The OnePlus 13 is a reasonably priced flagship Android smartphone offered for $899 in the US. It has the latest Qualcomm SnapDragon 8 Elite processor, 12GB or 16GB RAM, 256GB or 512GB storage, and a high-end triple camera system. The increased RAM and storage variant will cost an extra $100. It includes an 80W charger in the box that will fully charge the phone in around 40 minutes. There is also a pre-installed film screen protector that you can choose to remove or not. To hear a full unboxing of the device before reading this OnePlus 13 Review, follow this link.
Table of Contents
Hardware
Build
The device has a very premium build. The Artic Dawn color I purchased has a soft touch glass back with a matte finish. The camera module is one large circular raised area on the back of the phone. There is an IR blaster along the top, a mute/vibrate switch on the left side, and the side key and volume keys along the right side. The volume buttons are above the side key. It has flatter sides than its predecessor, but there is still a slight curve where the glass on the front or back meet the sides. It also has a much improved water resistance over last year’s model, now IP68/IP69 instead of IP65.
Display
The display is nice. I had no issues with touch sensitivity or response and the brightness was good as well. It gets close to as bright as the Pixel 9 series or S25 series. It touts a peak brightness of 4500 nits but you will never see this under normal conditions. This should only kick in when in direct sunlight. I can’t comment on the refresh rate or resolution since neither of these make a difference to me and I just turn them both all the way down right out of the box.
Speakers
There is a downward firing and forward firing speaker like on most phones these days. They seem to sound pretty good to me, but I will let you be the judge. Below is a media playback comparison between the OnePlus 13, Galaxy S25 Ultra, and Pixel 9 Pro.
The sound coming from this phone while using the Accessibility channel for TTS output sounds very thin in my opinion. It doesn’t bother me personally since it gets loud enough and clear enough to understand easily, but I know this type of thing does bother some people. Again, below is a comparison between these 3 devices when it comes to speech output.
Microphones
The microphone is much better on this year’s model. While it is not as good in my opinion as what I am used to with Samsung devices, it is good enough. With the OnePlus 12, I was reluctant to use it to record videos of my family because I didn’t want my memories sounding like they did when recorded with that phone, but I would be fine with videos recorded on the OnePlus 13. Below are samples for your listening pleasure.
Cameras
I won’t say much about the cameras since I can’t comment on the quality, but I will say the camera app is accessible as far as buttons being labeled, although it doesn’t verbalize any face detection like on Pixel or Samsung devices. You can use the volume keys for taking pictures and videos. A short press of either key will take a picture and a long press will start a video recording that will end when you release the key. This shortcut for taking a video can also be triggered even if the camera is in photo mode if you choose to change it to this from the default of burst shot within the camera settings. The only oddity that I noticed is that the button near the top right that should be labeled “Open Menu”, is instead labeled “Subset Off”.
The Mute Switch
This is OnePlus’s standout feature. It is rare on Android phones these days. It is a physical switch on the left side of the device near the top of the phone.
It slides vertically and has three settings. The top-most position is silent, the center position is vibrate, and the bottom-most position is ring. There is or isn’t vibration feedback depending on which mode you have just set. If you set it to ring, you will feel a long vibration. If you set it to vibrate, you will feel a few short vibrations. And if you set it to silent, there will be no vibration feedback. This makes it very simple to adjust the setting and know what it is set to without having to even take the phone out of your pocket.
There is one odd behavior if you are using TalkBack. If you have “Turn off media sounds in silent mode” enabled under “Sound and Vibration” settings, TalkBack will announce “Music volume set to 0%” at whatever volume level you have the accessibility volume set to. So if you plan to put your phone on silent without anyone noticing, you should make sure this setting is disabled.
Bluetooth
The Bluetooth experience while using TalkBack leaves much to be desired. For example, some short TalkBack utterances like certain letters while typing or some one syllable words would just not come through the earbuds at all, especially while swiping fast between items or typing. I had this same problem when using the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, Pixel Buds Pro 2, and the AirPods Pro 2, although the issue seemed to be most prevalent on the Pixel Buds. I tried changing all kinds of bluetooth settings and codecs, but nothing seemed to make a real difference. Your milage may vary with other headsets, but don’t get your hopes up. It is fine listening to or watching media, as well as listening to large blocks of text, but if you are trying to get actual work done, you may be disappointed.
The above issues only occur while media is not playing. This means that OnePlus is not keeping a constant audio stream to the bluetooth device. This can be avoided by installing an app that will play silence while a bluetooth audio device is connected and no other media is playing. The app that has done the trick for me can be found here.
Something nice I noticed in Oxygen OS is that there is a “Sync Volume with Device” switch for each connected bluetooth audio device that is turned on by default. This essentially let’s you disable absolute volume per device (rather than globally) without ever having to go into developer settings.
