OnePlus 13s review

OnePlus has been busy copying the currently trending designs in the smartphone market, but honestly, it’s still a looker. It’s clean, it’s sleek, and it’s as symmetrical as a perfectly balanced seesaw. The compact size makes this new design language sing. It’s not just easy on the eyes; it feels rather lovely in your mitts too. Personally, I am not a fan of block-shaped smartphones because the edges dig into your skin. iPhones and Pixels also have the same issue. Bring back curved edges!

The screen is a 6.32-incher, which sounds ample, but thanks to bezels thinner than a supermodel’s patience (just 1.34mm on the sides!), the actual phone is only 71.7mm wide.  This wizardry means you’re getting a viewing area comparable to some 6.1-inch phones but in a more pocket-friendly package. One-handed use? Absolutely. Technically, it’s the same size as the iPhone 16e and Google Pixel 9a, and a little smaller than the Xiaomi 15 and iPhone 16.

 

 

 

 

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The camera bump is not as flush as the Google Pixel 9a, but it’s not as chonky as the Xiaomi 15. So you don’t feel the uneven weight distribution while holding the phone while gaming or when you’re glued to a cat video marathon.

Remember the much-loved Alert Slider? Gone and replaced with a Plus Key. Again, taking a page from the newer Apple iPhone. A long press still lets you flip between ring, vibrate, and silent modes like a seasoned pro. But now, my friends, it’s customisable! Fancy quick access to your camera, a translator, or even a torch for those late-night fridge raids? Bob’s your uncle.

ALSO SEE: OnePlus 13R review

It’s also your hotline to the new AI Plus Mind, but more on that later. It’s an exact copy of Apple’s Action Button, and we miss the alert slider on both smartphones now. However, it’s not multifunctional, which means you can’t assign multiple things to single press, double press and long press actions. The button only works as a long-press action button. Strange.

Historically, small phones meant small power. Less space, less oomph. OnePlus says “Never Settle!” to that, and has apparently re-engineered things from the ground up. They’ve optimised every component to cram more into less, promising performance that is on par with other bigger flagships. Under the bonnet, we’ve got the spanking new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.

To keep things zippy, it starts with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and speedy UFS 4.0 storage. Grid Legends works at a solid 30FPS on this. There’s very little thermal throttling here in real-life usage. The smartphone does heat up after a few racing laps in the game, but Grid Legends is a console game ported to mobile, so we expected this. But surprise! The sheer capability of running this game smoothly is outstanding.

On a technical level, the Snapdragon chip is remarkable, but OnePlus has slapped in a big 4,400mm² Vapour Chamber, which is comparable to those found in much larger devices and keeps the frame rate from dropping or stuttering because of the heat.
How have they crammed all this in? Witchcraft? Nope, it's the "S-Structure".

 

 

 

 

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This involves a redesigned "sandwich" motherboard that improves space utilisation by 30% and miniaturises 355 components to free up even more room. They even tweaked the middle frame to squeeze in an extra 0.8mm of battery width. Don’t believe them? Wait for JerryRig to slice it open.

Now, this is where things get juicy. Battery life in small phones is usually a bit tragic. The OnePlus 13s, however, packs a whopping 5,850 mAh battery. That’s bigger than many larger flagship phones! This, combined with the efficient chipset, means it delivers one of the best smartphone battery life. We’re talking up to 7.5 hours of screen-on time with WhatsApp, social media, email, photography and light gaming. You can squeeze out even more if you’re not gaming a lot. It puts the Apple iPhone 16 and Galaxy S25 battery life to shame.

When you do eventually run low, the 80W SUPERVOOC charging will get you a full day's power in minutes. Plus, there’s Bypass Charging, which powers the phone directly during gaming, reducing heat and battery strain. Clever.

Here’s where the OnePlus 13s starts to feel a little bloated. While we understand that OnePlus is desperate not to miss out on the AI race, the AI feature set released with the OnePlus 13s feels like OnePlus is just throwing AI features at the wall to see what sticks; some ideas are genuinely useful, others raise privacy concerns.

First up is the Mind Space. This works like Nothing’s Essential Space but somehow doesn’t land as well as the competition. The idea here is to use the Plus Key to screenshot anything on the screen and dump it into the Mind Space, where the AI can crawl through it and suggest recommendations like adding stuff to your calendar or giving you a brief of what’s on the screenshot.

