, but there are also a few areas where it could’ve done a better job. If you are enticed by the premise of a $600 phone that looks sleek and makes bold performance claims, here’s a detailed breakdown of the treats you are in for, and the compromises you will have to make.

Affordable phones don’t have to feel cheap in order to deliver competitive innards. The OnePlus 13R exemplifies that philosophy quite handsomely. What you get on this one is a glass-metal sandwich engineering that includes a layer of Corning’s Gorilla Glass 7i — a first for any OnePlus phone so far — and aluminum on the sides. There’s an extra layer of aluminum underneath the glass shell to assist with heat management.

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I got the Astral Trail trim for testing, which features a beautiful concentric ring pattern. It has a beautiful matte silky finish to it, and the entire package feels really well-crafted. A few Chinese smartphone brands have already served similar aesthetics on their budget phones, but OnePlus’ take feels the most premium so far. A notable change this time around is the flat profile.

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The curved screen and bulging sides are gone, and a flat panel with sharp sides is in. It seems every other brand wants to go all-in on this look, so it’s hard to put OnePlus at fault here for abandoning what many would perceive as a more refined design formula on its premium phones so far. Despite the large camera bump, the weight balance is acceptable and the phone is not as top-heavy as I initially expected.

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It’s good to see the excellent three-stage alert slider on the phone. However, I wish the under-display fingerprint sensor was placed a little higher. In its current position, it requires a rather awkward finger placement to get the authentication done.

OnePlus says it has increased the size of the vapor chamber cooling system inside the 13R by roughly 8%, while the aluminum mid-frame comes with its own built-in firewall design. The idea is to keep the device running cool, with the metal parts leaning a hand with quick heat dissipation away from the device. However, I didn’t see an improvement compared to its predecessor.

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Running a graphic-intensive stress test worth 20 loops, the device got uncomfortably hot across the entirety of the metallic frame. Even the camera bump ran hotter than any phone I’ve tested recently. Thankfully, in general usage, the heat is handled admirably well. Following a marathon session lasting about 55 minutes in “Diablo Immortal” at the peak graphics settings, the phone didn’t climb above the 48-degrees Centigrade (roughly 118-degrees Fahrenheit) mark.

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Ingress protection is another weak area. The OnePlus 13R can only go as far as the IP65 tier, which as per the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) norms, means the OnePlus is only dust-tight and protected against water spills or jets, but can NOT survive immersion.

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That means if your phone falls in a pool, it’ll be wrecked unless you manage to recover it within a matter of seconds and dry it well. Competitors, some of whom are cheaper than the OnePlus device, go up to the IP67 level protection against the elements. Finally, for all that pizzazz that comes with a redesign and premium aesthetics, the wireless charging facility had to be sacrificed on the altar of affordability.

I miss the curved display on the OnePlus 13 and its more premium flagship sibling. OnePlus has always done a good job of avoiding ghost touches, so I never had any ghost input issues on their phones. In the OnePlus 13R’s case, the flat panel doesn’t look bad, and it certainly comes in as a neat bonus that the bezels are uniformly thin. Staring at the screen, you won’t mistake this for any other budget phone out there.

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The OLED panel, with resolution figures of 2780 x 1264 pixels, is adequately sharp. Plus, the underlying LTPO tech means it can adjust the refresh rate value dynamically between 1Hz and 120Hz. Coupled with the new animation engine that ships with OxygenOS 15, this phone offers arguably the smoothest UI experience that you will come across on any phone. The snappy transitions and fluid UX flow make the iPhone 16 Pro appear sluggish.

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With a peak brightness of 1600 nits (going all the way up to 4500 nits), you won’t find yourself squinting to make out the on-screen content even under direct sunlight. Color reproduction is fantastic, and so are the viewing angles. Watching the occasional YouTube video or doom-scrolling social media is a joy,

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A neat bonus is the Aqua Touch tech, which means the phone can also be used with fog or water on the screen. Likewise, the glove mode optimization can handle the touch interactions just fine even if you are wearing leather gloves. Both these features work just fine.

The OnePlus 13R draws power from Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, the same chipset that was also at the heart of 2024’s Android flagship. You get 12GB of RAM on the base variant, and 16GB on the top-end model that we had for review. As expected, you are not going to feel the lack of raw firepower across the board.

