One glance at our best phone battery life list should tell you that the latest phones from OnePlus last a very long time on a charge. Sticking to just the top three slots, you'll see that the OnePlus 13 and OnePlus 13R occupy two of them. And you don't have to scan very far down the last to find their predecessors, either.
That's impressive. And I got a first-hand glimpse of just how impressive it can be when I picked up the OnePlus 13R the other day.
How long the OnePlus 13R lasts
It's fair to say I spent a lot of time earlier this month with the new midrange phone from OnePlus, testing things out for my OnePlus 13R review. But my time with the phone didn't stop there, as I continued OnePlus 13R vs. Pixel 8a head-to-head testing, including a 200-photo shootout with both phones.
And then, a little more than a week ago, I set down the OnePlus 13R in my pile of test phones to concentrate on other things — the Galaxy S25 launch mostly, but I wrote about a few other devices in that time.
Just the other day, my colleague John Velasco asked me about a OnePlus 13R feature and rather than rely on my shaky memory, I went to retrieve the OnePlus 13R eight days or so after tossing it onto Mount Phone-more and leaving it be. I figured I'd have to recharge the phone to double-check on the answer to John's question. I figured wrong.
The OnePlus 13R still had charge. Eight, maybe nine days after I used it last, and it still had enough battery life to check the thing I needed to.
Now, that's impressive battery life.
I will grant you that the average person is unlikely to repeat this experiment in daily phone usage. Even if you are looking to cut back on your screen time, you are probably not about to walk away from your phone for a week. But isn't nice to know that if you did, it would still be ready to go?
Looking at it from another perspective, my experiment in benign neglect with the OnePlus 13R provides a nice complement to the battery test that Tom's Guide runs on the phones we review. That test takes things to the other extreme, forcing phones to surf the web continuously over cellular until they run out of power. For the record, the OnePlus 13R will last just shy of 19 hours on a charge when you put it through that kind of use.
Why battery life matters
Of course, you probably would be just as unlikely to use your phone without pause for 18-plus hours as you would be to leave it alone for days at a time. Instead, your usage pattern is going to wind up somewhere in the middle — a burst of activity followed by periods where you leave your phone unused. In that scenario, I think it'd be safe to include that you can probably go a day or so without having to worry about recharging your OnePlus 13. (And with the OnePlus 13 lasting even longer on our test, you'd be safe making that claim for either new OnePlus device.)
We all place different ranks on what's important to us in a smartphone, but I think having a long lasting device is near the top of most people's list. If that's the case, 2025 is off to a great start on the battery front, as a lot of the phones we've been testing — chiefly, the OnePlus devices, but also the Galaxy S25 Ultra battery now that Samsung has announced that phone — have been posting better battery life times compared to their immediate predecessors.
That's because chips are getting better at running more efficiently. Both the OnePlus 13 and Galaxy S25 Ultra use a Snapdragon 8 Elite system-on-chip, and not coincidentally beat the battery test results of the phones they're replacing. But even a phone like the OnePlus 13R, which relies on last year's top silicon, is reaping the benefits of power management improvements.
We've got a lot of time left in 2025 and more phones to test. Some will surely produce impressive battery test results of their own. But it's pretty clear right now that if you want a long-lasting phone, OnePlus is establishing itself as the phone maker to turn to. I can tell you that from first-hand experience.
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