The Oppo Reno13 impresses with beautiful design and top-notch battery life, though it’s not the fastest phone in its price range.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Beautiful design | Could be more powerful for this price |
| High level of water resistance | Lots of included bloatware |
| Decent battery life (and you do get a charger with it!) | No wireless charging |
Score: 3.5/5
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In this review
Oppo Reno13 Specifications
Oppo Reno13 Design
Oppo Reno13 Camera
Oppo Reno13 G24 Performance
Oppo Reno13 Battery
Oppo Reno13 Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Oppo Reno13 used in this review was loaned to me for a couple of weeks by Oppo Australia. That gets it reviewed, plain and simple, with no editorial oversight from Oppo. My opinions are my own, and you probably already know that, but I do feel that ethical disclosure is important. Now, on with the review.
Design
The Oppo Reno13 is built around a 6.59 inch AMOLED 120Hz display with a resolution of 1256×2760, entirely appropriate for this price range. The front-facing camera sits in a standard holepunch array at the top middle, and honestly, from the front, this looks about as generic as any standard smartphone at this size does.
Flip it around, however, and the magic happens, because the Oppo Reno13 really is a nice looking phone. I often rail against the silly prefixes that phone makers drop onto the colour choices for their phones, but here, at least for the model tested in Luminous Blue, Oppo is actually just being descriptive.
The camera bump on the back is ringed in light blue and very cleverly constructed to give it a shining halo effect in most light situations. Honestly, at first I thought that Oppo was wasting battery power with an embedded light on the back, but it’s just smart use of reflective surfaces, while also being quite eye catching in the best possible way. The rest of the phone body is wrapped in a much darker blue hue. I am admittedly a bit of sucker for blue as a phone colour, but this is just plain nice.
I’m presuming that the other available colour for the Oppo Reno13 in Australia, Plume White doesn’t in fact attract peacocks, but I can’t rule it out. It appears that other markets may also have black and purple variants of the Reno13, but here in Australia we just get the two. The Luminous Blue is certainly enough for me, and it’s a nice enough design note to be one of my favourite things about this particular phone.
Controls sit on the right hand side with your standard volume and digital assistant/power button combination. Unlocking is biometric with an in-display fingerprint sensor that’s given me no grief during my review period. The Reno13 supports dual Nano SIM (but no microSD expansion) plus eSIM, again in line with what I’d expect from a phone at its $899 price point.
I would also expect to perhaps see some level of advanced water resistance, and here Oppo once again steps up to the plate and then some.
The Oppo Reno13 is rated at IP69, which means that it’s resistant against quite powerful water jets and immersion. That’s not carte blanche to start living the full Aquaman life with it, to be clear – if you want to know more about why “water resistance” isn’t the same thing as “waterproof” clickhere, or watch the video below.
Camera
The Reno13 packs in a trio of lenses at the rear, headlined by a 50MP f/1.8 wide sensor, 8MP f/2.2 sensor and 2MP Monochrome sensor used for depth sensing only. I do miss the era where phone makers put actual monochrome shooting lenses in their phones, though that was some time back… and I digress. At the front, selfies are handled via a 50MP f/2.0 sensor.
The Reno13 is still a mid-range device, sitting as it does below both the Reno13 Pro and the Oppo Find X8 Pro, but above the recently reviewed Oppo Reno13 F.
It’s a slightly weird mix of lens choices, because the Reno13 F at least gets a macro sensor where the Reno13 situates its monochrome sensor. While the Reno13 F’s macro results aren’t great, I’d typically prefer more lens flexibility than less, especially when I’m paying more.
That being said, the Reno13’s general camera performance is fair within its price range. There’s no onboard zoom, though Oppo’s camera app does provide up to 20x digital hybrid zoom, with predictably worse results the more you push it.
To give that some perspective, while out on a camera testing walk with the Oppo Reno13, I spotted this nearby spider on a leaf. I should point out that I’m not a big fan of spiders, to put it mildly, so I wasn’t keen to get that close even though this was a quite small spider. Still, it provided a good way to put the Reno13’s zoom to the test.
Here’s the standard shot, no problems at all, but I don’t want to get any closer.
At 5x zoom (with a few photo misfires, I don’t like spiders!) the Reno13 does quite well. I think the spider might have spotted me.
At 20x zoom… I’m not sure what that is, but I’m not hanging around any longer in case I make it angry with me.
Oppo Reno13 Sample Photos
Performance
The Oppo Reno13 is built around a MediaTek 8350 processor with – for the Australian model tested – 256GB of fixed onboard storage and 12GB of RAM. While I would prefer microSD expansion, it’s worth noting that 256GB of storage at the Oppo Reno13’s $899 asking price is a pretty decent deal; a lot of the competing handsets at this price come with only 128GB of onboard storage, and in some cases with only 8GB of RAM too.
Oppo uses the exact same chipset in the Oppo Reno13 Pro, but it should be a step above the Oppo Reno13 F with its Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset.