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The company OnePlus 13R is also its first phone with a new OnePlus CPU Scheduler that puts less load on the CPU and improves battery efficiency, without taking a toll on the peak performance. Expectedly, my experience using the phone as my daily drive for over two weeks has been unsurprisingly smooth. There are no lags or instances of a frozen UI. Multi-tasking is as fluid as it gets, and so is the situation with games.

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In PUBG Mobile’s BGMI fork, I could play the game with Smooth graphics preset at 120fps, though the real figures usually fall between 112-116 fps on average. Moreover, when the scene gets chaotic with more players popping on the scene, I noticed the frame rates occasionally dropping down to the 90-100 fps range, apparently to avoid thermal throttling. In Diablo Immortal, with all the settings maxed out, the experience was smooth.

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For certain games, such as BGMI, this phone can do frame interpolation, somewhat like Nvidia’s DLSS stack. As far as temperatures go, the phone never crossed the 40-degree Celcius mark, which is acceptable. It runs hotter than the OnePlus 13, especially around the metallic frame, but does an admirable job of cooling down quickly.

OnePlus has made a few sacrifices on its latest sub-flagship phone. The most prominent among them is going with a USB 2.0 port, which means a dramatically lower data transfer bandwidth compared to the USB 3.2 port on the OnePlus 13. Moreover, if you are swayed by the promise of top-tier silicon inside the phone, you will have to enable the maximum performance mode manually from within the battery settings dashboard. Why, OnePlus? A top-end processor is among the biggest draws here. Let users revel in its glory.

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The thermal performance of this phone in benchmarks is rather odd on the Burnout benchmark. For example, it throttles down to 66% of its peak performance, with the CPU taking the biggest hit and dipping as low as the halfway mark compared to its peak output. Running another round of throttling test in a different app lasting half an hour at 40 threads, the performance only dropped to 76% of its peak value. Interestingly, following the biggest dip, the processor regained form and stabilized above the 80% threshold.

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Running the 3DMark Solar Bay Stress test, the OnePlus 13R delivered decent frame stability, but the gulf against a Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered smartphone is as hefty as 20%, or more. For unknown reasons, the ray-traced 3DMark Steel Nomad simply refused to launch. The highest temperature I logged on the phone was 45 degrees Celsius, which is not terrible, especially considering the fast cooling after a demanding session. However, these hiccups can be solved to a large extent via software updates that can optimize the performance and enhance stability, as well.

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On the OnePlus 13R, you get a 50-megapixel optically-stabilized main camera, an electronically-stabilized 50-megapixel telephoto camera with 2x zoom output, and an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera. Selfie duties are deputed to a 16-megapixel front camera. The standout elements, this time around, are a dramatically different color processing science and a dual-exposure algorithm, live photos (inspired by iPhones, with a downright copy-paste of the icon), and plenty of AI.

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Daylight shots are well-saturated with plenty of sharpness and a healthy amount of detail retention. The pictures lean more towards a warmer temperature and stronger shadow depiction. Compared to the OnePlus 12R, there is a lot more character in the pictures, which works both ways, somewhat in the same fashion that Apple and Samsung do their own unique flavor of post-processing.

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What you see in the preview is dramatically different compared to the final shot in the gallery, and it is no exaggeration. Thankfully, focus lock is quick, and subject separation is usually accurate. With stable hands, it can produce fantastic portraits, too.

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The front camera does an admirable job of retaining the fine details on the skin and depicting the real tone, but it often overblows the background highlights. It’s decent for stills, but under artificial light, it can’t quite handle noise as well as the rear cameras and makes the photos look softer than usual. It is serviceable for WhatsApp and Meet video calls, but don’t expect it to shoot polished vlogs that you can directly share on social media.

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There is a noticeable disparity in the colors captured by the three rear cameras. The ultrawide sensor, for example, has a bit of hazy output even under daylight, especially around the periphery, but still does a decent job of preserving chroma highlights.

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Between the other two 50-megapixel sensors, the main camera edges closer to a colder side, while the telephoto camera prefers a warmer (and more pleasing) tone. The algorithmic processing truly shows its true colors when you click pictures of the same subject with the default Photo and Pro models. The latter prefers a lower ISO, while the former takes a heavy-handed approach to saturation.