You may want to turn off the previously mentioned switch to disable absolute volume, because the years old bug is still here where TalkBack’s volume is very low when you reconnect a bluetooth device. Doing this will keep you from having to turn TalkBack off and back on again every time you connect your earbuds.
Haptics
I loved the haptics on the OnePlus 12, and these are just as good (if not better). I actually noticed for the first time while using this phone that there is a distinct type of vibration that occurs when the TalkBack focus lands on a heading. They are very tight but still strong (you feel them more than hear them), but you can tone them down in the settings if you don’t like this.
Biometrics
Face unlock is fast and reliable, and needs barely any light to see you although it will still not work in the complete dark with your screen hidden like on an iPhone.
The fingerprint sensor is great as well. It is one of the best I’ve used when it comes to reliability. The Optical sensor was already great, but it has been upgraded to an ultra-sonic on this year’s model.
There are some slight shortcomings though. First, there is no speech feedback during setup, so you will just have to keep pressing your finger on the screen until you feel a vibration, and keep repeating until fingerprint registration is complete. Second, still present is the bug where if you have a virtual keyboard open when you unlock the phone, it will type whichever letter your finger was touching when you unlocked the device. And it doesn’t matter how fast you remove your finger from the screen. Of course this only effects lift to type typers. If you are a double-tap typer, this will not effect you.
Battery
The upgraded 6000mAh battery combined with the newer, more efficient processor, means that this lasts even longer on a charge. Using it with the screen at full brightness, I can still pull off between 7 and 9 hours of screen on time with this phone. I can’t kill this in a day if I tried. I have actually set it to only charge to 80 percent, and I have only totally drained it in a single day once in the 3 weeks I’ve been using it.
It is also worth mentioning that the charging speeds are ridiculous. Just plugging in for 20 minutes could get it mostly charged. There is an included 80W charger in the box that can do this. Also, an optional 50W wireless charging stand or magnetic charger can be purchased. These will charge the phone wirelessly faster than many other phones can charge wired.
Software and Accessibility
Performance
It should come as no surprise, but the responsiveness of TalkBack is right up there with any other phone I have tried. It is no secret that TalkBack performs better on higher end hardware, and this is just about the highest end you can find on Android at the moment.
Setup
Right out of the gate, there is a glaring accessibility issue. After the phone boots up for the first time and you have held the volume keys to enable TalkBack and have finished or dismissed the TalkBack tutorial, you are stuck before you have even started going. On the introduction screen, the “Get Started” button (or whatever it is called) is not focusable by TalkBack using explore by touch or by swiping between items, and is therefore not clickable. You will actually have to turn off TalkBack or perform a passthrough gesture (which most users don’t know how to do), and then tap the screen where you think the button should be and hope you have guessed right. If it helps, the button is about where the fingerprint sensor on most phones is, maybe a little lower. After this, you can re-enable TalkBack with the volume keys to see if you have successfully made it to the next screen. From this point onward, the setup is pretty strait forward with the exception of the fingerprint registration mentioned earlier.
Launcher
The default launcher is mostly accessible. It has some actions, but you will have to long press on items to get to some functions such as removing an item from the home screen. The most awkward thing is that as far as I can tell, the only way to get to the settings is by doing a pinch out gesture. You will have to put two fingers on the screen and slide them together to get the options like Wallpaper, Widgets, etc to show up along the bottom of the screen. Other then this, it is decent.
Recent Apps Screen (Task Changer)
The recent apps screen is a disappointing mess. If trying to swipe between open apps, it will not automatically scroll the screen for you as it should. You will have to slide two fingers to manually scroll, and then tap the center of the screen with one finger to put the currently shown app in focus. There are also about 7 app icons along the bottom of the screen that are representations of the most recently opened apps that let sighted users find the app they want faster without having to scroll the screen, but these are practically useless for TalkBack users. When an app is first opened and added to the recents screen, these icons along the bottom are given labels, but when the open apps change position in the list, the labels stay at the position they were assigned rather than following the app icon to its new position. In short, even though these icons are labeled, they are usually labeled wrong and double tapping one will result in a different app opening. The recent apps screen does support actions, so I will give it that,. But it is so frustrating to try to navigate that I found myself simply going to the home screen and finding the icon for the app I wanted to go back to.
Vertical Sliders
Oxygen OS 15 has an annoying bug that keeps screen readers from interacting with vertical sliders as they should. This includes the brightness and volume sliders in the quick panel as well as all of the volume sliders in both the standard and expanded volume panels. What happens is that when these sliders are in focus, you cannot simply swipe up or down to adjust them by increments of 5, but you have to instead double tap, hold, and slide up or down slowly. The horizontal sliders for volume and brightness found in the settings app do not suffer from this.
