OnePlus 13s review: sets the bar for compact smartphones

The OnePlus 13s proves that compact phones in 2025 can deliver a true flagship experience without significant compromises on performance or battery. At a time when large-screen devices dominate the market, some OEMs continue to bet on smaller form factors, and for good reason. Brands like Google, Apple, and Samsung have been catering to this niche for a while, and now OnePlus has joined the fray with the OnePlus 13s, priced at Rs 54,999. OnePlus is clear that the OnePlus 13s is aimed at buyers seeking a flagship-grade compact, one-hand-friendly device who don’t necessarily need a large display for content consumption.

Verdict

The OnePlus 13s is a solid addition to the brand’s lineup, especially for users who prefer a compact phone without sacrificing performance. It delivers a sharp and vibrant display, dependable cameras, a solid battery life, smooth day-to-day performance, a clean software experience, and useful AI features. While it may not offer the same level of versatility in camera or raw power as some flagship rivals, it strikes a compelling balance between form factor, features, and value.

Design

The USP of the OnePlus 13s is its compact design. The phone measures 150.8 x 71.7 x 8.15 mm and weighs just 185 grams. In comparison, the OnePlus 13 measures 8.9mm in thickness and weighs 210 grams. So, the OnePlus 13s is slimmer and lighter than its flagship sibling. It weighs just as much as the Pixel 9a, another compact smartphone in this segment.

The compactness of the OnePlus 13s makes it comfortable to hold and use in one hand, and also fits in the pocket neatly without creating an ugly bulge. Its flat frame allows for a nice grip even without the silicone cover. The frame and back have a smooth matte finish, and it comes in three colours – Black Velvet, Pink Satin, and Green Silk. We got the Black and Green colourways for review, and they both look great. Black is, of course, an evergreen colour you can’t go wrong with, while Green is a pastel olive green hue that looks subtle rather than jarring.

To add to the symmetry of the flat frame and boxy design, you get a square-shaped rear camera module that sits on the top left. The overall look is elegant. If you’re not looking for a flashy design, the OnePlus 13s will appeal to you.

Plus Key

A few thoughts on the Plus Key – a new physical button that replaces the iconic Alert Slider. There’s no denying that the Plus Key is inspired by the iPhone’s Action Button, and it works similarly: long-press to launch a specific action. You can head to the Plus Key menu in Settings (which also looks similar to the Action Button menu on iPhone) to assign your preferred function, such as saving to Mind Space, switching between silent, vibrate, or ring modes, opening the camera app, starting or ending a recording, translating text, or capturing a screenshot.

By default, my Plus Key was set to switch between silent and ring. While you might briefly miss the familiar feel of the Alert Slider, it doesn’t take long to appreciate the convenience of simply pressing a button to perform the same function. For others, the Plus Key offers versatility, allowing users to customise the button based on the action they find most useful.

Display

The OnePlus 13s gets a 6.32-inch 2640×1216 (FHD+) 120Hz ProXDR LTPO display. The last part means the refresh rate can dynamically switch between 1-120Hz, ensuring battery life is optimised. The display supports up to 1,600 nits peak brightness, which isn’t the highest in this segment. Phones like the Realme GT 7 Pro offer peak brightness of up to 6,500 nits.

Despite a comparatively lower peak brightness on paper, I didn’t struggle to see the display of the OnePlus 13s clearly under direct sunlight. And I say this after testing the phone under a blistering 43 degrees Celsius, clear, summer day in Delhi.

The OnePlus 13s has a gorgeous display, one that delivers excellent sharpness and vibrancy. It’s a display you’ll like watching content on, if you don’t mind the smaller screen size. The flatness of the display and the handy form factor also make it a great phone to game on.

Cameras

Camera is perhaps the only area where the OnePlus 13s felt lacking. While I was quite satisfied with the phone’s primary camera during my recent trip to Malaysia, the lack of a wide-angle lens and a fixed 2x telephoto lens makes the camera system less versatile than what the competition offers. The smartphone is equipped with a 50MP Sony LYT-700 primary camera with an f/1.8 aperture and OIS, and a 50MP 2x telephoto lens.