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At the end of the day, it would boil down to your personal taste: realism or eye-pleasing vibrance. The algorithmic processing, especially denoising and sharpening, is quite aggressive. It can be a hit or miss. There’s also a weird halo effect that is visible in certain close-up shots, especially around finer details such as hair and sharp color transitions.

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Night mode is one aspect where the OnePlus 13R offers the biggest improvement, especially if you prefer high contrast output. The downside is that the moment you zoom, even at the native optical range, an absurd amount of smoothening happens. The telephoto lens also doubles as a macro camera and often delivers stunning clicks. The lack of OIS means focus-hunting is quite evident, but with a bit of patience and manual exposure downscaling, it can produce amazing clicks.

One of the biggest strengths of OnePlus phones has been a large battery and fast charging chops. The OnePlus 13 is no different. On this one, you get a massive 6,000mAh battery, which can last a full day of usage, irrespective of how heavy your usage is.

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I work across four communication platforms, a pair of task management apps, all-day music streaming, social media scrolling, and the periodic sessions of Call of Duty: Warzone interspersed throughout my short breaks. Even with a few days of heavy camera testing, I didn’t have to run for a charging outlet mid-way through the day.

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In terms of gaming uptake, an hour of heavy gaming at peak graphics settings can sip anywhere between 18-26% of battery juice. For casual titles, the battery drain is lower. With less intensive usage, you can even extract two days’ worth of per-charge mileage.

OnePlus bundles the 80W SuperVOOC charger in the box, which is a better deal than almost any other major brand hawking their ware in the US market. Plus, it can top up the massive battery in less than an hour. In my experience, it usually reaches the 60% mark in about roughly half an hour, less time than it takes my seasoned hands to fix a quick egg delicacy.

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To take care of battery longevity, there’s a smart charging mode that pauses top-up at the 80% mark, a facility that you also get on iPhones. Smart charging, on the other hand, pauses fast charging at the same level and fills the remaining tank right before you wake up.

OxygenOS 15 is a major overhaul of OnePlus’ software skin. The system load is 40% lighter, and thanks to what the company calls parallel processing, interactions feel tangibly more responsive. The company is promising four OS updates and six years of security coverage, which is not the best out there, but still a fair deal considering the phone’s asking price.

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The biggest change, and predictably so, is a bunch of AI features. Among them is a universal search system that draws from Apple’s own take. It can look into your system files and answer contextual queries in natural language. It even evens UI pathways, complete with one-tap actionable commands. However, it failed to answer queries based on a PDF research paper, and I couldn’t get it to work despite repeated attempts.

Powered by Google’s Gemini model, you also get tricks like PassScan for directly adding flight tickets to the Google Wallet app, while Magic Compose and Circle to Search pull the exact same tricks as they do on the Pixel and Galaxy smartphones. There are a bunch of AI-assisted editing tools, as well.

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In my tests, the object eraser and reflection removal tools did a surprisingly good job. The AI detail boost feature, on the other hand, merely combined sharpening and denoising, but the results are not dramatically better. If the provided image is visibly grainy, the AI unblur feature comes to the rescue, but don’t expect it to work magic and deliver realistic surface textures. Overall, OxygenOS 15 feels more competitive than ever, and snappier than its rivals.

The OnePlus 13R starts at $599 in the U.S. through Amazon, and for that asking price, it’s hard to beat. The hardware is top-notch, and it’s sufficiently fast to survive the generative AI software onslaught for at least the next couple of years. You are guaranteed top-tier performance, a fairly powerful telephoto camera (which is a rarity in this price bracket for the US market), a massive battery, and a charging pace that is twice as fast as Samsung or Apple’s $1,200 phones.

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The 120Hz OLED display easily outclasses the mainline (and still pricier) Samsung and Apple smartphones, and the cameras, despite their quirks, offer their own unique flavor of vibrant photo capture. The lack of wireless charging, weak ingress protection, and some random thermal hiccups are the only few pitfalls of the OnePlus 13R.

If you are looking at alternatives, the Google Pixel 8A or Samsung’s Galaxy S24 FE are worth a look. But for the sum of its parts — especially at aspects that make or break a good phone — the OnePlus 13R is more competitive and functionally rewarding than any other phone in its price bracket.