From Bugs to Brilliance: The Real Story of the OnePlus 13 (after six months)

Phone Arena

20 hours ago

And then I remembered about this phone: the OnePlus 13.
When talking about the best phones out there, the OnePlus 13 often is left out of the conversation, but it is not only a great value buy at just $800, it's a great flagship period.
A few things that really make this phone special, but there are also a few shortcomings, so let's talk about the good and the bad of the OnePlus 13 .
The first and most important one is the smooth performance of the UI.
This was especially noticeable after my time using the Galaxy S25 Ultra . I definitely feel like I upgraded with the OnePlus 13 . No matter the yearly Samsung optimizations, there is always a bit of a micro-stutter when using gesture navigation in One UI, and I might be super sensitive to that, but I notice those a lot. None of that on the OnePlus 13 ! Gestures are smooth, the performance is lightning fast, and the interface is free of clutter.I'm also super happy OnePlus is NOT copying Apple as much as Samsung is these days. The new Now Bar on Samsung phones, for example, is probably the worst thing to happen to One UI. Why are my music controls in a tiny bar at the very bottom of the screen? And why are they so tiny? This makes common tasks like switching to the next song in my playlist so much harder. Thankfully, the OnePlus 13 does not suffer from this.
Second, but also just as appreciated as the performance, is the quick charging on the OnePlus 13. This is an absolute game-changer. Especially, if you don't like charging your phone overnight and charge it up in the morning instead. Having the ability to just top up the phone for 20 or 30 minutes and a get full day's worth of battery is absolutely great. Nobody's got a full hour to wait for a proper charge like you have to with most other phones!Just remember that this quick charging only works with a OnePlus charger, and if you try using something like an Anker charger with USB Power Delivery, the phone drops down to quite slow 25 watt speeds.
Third, the OnePlus 13 might just be the best designed phone of 2025. There are two things that elevate it to this level. First, OnePlus offers this blue soft touch finish that feels so much better than your any bland glass and metal design, but even more impressively, this is a big phone that feels much smaller than its screen size. I don't know about you, but my idea of a fun walk does not involve a giant phone dangling in my pocket.
The OnePlus 13 is not only smaller than other flagships, but the slight taper on the back of the phone helps a lot for ergonomics. Plus, you still have almost flat sides, which is very important for durability when you inevitably drop your phone on the concrete floor one day. One more point on the design: it's worth noticing that the OnePlus 13 is very well-balanced, a stark contrast to camera phones from Vivo for example that are top-heavy because of their gigantic cameras, and it feels like you might drop them any second.
Fourth, one software feature is an absolute game-changer. You might think I'm talking about the OnePlus Canvas multitasking (that Android will now basically copy in Android 16), but this is not what I have in mind. My favorite OnePlus software feature is the easy photo sharing with iPhones. This feature is seriously under-rated — just go on a vacation and then try to share all your photos with your iPhone-using friends. You'll understand its appeal right away.
Okay, enough with the praise, the OnePlus 13 is not a perfect phone and I also have some complaints after my time with the phone.
First, the vibration. The first week of using the OnePlus 13 , I couldn't figure out how to have the phone vibrate on a call at all! Frustrating! It turns out that you have an option where the haptics would sync with your tune, but for some reason, that resulted in no vibration at all, and I found myself missing quite a few important calls.
The fix to that was to turn off the haptics sync feature. So far so good, the phone finally vibrates when you get a call, the vibration is so weak, I am still missing important calls and notifications. That's just unacceptable in 2025, and it's strange that OnePlus has not fixed this issue, considering the multitude of complaints about this in online forums. It's also strange because haptics have actually been a key area of improvement for OnePlus. And haptics while typing or even interacting with menu elements are very refined, but they are just too weak for the more important features like... not missing a call.
Second, it seems that this is a widespread problem on Android phones, but font sizes are just messed up.
This has been one of my big frustrations with practically every Android phone I pick up, and there is no way to get the font size just right.
Increasing the font in the system would result in improvements in one app, but oversized fonts in another.
On the OnePlus 13 , I found that text in the browser for some reason appeared much larger and font scaling worked a bit better on the Galaxy S25 Ultra . I don't know what is the solution for that, but Android's font inconsistencies are the one area I really want to see improved in the next Android version.
Third, the camera quality. It's not great. It's not bad either, but definitely not great.
Here, I'm not even talking about some occasional issues with color accuracy or slightly insufficient detail, but bigger problems like... completely losing the focus! I record myself often, just placing the phone somewhere, and on multiple occasions now the phone would just lose the focus and never regain it in videos. That has never happened with me while using other recent flagship phones, and it's just very disappointing missing an important moment on video this way.Then, there are other, more conventional issues I've noticed. For those who record a lot of video, the excessive oversharpening happening with video recordings is something that is a turn-off. In photos, colors are occasionally a bit on the bleak side, and portrait mode photos sometimes have a weird halo effect around a person's face. Fourth, I just hoped battery life would be amazing. After all, having a 6,000mAh silicon-carbon battery gives you sky-high expectations, but either for the particular power management on this phone or for some other reason I am getting just... regular flagship battery life. Not much better than the Galaxy S25 Ultra , which has a 20% smaller battery.Do not take this as me advocating for thinner phones with smaller batteries, though, quite the opposite.
Overall, though, when you compare the price of the OnePlus 13 to other phones, it's an absolute steal. The base model with 12 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage has an MSRP of $900, but realistically you end up paying $800 because of the OnePlus recycle any phone policy which drops $100 off the price.
Would I recommend the OnePlus 13 ? If you can live with the occasional bug in the camera app, I think you can live with its other shortcomings. OnePlus as a brand remains very underrated, and it has a lot going for it.
Let me know your thoughts about OnePlus and its latest flagship in the comments below.