You’ve probably never given this much thought, but the downside to releasing a product as premium-looking and incredibly feature-packed as the OnePlus 13R at a virtually unbeatable price of $599.99 is that the handset’s manufacturer can’t make a lot of post-launch headlines with deals and discounts.
Believe it or not, this impressively powerful 6.78-inch device is marked down with no special requirements or strings attached of any sort for the very first time today since its US commercial debut back in February. And if two months doesn’t seem like a long time to keep a smartphone’s price point unchanged, you’re probably not familiar with how quickly Samsung’s new high-end Galaxy devices tend to score discounts (with or without trade-ins).
At $499.99, the OnePlus 13R is even harder to trump in the bang-for-buck department than before, packing the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor as the very best Android phones… of last year while sporting an absolutely gorgeous AMOLED screen by any and all (current) standards.
That’s not only equipped with 120Hz refresh rate technology, but a peak brightness of 4500 nits, and if you’re worried about the stunning display’s impact on battery life, don’t be. The OnePlus 13R somehow manages to squeeze a gargantuan 6,000mAh cell as well into a remarkably thin and reasonably lightweight body made from aluminum and glass, proving that you can break the 5,000mAh psychological barrier without sacrificing a phone’s elegance.
Obviously, the 13R is not as sophisticated as the top-of-the-line OnePlus 13 in a number of key departments, lacking, for instance, wireless charging support and settling for an older and slightly slower chip than the state-of-the-art Snapdragon 8 Elite, as well as “only” two instead of three 50MP rear-facing cameras.
But at five Benjamins in a 256GB storage variant that also features 12 gigs of RAM, the OnePlus 13R‘s closest competitor is probably Samsung’s slightly smaller and nowhere near as powerful Galaxy S24 FE. That 6.7-incher is frequently available for $500, but only with 128GB internal storage space, 8GB RAM, a slower Exynos 2400e processor under the hood, way smaller 4,700mAh battery, and an arguably less flashy design. That doesn’t really sound like a competition, now, does it?
