OnePlus 13R Review: Marathon Battery, But Is It Overpriced?

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The OnePlus 13R is an intriguing smartphone. I’ll tell you now, it’s very good, just like pretty much every phone released these days. We’re at a level now where finding something negative to say is virtually impossible. But the price of the OnePlus 13R is something I’ve been stumbling on.

In this OnePlus 13R review, I’ll be looking into aspects like the camera, battery life (hint: it’s incredible!) and display to determine if this phone is priced correctly, or if there’s better value elsewhere. And I think I’ve got the right conclusion for you.

Specs and pricing

Here’s a quick rundown of the key specs for the OnePlus 13R. The key takeaways are the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, which is fast enough for anyone’s needs, a 6000mAh battery and the 50MP main camera.

Design and display – stylish, bright and feels pricey

Right out of the box, the OnePlus 13R strikes you as a premium-looking smartphone. It is remarkably thin and the brushed aluminium sides finish off a stylish, luxurious look. The bezels around the screen are also pleasingly thin with the display stretching across almost the entire face of the phone.

OnePlus has opted for a square back (a bit like the Samsung S24 Ultra) this year which I much prefer, and they have these wonderfully tactile side buttons which click so crisply in response to being pressed. The whole device has a brilliant feel to it.

Back to that display which is truly excellent. It’s super bright, the colours are vibrant and it feels so smooth to use; opening and closing apps feels like butter. It’s great to watch video on too with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz.

There are a few new features too like an upgraded Aqua Touch to enable you to use the phone with water on the display, and Glove Mode so that the 13R, well, still works when you have gloves on. The only area the OnePlus 13R lags behind is the IP65 rating which should really be at IP68 by now like its flagship brother.

But that’s a minor problem. Just wait until you hear about the battery.

Battery life – marathon levels of endurance

OnePlus is keen to stress the 13R’s battery specs across their marketing and that’s with good reason.

The OnePlus 13R has a huge 6000mAh battery. For comparison, the iPhone 16 Plus has a 4,674mAh battery. Size isn’t everything though. Software and hardware optimisations go a long way to making batteries last longer.

And OnePlus seem to have taken care of that too because the battery life on this phone is utterly incredible.

You get about 23 hours of video playback time but what is especially impressive is the lack of battery drain when the phone isn’t in use. I left it sitting on my bedside table overnight and it genuinely hardly fell a percentage point.

All in all, it is a seriously good battery, especially for a ‘budget’ phone, which has become typical of Android devices (an untypical of Apple’s!). It’s a new bar that competitors are going to have to get near if they want a chance at staying relevant.

Wired charging is at 80W delivering a full charge in about an hour and you can also wirelessly charge at 50W to full in 75 minutes. For a battery that lasts this long, that’s a huge win.

Camera

The camera on the OnePlus 13R isn’t going to blow your mind. Neither will it win any awards for advancing smartphone photography in a unique way. It’s just plain fine. Here are some examples of different lighting.

You get a 50MP dual exposure main camera and a 50MP telephoto lens. That dual exposure is a nifty feature by the way that automatically merges two shots into one for the clearest final image.

This is accompanied by an 8MP ultra-wide camera and a 50MP portrait camera with 2x optical zoom which is the best of the lot.

Are these images acceptable for 679 of your finest British pounds though? I’m struggling to work out an answer to that.

The pricing of the OnePlus 13R puts it in a slightly weird place between budget and flagship. For example, the iPhone 16 costs £799 and takes typically reliable Apple-y photos, while the Google Pixel 8 currently sells for £499 and takes incredibly beautiful photos.

I don’t think the OnePlus 13R matches either of these phones in the images it produces. Don’t get me wrong, the 13R does take good-looking photos and they’re impressively low-noise when you start zooming in, but the consistency is lacking.

In low light, the camera struggles and often ends up brightening the image far too much. Even in conditions that are just darker than ideal, image quality suffers noticeably. The images produced feel quite cold and muted too. This is a point of personal preference but I like the vibrance of the Pixel’s images more. And if you want a more like-for-like comparison, then the Vivo X200 costs about the same amount of money but is definitively better at photography. 

This sounds quite negative but it’s only because the standard of competition is so high and the price threw me off slightly. The OnePlus 13R still takes good photos, it just isn’t my favourite.

Software and AI

Things pick back up again for the OnePlus 13R with the software. OxygenOS 15 is based on Android 15 and is beautifully smooth to use, much like most top-end Android phones are these days.

OnePlus has also boarded the AI train with the 13R, incorporating Google Gemini to add a variety of now-familiar features like note summaries, generative writing, image editing and Circle to Search.

It all works smoothly from a user interface perspective and the results you get are about as useful as any other smartphone AI system.

Conclusion

And so I return to the question in the title of this post; is the OnePlus 13R priced correctly? In other words, is it worth buying?

I’m coming down on the side of yes – but only just. 

What pushes the OnePlus 13R over the line is the frankly mindblowing battery, the display and the build quality. Yes, the camera could be better but it does the job and you get a lot of other things for your money if you do opt for this phone. If the camera is a deal breaker, then the OnePlus 13 is also there with a more refined system.

With all that being said about value for money, the Pixel 8 at £499 is incredibly hard to overlook if you want something in this sub-flagship, above-budget price range.