Oppo Reno13 F Review: The F is for (Ph)enomal Battery Life

The Oppo Reno 13F isn’t the fastest phone you can get in the mid-range right now, but its battery life is exceptional.

Score: 3.5/5

In this review

Oppo Reno13 F Specifications
Oppo Reno13 F Design
Oppo Reno13 F Camera
Oppo Reno13 F Performance
Oppo Reno13 F Battery
Oppo Reno13 F Conclusion

Ethical disclaimer: The Oppo Reno13 F used in this review was loaned to me by Oppo Australia, and it’s going back as soon as this review gets published. As always, that gets it reviewed, nothing more, nothing less. Oppo Australia does not have any editorial oversight or influence on this review. Yes, that should be obvious by now, but I do feel that ethical disclosure is a dying art, and I’m raging against that. For more on Alex Reviews Tech’s editorial policies, see here.

The Oppo Reno13 series covers phones that cost from $599 all the way up to $1,299, which means that there’s a lot of scope for performance differences. The Oppo Reno13 F is the lower-cost entry in the series at $599, which means that it doesn’t get quite all the fancy features of, say, the Oppo Reno13 Pro.

That absolute mid-range space is rife with competing smartphones right now, and honestly, the Oppo Reno13 F doesn’t compare all that well with them in straight line performance stakes – but for some users, it’ll make up for it (and then some) with its exceptional battery performance.

Design

The Oppo Reno13 F is built around a 6.67 inch 2400×1080 120Hz capable display with a holepunch at the top middle of the phone to house its front-facing camera. If you’re the type who fusses about bezels, they’re present but on the minimal side. At 162.2×75.05×7.76-7.82mm and 192g this is a phone on the slightly lighter side for this size.

The Oppo Reno13 F certainly isn’t hard to control.

Controls are located on the right-hand side with standard power button and volume controls, while unlocking is handled either via in-display fingerprint reader or facial unlocking, though this is your typical Android flat faced unlock; I wouldn’t advise you use it for purchase authorisations if you’re wise. The fingerprint reader works well enough in any case.

In Australia the Oppo Reno13 F sells in either “Luminous Blue” or “Plume Purple” finishes; it appears that a third colourway, “Graphite Grey” won’t make it to our shores. Oppo loaned me the Plume Purple version. It’s certainly striking, even thought the rear casing is rather obviously plastic. The benefit here is that it’s mostly fingerprint resistant as a result, plus it’s not vegan leather, which I loathe… but I digress.

The box that the loan model of the Oppo Reno13 F comes in has a cardboard enclosure that could house a case, but for the Australian model at least that’s notably absent. I’d advise you to buy a case for any phone, because they’re such a simple way to protect your investment – and keep your phone running when (not if, we’re all human and gravity isn’t likely to stop working any time soon) you drop your phone.

Water resistance used to be the exclusive purview of premium phones, but in recent years there’s been a shift towards offering IP-rated water and dust resistance in mid-range phones.

The Oppo Reno13 F takes this to a very high level, with IP69-rated water resistance and a strong push towards using the phone as an underwater camera.

Important backside-covering note: What follows is not, strictly speaking, legal advice. I’m not a lawyer, for a start.

The push for underwater photography is interesting from an Australian consumer law point of view, because Oppo does also note that water ingress is not covered by its warranty.

At IP69 you’re far more likely to have your phone survive a dunking in a pool, or even a camera shoot or two that way, but I wouldn’t push it, even though based on what happened to Samsung when it made similar claims which would suggest that you might be able to get some kind of coverage even if you did drown your Oppo Reno13 F.

Camera

Oppo has long sold itself as a camera-centric smartphone provider, and on paper, the Oppo Reno13 F does bring with it some scope for better-than-usual mid-range photography. At the rear you’ll find a triple lens array built around a 50MP wide sensor, 8MP ultra-wide sensor and 2MP macro sensor, while the front-facing selfie camera has a 32MP sensor.

Smartphone photography is more than just a sum of its megapixel counts, of course, but the story of the Oppo Reno13 F’s camera performance is one that can be summed up as adequate, but not great.

At this price point a triple lens array could be in interesting inclusion were it not for the fact that the tertiary lens is that 2MP macro sensor.

There was a period a few years back where it seemed like every mid-range and budget phone threw in a 2MP macro sensor for the heck of it, and most of them really sucked.

I didn’t test the Oppo Reno13 F in a pool, but I did test it in the rain — including some macro work.

Getting this paper bark macro shot took a lot of work — and more than a few failed shots too.

Macro performance here doesn’t entirely suck, but it’s still an exercise in patience getting those tasty-looking close up photos to come out right. At smaller scales and depending on what you’re photographing you may only get the one shot to get it right, too.

Selfies are fine, though I won’t use the Oppo Reno13 F’s Retouch facility to smooth out my wrinkles.
I’ve EARNED those wrinkles!

Otherwise we’re solidly in the space of a mid-range phone in early 2025 (or late 2024, really) when it comes to camera performance.

