OnePlus 13 Early Impressions - It's a Beast
A speedy and useful beast
I’ve been using the OnePlus 13 as my daily driver for nearly three weeks now, with the Pixel 9 Pro XL moved to the subs bench. If you’d like the very very short story of my early thoughts, here it is:
A couple of top tier mobile tech reviewers have raved about this phone and called it an early entrant for the best smartphone of 2025. I agree with that take.
If you’re interested in a little more detail on why the OnePlus 13 is such a useful beast of a phone, here are the biggest reasons that stand out so far:
Crazy specs
This phone has bananas amount of RAM - 16GB. I6GB as in more RAM than my work laptop had just a few years back, and more than a lot of people’s laptops - work or personal - have right now. You might ask what good is all that RAM in a phone?, or how will that benefit me while using it? First off, I really enjoy telling people that my phone has more RAM than their laptop. On a slightly more practical front, it allows for more apps running at the same time and (along with the latest greatest Snapdragon 8 Elite Octa-core processor) super fast switching between them.
It has a Six Thousand (!) mAh battery. I have had maybe two days where I saw the battery run down to below 50% by 10:30pm after a full day of heavy usage. Most days it will be sitting at 60-70% at that time of night. On top of that, the US version supports 80W charging (100W for the international version) and per my own and other reviewers’ testing it will charge from 50 to 100% in a little under 20 minutes.
Great performance across the board
Thanks to the Snapdragon CPU, RAM, and its very clean fork of pure Android - running Oxygen OS 15.0 and Android 15, using it is a a smooth and clean experience. The additions that Oxygen OS bring just add to that. It paired with Bluetooth for Google Maps and Spotify as easily as any phone I’ve used, and it gets as good or, in some cases, better cellular speed results than the Pixel 9 Pro.
It’s easy to use
As in, to borrow the Apple mantra, it just works. The display - all 6.82 inches of it - is fantastic, with top tier specs that make it great for viewing text and images and excellent for taking notes on; and for swipe typing and for voice-to-text. It’s obsessively great to read on, and so good when reviewing or creating notes in the evening that I really have to pull myself away from it.
The OnePlus 13 is very light too, and surprisingly easy to hold in one hand. This is great since I have the phone in my hand for relatively long stretches when taking notes at work or working on research. The “vegan leather” back feels great to hold too, and after three weeks it doesn’t have any marks on it at all. The Alert Slider physical button to switch between ring/vibrate/silent mode is another long-time standard nicety featured on OnePlus phones.
I’m not 100% convinced at this point that I won’t go back to the Pixel 9 Pro XL at some point, but I know that the OnePlus 13 is serving me very well right now.