Notification Shade and Quick Settings Panel
When it comes to regular operation, there are no glaring issues other than the previously mentioned sliders. Also, the checkbox to the right of the brightness slider is simply labeled “Brightness”, but should be labeled “Auto-Brightness”.
While using the quick settings panel is straight forward, customizing it is definitely not. There is no accessible way to reorder tiles. They do not have actions, and while you can double-tap and hold then drag to rearrange them, TalkBack will give you no feedback as to where you are putting it. The easiest way to order them is to just add them in the order you want them to be. Simply double-tapping a tile in quick settings will remove it, and double-tapping a tile that is not in quick settings will add it. Also, you will have to manually scroll the pages of available quick settings tiles with two fingers. (More on this in the following section.)
Page Navigation for Some UI Elements
Oxygen OS falls short in accessibility when it comes to some portions of the UI that involve horizontally scrolling pages and I will try my best to explain it and how to overcome it.
First of all, I will say that the following applies to the share sheet when trying to share an item to another app as well as the previously mentioned quick settings editor. These are the areas that I noticed the following issue, but it could also show its ugly face elsewhere.
In these situations, there are a set of icons displayed on a page. Below the page are page indicators. These page indicators are unlabeled and cannot be interacted with. So it will not tell you what page you are on or let you change the page. The reason this is so frustrating is that when swiping through the items on the page, once you have gotten to the last item, swiping will take you to the unlabeled page indicator below rather than going to the next page for you. Even using TalkBack’s scroll gestur/action will not turn the page. You will have to manually change the page yourself by placing two fingers in the area of the page contents and sliding to the left or right.
Fingerprint Sensor Guidance
In Android 15, Google added a feature that directs a TalkBack user which way to move their finger to find the sensor if they have missed it. TalkBack will announce “move up”, “move down”, “move right”, or “move left” accordingly.There is just one problem. OnePlus did not get the memo about this feature. As soon as you touch the lock screen anywhere near the sensor, it will always say “move up”, even if you touch above the sensor. So not only did they not get this feature working correctly, but they didn’t even take the time to disable it.
OnePlus Apps
Although the OS is a mess at times, I didn’t see much issues at all with the built in apps. OnePlus uses the Google Phone and Messaging apps. And the OnePlus stock apps such as Camera, Files, IR Remote, Notes, Voice Recorder, etc. are all very accessible and don’t seem to have many unlabeled items at all.
AI Features
Google Gemini is onboard and can be brought up with a long press of the side key. It works as it should for the most part. The one odd behavior that I came across is that when asking it to turn on or off do not disturb, it will respond by telling you it has, when really it hasn’t. Other than that, it behaves pretty much the same as on other Android devices. (Right down to the ridiculous behavior of TalkBack yelling “List, ask about this screen” while you are trying to ask a question or give a command).
“Circle to Search” is still as useless to screen reader users as it has always been. If you want to use it to perform a Google search containing a single word found on the screen, you are golden. Otherwise you are out of luck.
The “AI Summary” feature can be accessed from the sidebar (by swiping in with two fingers from the right side of the screen near the top of the phone while you are in a Chrome tab. It actually works pretty nicely with TalkBack. However, the summary is presented to the screen reader as a single element, so if you want to read a paragraph at a time, you will have to use reading controls.
The “AI Speak” feature works great as well. It can also be found in the sidebar while using Chrome. All controls are accessible to you. You can choose from between one male and one female voice and adjust the speed from between 0.5x and 2x. There are also buttons to play/pause and navigate forward or backward by paragraph. It will play with the screen off, but does not tie into media controls, so using the TalkBack gestur or earbud controls to play or pause will result in nothing at best. (More likely it will just resume whatever media you were playing previously.
There are AI writing tools that can be accessed from within the Notes app for shortening, lengthening, changing the style of, or proofreading any text you have selected. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work reliably with TalkBack. It seems that the preview that is shown to you is not exposed to the screen reader. You actually have to approve the change to see the results and I couldn’t find a way to undo the change.
There are also AI tools in the Photos app for editing such as detail boost, unblur, object eraser, reflection removal, and so on. I cannot comment on the effectiveness, but I can tell you the controls to perform the tasks are accessible.
Other Features
The OnePlus 13 was not as customizable as I expected it to be. OnePlus has added a lot of features to stock Android, but they have added them the way they want and haven’t allowed too much customization by the user.
An example of this is the fact that there are 3 different shortcuts that can be enabled to quickly access the camera. These include. Drawing an “O” (or a circle) on the screen while the display is off, double-pressing either of the volume keys while the display is off, or double pressing the side key. The problem here is that not one of these shortcuts can be changed to do anything else. This is redundant and a waste of good functionality.