The more relevant comparison here is with phones in or around the Reno13’s price point, however, because if you’re spending $899 on a phone, you’re solidly in the upper tier of mid-range phones and it makes sense to get the best device for your money. So how does the Oppo Reno13 compare? Here’s how it stacks up against similarly priced handsets using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:
The Reno13 is beat out by Samsung’s top tier mid-range phone and Apple’s lowest priced iPhone, though both do cost a little more than Oppo’s effort here. It’s not the best in class, but it’s certainly reasonable at this price point. While the Pixel 9a is due out quite soon, I’ve not yet been able to test that device, though my expectations based on the Pixel 9 suggest that it’s not likely to jump up in performance terms much over the Pixel 8a.
On the GPU front, here’s how the Oppo Reno13 compares against the same suite of phones:
It’s much the same story here, and the reality of using it day to day with a variety of apps is that while it’s not in the premium space (or priced as such) most Android apps will run well enough, as long as you don’t expect to be pushing the edges of higher-tier Android games or similar data-crunching exercises at the highest level.
The Oppo Reno13 is an Android 15 phone with Oppo’s own ColorOS overlay on the top of it. It’s a substantial rewrite of much of what Android does that certainly has its fans, though these days I’m more on the fence about it.
I would prefer a more plain Android look and feel, and having to dig around for certain settings can be a little tiresome, but I can see the appeal of its bright interface with just a dash of iOS style to nod towards ColorOS’ past, where it sat rather resolutely as an iPhone-cloning exercise. In terms of upgrades, Oppo’s promise for the Oppo Reno13 is for five major operating system updates and six years of security upgrades. Competitors such as Samsung and Google are doing just a little better here, though realistically five to six years isn’t a bad span to consider your next phone replacement anyway.
Oppo provides a number of its own applications as well as its secondary App Market, and while I appreciate the idea of expanded consumer choice in where you get your apps, App Market remains a poor cousin to Google Play. The first time you launch it it’ll try to get you to install a number of apps you may or may not want, and it’s notable that any app search in the App Market will also return a number of Google Play store results… at which point you may as well just be using Google Play anyway!
Speaking of unwanted apps, the Oppo Reno13 installs a number of them by default, including the same apps that many phone makers shove onto phones whether you want them or not. So we’re talking the likes of the Booking.Com app, Temu, WPS Office and a range of very bland Android games. You can uninstall them, and I know full well that they’re present because money has changed hands, but I’d dearly love not to have to go through the hassle of getting rid of them, if anyone at Oppo (and, to be fair, a number of Oppo’s competitors) is listening.
The Oppo Reno13 is, strictly speaking, the Oppo Reno13 5G, so it’s capable of running on both 4G and 5G networks in Australia, and potentially lower-scale 2G/3G networks overseas. We’re in sub-6Ghz territory here in performance terms, with the Reno13 hitting my typical 200-400Mbps speed limits on the Telstra network in Sydney, much like any other 5G-capable handset. Network experiences can vary of course, but I’ve had no mobile network complaints with the Reno13 during my testing period.
Battery
It feels like the period where I complain that every single Android phone ships with a 5,000mAh battery might be coming to an end, because the Oppo Reno13 is yet another handset that opts for a slightly larger battery than that standard metric; 5,600mAh to be precise.
Battery life can be highly variable between users and handsets, which is why I mix between anecdotal usage and a comparative YouTube-based battery rundown test.
Also read:
Why you shouldn’t always trust mobile phone battery tests (not even mine!)
Here’s how the Oppo Reno13’s 5,600mAh battery compares:
The Oppo Reno13 performs well in that test, and it does match up with my more anecdotal observations of its battery life. While you could send it flat if you used it intensely for video recording or playing higher-end games with in a day, for most everyday users it should make it through your working day without needing to reach for a charger.
Speaking of chargers, the Oppo Reno13 is one of a rare breed in its price space. Partly because it doesn’t support wireless charging (boo!) but mostly because you do get a charger in the box, specifically one of Oppo’s 80W “SuperVOOC” chargers, along with a USB-A to USB-C cable to use with charging up the Reno13.
It will still work with other chargers, though you might not see the full charging speed with Oppo’s native charger. My experiences over the years have sometimes shown SuperVOOC chargers to be a little fussy charging other gadgets reciprocally, however, but this can vary depending on what you plug into it.
Oppo Reno13: Alex’s Verdict
There’s a lot of really interesting phones that can be yours in that upper tier – between around $750-$1100, roughly speaking – price bracket.
The Oppo Reno13 could be a little more powerful in pure grunt terms, but it serves its price bracket well with decent cameras, great battery life and really stunning design that I do like quite a lot. I will always advocate for the idea that everyone should shop around when buying a phone at any price point, but if your budget sits in this space, the Oppo Reno13 is well worth consideration.
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Oppo Reno13: Pricing and availability
The Oppo Reno13 is available in Australia at an RRP of $899.
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