5 things I appreciate about the OnePlus 13R, the new mid-range runner-up

Summary

Alongside its flagship 13, OnePlus released a mid-range 13R smartphone earlier this year.
The 13R provides much of the flagship phone experience at a reduced cost.
While not as high-end as its more expensive sibling, there’s a lot to love about the 13R, from build quality, to software features, and everything in between.

When OnePlus launched its latest duo of premium smartphones earlier this year, the higher-end 13 model naturally received much of the attention. When I reviewed the 13, I praised its design, its best-in-class water and dust resistance, and its performant software package. While I continue to adore the 13, I can’t help but feel that its mid-range sibling, the 13R, deserves some love as well.

The 13R costs a full $300 less than the standard 13, and OnePlus has managed to hit this price point without sacrificing the essentials. At a base asking price of $600, the 13R competes directly with the Apple iPhone 16e, and it sits $100 above Google’s Pixel 9a , the current best mid-ranger. After using the OnePlus 13R in the real world, here are five aspects of the phone that I appreciate daily.

OnePlus 13R

The OnePlus 13R features a bright 6.7-inch AMOLED display, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset with plenty of RAM and storage, and a massive 6,000 mAh battery with 80W fast charging support.

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1 It doesn’t skimp out on build quality

The 13R is machined out of aluminum and tempered glass

When it comes to mobile gadgets, I’m partial to a well-executed external hardware design. Fortunately, despite its mid-range price tag, the OnePlus 13R features a premium fit and finish, with a solid aluminum side rail, and front and back panels made of Gorilla Glass 7i.

Of course, there’s no titanium, next-gen Gorilla Glass Armor, or IP69 ingress protection to be found on the 13R, but that doesn’t stop the handset from looking and feeling like a million bucks. I’m particularly fond of the etched glass finish on my astral trail (white) unit, which catches the light in all the right ways when I’m out and about.

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2 It features cutting-edge silicon

The 13R comes with a powerful flagship Snapdragon chipset

When it comes to shipping its smartphones with powerful processing packages, OnePlus continues to Never Settle. The 13R comes with the same bleeding-edge Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset that powered many of last year’s best Android flagships, including the OnePlus 12 and the entire Samsung Galaxy S24 series.

Qualcomm has since released the all-new Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which provides yet another step up in performance, but the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 remains a performant workhorse for all but the most demanding of workflows. For just about everyone out there — myself included — the 13R offers more than enough performance headroom to last several years into the future.

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3 It doesn’t ship with a lame macro camera

All three rear-facing cameras on the 13R are useful

With last year’s mid-range 12R, OnePlus opted to supplement the rear wide-angle and ultra-wide-angle shooters with a measly 2-megapixel macro lens. We’ve seen this tactic before: the extra optical sensor allows companies to boast of a ‘triple rear camera setup,’ despite the dubious utility of a low-res dedicated macro shooter.

Sensibly, with this year’s OnePlus 13R, the company has elected to kick the unimpressive macro shooter to the curb, in favor of providing a genuinely useful 2X telephoto lens. This new 50-megapixel f/2.0 sensor doesn’t offer the 3X or 5X optical zoom range that I’ve come to appreciate on higher-end smartphones, but it’s more than serviceable for casual photography.

OnePlus 13 in the woods with a purple/yellow background.

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4 Its battery pack is (relatively) massive

There’s a lot of battery packed into the 13R’s relatively thin chassis

Despite the OnePlus 13R’s reasonably svelte 0.31-inch (8 mm) thinness, the phone manages to squeeze in a fairly massive 6,000mAh battery pack under the hood. In my experience, this combination of hardware capacity and software optimizations makes for a phone that always lasts me through the day, despite taking dozens of photos, streaming videos, and navigating via GPS.

The 13R tops up quicker than many higher-end phones, too: at 80W, the phone can charge to half capacity in twenty minutes, and it can reach maximum capacity in under an hour. By comparison, the iPhone 16e lands at around 29W, and the Pixel 9a clocks in at 23W.

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5 Its OxygenOS 15 software skin is top notch

I’m a fan of the 13R’s fluid and feature-rich Android skin

Earlier this year, OnePlus hyped up its OxygenOS 15 software skin that runs atop of Google’s Android 15 operating system. According to the company, one of the main focuses of this software release was to provide a smoother interface, complete with more responsive gestures and cleaner animations.

In practice, the OnePlus 13R is about as silky smooth as any other premium smartphone I’ve ever encountered. Everything is snappy and performant, despite the skin’s abundance of baked-in tweaks and customization tools. In my personal experience, I find OxygenOS to be better balanced in terms of its feature-to-simplicity ratio than, say, Samsung’s OneUI alternative.

This device was provided to Pocket-lint by OnePlus.