And speaking of screen off gestures, there are 5 possible gestures (excluding media controls) and only three of them can be customized. The other 2 are reserved for the flashlight and opening the camera, and while they can be disabled, they cannot be customized.
Some features would be extremely useful, but are just plain not accessible. One example of this is the quick launch fingerprint feature where if you leave your finger on the screen after unlocking the phone, you can then slide it toward one of up to 5 user defined shortcuts or apps and then release to launch it. But of course this doesn’t work with TalkBack. In order to use this feature, you would first have to perform a pass-through gesture before even unlocking the phone, and then after the phone is unlocked as you are sliding your finger around to select a shortcut, there is no verbal feedback to let you know which shortcut you are about to launch when you release your finger.
One feature I do like however, is the last app gesture they have added to the navigation gestures. This is performed by swiping in from the side of the phone with two fingers and holding until you feel a vibration, and then releasing. If you are familiar with navigation gestures, this works in the same way that swiping up from the bottom of the screen with two fingers and holding until you feel a vibration, and then releasing will take you to the recent apps screen instead of taking you to the home screen if you release quickly after the swipe up.
Another feature I really like is how the power menu is set up. After bringing up the power menu by either long-pressing the side key or pressing both the side and volume up keys at the same time (depending on whether or not you use the side key for Google Assistant), you will then only have to either swipe up with two fingers to restart or swipe down with two fingers to power off. This is the fastest restart or powering off of a device I’ve ever experienced. It also will not ask for you to unlock your device before doing it like Samsung phones require. However, if you prefer this behavior, you can change it in security settings.
This is a good time to mention that OnePlus does modify OS behavior in certain situations while TalkBack is running to help improve the users experience.For example, in the above mentioned power menu, a sighted user would have to swipe up or down directly on the button to perform the action, but with TalkBack enabled, you can swipe up or down with two fingers anywhere on the screen. Also, even if you have the three finger gestures for screenshot related actions in the system settings enabled (which I believe they are by default), they will automatically be disabled while TalkBack is running to prevent interference with TalkBack and the Braille Keyboard. I wanted to mention this since these type of gestures usually cause problems on other manufacturers devices, and even on OnePlus devices in the past.
Accessibility Settings
The accessibility settings are a little more discoverable in Oxygen OS 15 than they have been in the past. They are still hidden one level deep in the settings, but are now found under “Accessibility and Convenience” instead of “Additional Settings”.
I had no issues with using the accessibility gesture. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen with three fingers worked as well on this device as it ever has on any other device I’ve tried.
If you have multiple services assigned to the accessibility shortcut, you will not have to select which one every time you do the gesture or press the button like on a Samsung device.
If you use color inversion, you will not have to worry about the current page refreshing when you invert the colors. This should not even be something I should have to mention, but this is an issue on Pixel devices, so just wanted to say that is not an issue here on this device.
I did notice that the quick settings tile for color inversion is nowhere to be found. It is not available with all of the other tiles to manually add to your quick panel and even assigning it as an accessibility shortcut to the quick settings will not make it appear. So if this is how you invert colors, you will have to do it another way in this iteration of Oxygen OS.
TalkBack has a horrible “feature” on OnePlus devices called “Watermark Prompt”. This is a permanent message on the screen that blocks a good portion of the screen and is meant to let someone sighted know how to turn off TalkBack. It says something along the lines of “TalkBack mode is enabled. To exit TalkBack mode press both volume keys and hold for 3 seconds.” I hate this and if you weren’t able to turn this off, I would not use this phone. To disable Watermark Prompt, go to Settings > Accessibility and Convenience > Accessibility > Vision > TalkBack, and you will find a switch for it on this page. Just keep in mind that you will not be able to get to this setting until after setup, so you will have to deal with it for at least that one sitting. If you are completely blind you will not notice this at all. It does not effect TalkBack usage, but you may still want this disabled depending on how you feel about it.
Notes for Jieshuo Users
Installing Jieshuo Plus or Jishuo Lite with the default package installer will result in you not being able to turn it on at all in my experience. You should instead use a third-party installer such as Skit or similar. After doing this, I was able to run it with no problem.
If installing Jieshuo Lite, it will show up with other “Installed Apps” in the “General” tab of accessibility settings. However, when installing Jishuo Plus, the helper service will show up with installed apps, while the regular Jieshuo Plus service will actually show up in the “Vision” tab of the accessibility settings right along-side TalkBack and Select to Speak.
Conclusion
This is a very nice Android phone, one of the best in my opinion. It, like most devices, has its issues with accessibility, and I hope I have done a good job informing you of these shortcomings and possible workarounds to help you decide if it’s worth taking the plunge.
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