It’s not as dark around Kirby as you might think. No wonder he’s cranky.

Output is still decent for most simple shots, but if you’re going into more challenging territory like low light or fast motion, you’re likely to come away disappointed, even with the inclusion of “livephoto” shooting, which uses the well-established system of shooting a small quantity of video around each photo if enabled and then choosing the most suitable shot from its capture range.

Oppo Reno13 F Sample Photos

Performance

The Oppo Reno13 F is built around a Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage, expandable via microSD card.

Having recently seen some mid-range models – why yes, Samsung Galaxy A36, I am looking at you – drop microSD expansion, it’s nice to see it here.

Still, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 does sit somewhat behind the times relative to what you can get in current smartphones, even in the mid-range, which did make me wonder how well the Oppo Reno13 F might run in a comparative sense.

The reality here is that while the Oppo Reno13 F isn’t exactly slow, it’s certainly slower than its similarly priced (at the time of writing) contemporaries. Here’s how it compares, for example, using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

It’s the same story too in terms of GPU performance, where the Adreno 710 GPU in the Oppo Reno13 F doesn’t keep up well. Here’s how it compares using 3Dmark:

None of this should be taken to say that the Oppo Reno13 F is an incredibly slow phone; that’s not the case. It’s just that for this kind of money at the point where the Oppo Reno13 F is launching in Australia, you can get phones that are notably more capable, and that has longer-term implications when you look to using a phone for a number of years, which you very much should.

Oppo’s past history with updates for its mid-range phones has often been a bit sketchy, but I’m told by Oppo Australia representatives that the entire Reno13 range, including the Oppo Reno13 F should get five major operating system updates and six years of security upgrades, which is pleasing to see.

Again, comparatively it’s slightly outdone by Samsung’s promise for its 2025 Galaxy A series phones that see six years of both OS and security updates.

Still, it’s a good step and a likely timeframe in which you’d probably look to replace the Oppo Reno13 F with something newer.

On top of Android 15 sits Oppo’s own ColorOS launcher. It has its fans, it has its detractors, and these days I sit somewhere in the middle. I don’t love it for sure, but it’s not a hard launcher to become familiar with, and its longer history in aping the look and feel of iOS may make it more attractive to anyone switching from an iPhone.

Oppo also throws a lot of additional apps into the Oppo Reno13 F. Of course the Booking.com app is there, because that thing infests every Android phone these days, but you also get bunch of Android games, ranging from the rather well known – Candy Crush and Roblox – to some quite bland clones of classic game concepts.

Hands up everyone who wants an “Explosion of the Month” of apps.

Oppo’s App Market is also present (alongside Google Play), and while I appreciate the competition aspect of having multiple app stores available to consumers, it’s still a weird mix of seemingly authentic apps and junk… so honestly, if I were you, I wouldn’t bother.

Sometimes, the jokes write themselves.

Battery

So far, the Oppo Reno13 F hasn’t really acquitted itself all that well, with performance that sits more in the “decent” category rather than “exceptional”, which would typically lead to a phone that I couldn’t recommend at all

However, it does have one last ace up its sleeve. The Oppo Reno13 F packs in a 5,800mAh battery behind its frame, a fair amount larger than the standard 5,000mAh batteries seen in most non-folding Android devices. Larger doesn’t automatically equate to better, but it certainly isn’t likely to hurt.

Battery usage is always variable; the phone owner who only uses it for text messaging is always going to get more battery life out of it than the hardcore gaming fanatics, and I’m yet to find a phone that I couldn’t send flat within a day if I put my mind to it.

To give it some kind of comparative picture, I turn to my standard YouTube three hour streaming test – for more on how ART handles smartphone battery tests, see here. 

This is where the Oppo Reno13 F may redeem itself for some consumers, because those battery life figures really are rather good.

One of my standard comparison points for this test is to see if a phone can last with at least 90% of its battery remaining after one hour of video viewing, because phones that can’t will often struggle to last a single day. That’s a rare scenario to see these days, to be clear, but the reality here is that the Oppo Reno13 F doesn’t even drop below that level after a full three hours of testing, which is deeply impressive.

It’s also one of the few mid-range phones available these days that still ships with a charger, though that’s also because it uses Oppo’s own proprietary “Super VOOC” charging standard.

This delivers power at up to 45W to the Oppo Reno13 F, nice and fast. It’s still USB-C and you can still use other chargers with the phone of course, though they’ll typically run and charge a little slower.

Oppo Reno13 F: Alex’s Verdict

If the Oppo Reno13 F didn’t have its exceptional battery performance, judging it would be easy. While not a terrible phone, there’s not enough here get all that excited about when better performing options are readily available at this price point.

However I’ve long argued that battery life is fundamental to the phone experience, simply because a phone with no power is just a glass brick. If the performance level of the Oppo Reno13 F is enough for your needs, that battery life could tip it into the highly suitable category.

Oppo Reno13 F: Pricing and availability

The Oppo Reno13 F retails in Australia for $599 outright, and will go on sale in Australia from the 27th of March 2025.

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