ALSO SEE: OnePlus 13 vs Xiaomi 15: Flagship Android shootout

You can save articles, photos and notes here, but I personally didn’t find it any useful than already existing methods on my phone. For example, if I need to find a screenshot, I can simply go to the screenshot album in my Photos app. If there are some articles I want to read later, web browsers have a bookmark feature since dinosaurs roamed the planet.

The Nothing Essential Space is more feature-rich than OnePlus’s attempt. Heck, the Mind Space doesn’t even tap into Google Gemini or ChatGPT looking for answers. It simply tells me what I can already see. I tried using it to find the name of the card set to which my Pokémon card belonged, and only Google Lens could give me that answer.

Other AI features include AI Search, Call Assistant and Voice Scribe. AI Search works inside the Mind Space app and gives you one-line answers to your query. The AI Call Assistant is interesting. It offers real-time call translation and summarisation of your calls. Then there's AI VoiceScribe, which can record, summarise, and translate calls, meetings, and videos within third-party apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube, and supports over 20 languages.  Handy for those of us who can barely remember what we had for breakfast. In all of these AI features, I only found VoiceScribe to be original and useful.

 

 

 

 

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Besides these, there’s also a new Translate app that offers five modes: text, live voice, conversation, camera, and screen translation, again with support for over 20 languages. Again, it’s just a rehash of the Google Translate feature.

You also get the whole suite of Google Gemini features, so you’re not arm-twisted into using only OnePlus’ AI features. Circle to Search, AI Summary of YouTube, Gemini Live with Camera and Screen Sharing, the whole deal is here. It even extends to the Photos app that uses AI Reframe to analyse your photos and suggest better compositions, crops, and filters.  

Now, what’s the catch? Well, OnePlus says that they have plonked a PCC (Private Cloud Compute) somewhere to send your queries to a secure cloud-based server and pull out answers that cannot be reasoned using your smartphone hardware. This is great for getting speedy answers, but OnePlus doesn’t specify what framework it has deployed to keep your data safe and whether or not it can be vetted by outside security researchers, similar to what Apple does.

The OnePlus AI also scans your entire screen when you use it, and then sends it to the cloud to get an AI summary of whatever you showed it. So the Mind Space doesn’t work without internet, and it relies on the PCC to pull answers. From our testing, we’ve found that the Mind Space app and other AI features use the HeyTap service provider to ping Google Cloud for answers.

Essentially, OnePlus has added a layer between you and Google. HeyTap provides internet solutions for Oppo, OnePlus and Realme and has been doing so for a long time. Remember those lock screen ads? That’s from HeyTap. How comfortable you are using the OnePlus AI features depends on you; thankfully, the AI features aren’t all that useful, so you’re most likely to pull back to Google Gemini and ChatGPT for your shenanigans.

A compact phone needs a cracker of a display, and the OnePlus 13s seems to deliver there at least. It’s a 6.32-inch panel with a 1.5K resolution (2640x1216, 460ppi), a dynamic 1-120Hz LTPO refresh rate, and ProXDR. Brightness goes up to 1600 nits in high brightness mode, so squinting in the sun should be a thing of the past, while it can dim down to 1.1 nits for comfortable night-time viewing. It’s got 10-bit colour depth and 2160Hz PWM Dimming too.

Crucially for a phone you might use in, you know, the real world, it features Aqua Touch 2.0. This means even if your hands are wet, the screen should still respond smoothly. There’s also a new Glove Mode for those chilly winter months or motorcycling journeys.

The colour and uniformity are quite impressive on the OnePlus. The smartphone does punch really high brightness, but the punch in colour is not enough to knock out Apple and Google. There’s a bit of colour washing in HDR content, but this is only noticeable to the trained eye. For casual users, you’ll barely be able to notice and welcome this display with open arms (or wide eyes).

The audio, on the other hand, is extremely good. The OnePlus 13s has one of the best stereo separations I’ve heard on any smartphone. It’s outright shocking how they managed to do that, I was certain that the speakers would be the first to get the boot, given the compact size. However, the speakers are loud and have fantastic stereo separation.