I took a lot of outdoor photos under intense sunlight in Malaysia and was pleased with the level of clarity and vibrant colour reproduction captured by the primary camera. Photos had impressive contrast, and even tricky backlit scenarios showed good dynamic range. You can also shoot in 4x digital zoom, although you should expect photos to look soft.

The 2x telephoto lens does a good job with details and ensuring colours don’t look too different from the primary camera. However, the biggest problem I had was that it does not offer multiple zoom levels in Portrait mode. This is quite disappointing considering OnePlus provided a dedicated telephoto lens and did not include a wide-angle camera. I feel offering multiple focal lengths in portrait mode should have been included, and it leaves you feeling shortchanged instead.

To see just how good the cameras on the OnePlus 13s are, I tested them in certain scenarios against the Google Pixel 9a, which is considered one of the best camera phones in the segment. I found that the Pixel 9a is still the better camera phone in this segment, but the OnePlus 13s seems to be a close second.

Daylight

While the OnePlus 13s captures impressive details and sharpness (notice the leaves of the bushes), I found the Pixel 9a to capture more accurate, true-to-life colours and was better at handling dynamic range as well. That said, a lot of people are likely to find the bright and punchy image of the OnePlus 13s more appealing than the Pixel 9a’s.

Portrait

OnePlus 13s’ portrait mode is fixed at 2x, and you cannot adjust the zoom level, which is a bummer. Portraits captured appear sharp but overexposed. In comparison, the Pixel 9a’s portrait image does a better job at capturing accurate skin tones and colours of the clothes. Also, the OnePlus 13s background blur is more pleasing than the Pixel 9a’s while both perform averagely with edge detection, neither too bad nor too good.

Low-light

The OnePlus 13s holds up well in low-light scenarios against the Pixel 9a, although I felt the latter performed slightly better in capturing more accurate colours of the sand and grass, contrast, and details of the trees in the background in the image above.

Selfie

Lastly, we come to selfies, where I feel both the OnePlus 13s and Pixel 9a have strengths in different aspects. While the OnePlus 13s captured sharper selfies that showed good facial details along with a natural background blur, the Pixel 9a was able to handle exposure better and also captured more accurate skin tone.

Performance

With the 3nm Snapdragon 8 Elite powering the device, the OnePlus 13s feels incredibly snappy to use. From scrolling through the UI and popular apps like X, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, switching between them without any noticeable lag, and using some of the AI features offered by OnePlus, the OnePlus 13s feels effortlessly smooth and responsive. You can get the phone in 256GB and 512GB UFS 4.0 variants, both paired with 12GB LPDDR5X RAM.

Take a look at how the device compares against a few other Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered phones, as well as the Tensor G4-powered Pixel 9a.

As you can see from the AnTuTu and Geekbench graphs above, the OnePlus 13s is largely at par with its Snapdragon 8 Elite brothers, and surpasses what the Pixel 9a achieves with the Tensor G4. However, the OnePlus 13s shows significant performance throttling under heavy workload in our CPU Throttle test, performing similarly to the Pixel 9a. The Realme GT 7 Pro and iQOO 13 handle sustained performance better.

Throttling test aside, my real-world gaming experience with the OnePlus 13s told me a different story. The phone performed extremely well on high graphics when playing Call of Duty Mobile for about 30 minutes. I noticed consistently stable frame rates during gaming, and the device did not heat up much, ensuring battery drain was minimal.

Software and OnePlus AI

The OnePlus 13s ships with OxygenOS 15 based on Android 15. OnePlus phones are typically well-known for offering a fairly clean and user-friendly UI, and the OnePlus 13s is no different.

OnePlus AI brings a suite of AI features, chief among them being AI Plus Mind. This feature intelligently organises important information saved in your phone and allows you to access it in one centralised location, called Mind Space. AI Plus Mind uses contextual AI to understand saved information, such as detecting a calendar event on your screen and suggesting adding that event to Calendar, summarising information in a screenshot and providing a crisp summary next to it in the Mind Space app, and so on.

AI Search is another feature that can understand queries you type in the search box and will pull up relevant information, as long as it is available in your Files, Notes, Settings, and Mind Space.

AI Call Assistant is an India-exclusive that offers real-time call translation and summarisation. It will simultaneously translate and interpret the languages of both parties on the call for better clarity and understanding at a glance. The feature can be enabled within the dialer app when on a call.