At higher volumes, it can get a wee-bit shrill as if the speakers are crying out for more air, but that can be easily overlooked and controlled. I suggest keeping the volume at 80 percent.

Right, the cameras. OnePlus says "flagship-calibre", I say “budget”. The main shooter is a 50MP Sony LYT-700 sensor (1/1.56-inch) with an f/1.8 aperture and OIS, known for good HDR. There’s also a 50MP telephoto lens, good for 2x zoom shots and portraits. Upfront, a 32MP sensor with autofocus handles selfies and video calls.

It inherits the OnePlus 13’s computational photography smarts, including OnePlus Snapshot with its Dual Exposure algorithm for clearer shots of moving subjects, and Clear Burst for capturing fast action at 6 frames per second.  You can also shoot 4K 60fps Dolby Vision HDR video, with Ultra Steady for smooth action shots. 

Now, here’s the rub. While these specs sound perfectly decent, the user prompt itself hinted the camera might not be quite up there with the big boys like the Pixel 9a (renowned for its photo magic) or the top-end iPhones and Samsungs. For a compact phone, this is often where the tightest compromises are made. It sounds like it’ll be a very capable camera system, perfectly fine for your everyday snaps and Insta-glory, but perhaps not the absolute monarch of mobile photography.

In Portrait mode, you can see that the OnePlus 13s has slightly boosted contrast with brighter reds and blues compared to the Pixel 9a and iPhone 16e. The iPhone 16e gives the most consistent and accurate results compared to everyone in this camera test. However, the OP 13s portrait mode is surprisingly neutral compared to the Vivo V50. Even outdoors, the OnePlus 13s beats the Vivo V50 in terms of bokeh falloff, and it lets the highlights remain highlights. The Pixel 9a subdues the highlights tremendously, favouring a less bright image than OnePlus. 

Compared to the Xiaomi 15, the OnePlus 13s completely fumbles. It lacks clarity and sharpness compared to Xiaomi’s portrait mode. The OnePlus 13s also favours warm tones and makes skin reddish, compared to the cooler tones on the Xiaomi. However, Xiaomi overprocess the image with HDR tuning, which looks unnatural.

At 4x Portrait, the OnePlus becomes even worse compared to the Xiaomi 15. The camera simply lacks detail and clarity. And you can clearly see the reddish tones on the OnePlus.

In general point and shoot, the OnePlus 13s lacks clarity and detail. It simply cannot keep up with the competition in terms of camera performance. The Pixel 9a, the iPhone 16e and the Xiaomi 15 all beat it.

The OnePlus 13s has barged onto the scene with a clear mission: to prove that you don’t need pockets like a kangaroo to carry a proper flagship phone. And you know what? It makes a jolly compelling case. The design is smart, comfortable, and refreshingly compact without feeling like a toy.

Performance is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is blistering, especially when paired with that cooling system. The AI features, particularly AI Plus Mind, are probably best left untouched. You can always use Google Gemini, which is faster and better at getting things done, and it can control your IoT devices. The display is bright, sharp, and smooth.

But the real showstopper? That battery life. A 5,850 mAh cell in a phone this size, coupled with 80W charging, is the kind of stuff that makes tech reviewers do a little happy dance. If the real-world figures live up to OnePlus’s claims, this could be the compact phone that finally banishes battery anxiety to the history books. It certainly can outlast the iPhone 16e and potentially even the base Samsung S25 on paper, but real-world mileage will vary depending on your use.

ALSO SEE: Buying Guides: Best premium smartphones in India

Where’s the catch? Well, the camera system, while sounding perfectly competent with its dual 50MP rear setup and 32MP front cam, is the area where it doesn’t quite trade blows with the absolute best in the business, like a Google Pixel 9a or the pricier iPhone 16 Pro and Xiaomi 15. It’s good, but perhaps not the reason to buy this phone if photography is your absolute, number one, desert-island priority.

At Rs. 54,999, the OnePlus 13s is trading blows with the iPhone 16e and Pixel 9a and between the three, the iPhone 16e is a compelling smartphone. However, the storage and charging speeds are better on the OnePlus 13s. In terms of performance, the OnePlus 13s runs circles around the Pixel 9a and has better day-to-day features, barring the camera. It’s a seriously competitive category all of a sudden, and OnePlus certainly is losing its sheen as a flagship killer.