AI VoiceScribe can record, summarise, and translate calls, meetings, and videos in third-party apps like WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, and so on. Simply tap on the VoiceScribe option in the Smart Functions drawer and tap on the Start AI Summary option to begin summarising. Summaries are stored in Notes. I found this feature to be quite useful, and it is also able to translate non-English languages like Hindi pretty well.

Additionally, you get a suite of AI editing tools for photo editing, such as AI Detail Boost, AI Unblur, AI Reflection Eraser, and AI Eraser. I used AI Eraser in OnePlus’ camera app and compared it with Google’s Magic Eraser in Google Photos and found OnePlus’ AI feature more reliable. Check out the image below, where OnePlus’ AI Eraser was able to remove the snail cleanly while generating a crevice in the floor based on the design around the snail, better than what Google’s Magic Eraser managed to do.

In addition to OnePlus’ own AI features, the OnePlus 13s also comes with Google’s AI features like AI Overview in Circle to Search and built-in Gemini assistant. Suffice it to say that the OnePlus 13s has tons of AI features, some of which are worth trying and incorporating into your daily life, while others might not be used as much.

Battery

OnePlus hasn’t compromised on the battery unit in the OnePlus 13s. The device features a large 5,850mAh battery – an impressive capacity for a phone of this size. It’s bigger than other compact phones like the Pixel 9a (5,100mAh) and Galaxy S25 (4,000mAh), and even surpasses some regular-sized phones like the Realme GT 7 Pro (5,800mAh) and Galaxy S25 Ultra (5,000mAh).

What’s even more interesting is that this isn’t a silicon-carbon battery, which is becoming more common as it allows brands to offer larger capacities in smaller footprints. Instead, OnePlus has opted for a lithium-ion battery, and a big one at that, all without compromising on the form factor, which is quite impressive.

Suffice it to say that the battery life of the OnePlus 13s is extremely reliable. While you won’t get two full days on a single charge, the phone will easily last a full day and then some on moderate to heavy usage.

Speaking of charging time, the 80W SUPERVOOC charger bundled in the box managed to charge the phone from 20 to 100 percent in about 42 minutes based on our in-house testing. Unfortunately

Additionally, the OnePlus 13s comes with bypass charging, a relatively new feature that is also present in some Samsung, Google, and Infinix phones. Bypass charging essentially ensures components like the processor and display are powered instead of the battery, thereby reducing heating for extended gaming sessions.

Final verdict

If you’re looking for a compact flagship smartphone in 2025, the OnePlus 13s should be at the top of your list. This smartphone has proved that compact phones don’t need to come with tradeoffs in performance or battery life. The OnePlus 13s not only delivers smooth, top-tier performance but also exceptional battery life.

The USP of the OnePlus 13s is its small and handy form factor, which makes it lightweight and a delight to hold in one hand, and easy to keep in your pocket without creating a bulge. Additionally, the phone’s software experience is as good as ever, if not better now, with some useful new AI features to boot.

Perhaps the only area where the OnePlus 13s feels a bit lacking is in the camera department, which isn’t as versatile as one would have hoped. Despite featuring a reliable primary camera that delivers exceptional photos in daylight, the fact that the telephoto lens has a fixed 2x zoom and there’s no wide-angle lens makes the OnePlus 13s’ camera system feel incomplete.

At this price point, the OnePlus 13s is an easy recommendation if you’re looking for a compact flagship. However, if raw performance is what you’re after, the iQOO 13 (review) should be considered. And if photography is important, the Pixel 9a (review) is still your best bet.

Editor’s rating: 8.2 / 10

Reasons to buy OnePlus 13s:

• Compact and handy design makes it convenient to hold in one hand and easy to pocket.
• Despite being a compact phone, it features a terrific battery life that can easily last a day and then some.
• The primary camera is impressive in daylight scenes.
• It comes with a host of new AI features, some of which can be part of your daily routine.

Reasons to skip OnePlus 13s:

• The OnePlus 13s lacks a versatile camera system as it misses a wide-angle lens.
• The dedicated telephoto lens is limited to 2x zoom.
• No wireless charging for a flagship-grade smartphone.