Full transcript of “One Plus 13S Review: What's the S For?”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:01 Hi. [Music] The S stands for stronger, smarter, and subscribe, which is incredible because you guys just got 20 million subscribers onto this channel. So, that's amazing. Thank you. No, but it it stands for small. Small phones died with the Xen Phone 10, the legend. That was the last under 6 in screen size flagship phone, and they're not coming back. So now it's time to redefine basically what a small flagship
0:48 phone is. And it seems like the new bar we've set is 6.3 in. So if a screen size of a flagship phone is under 6.3 in, then that's one of the smallest flagship phones. So iPhone 16 is a 6.1 in screen. Galaxy S25 is a 6.2 in screen. Xiaomi 15 is right around 6.3. And this new phone, this OnePlus 13S, is one of the best small flagship phones out there at 6.3 in. And if you're willing to accept that that is the new bar, then this is kind of like the Xen Phone 10 reincarnated except for 2025. Now, my asterisk is this phone is not coming to the US. So, if you're here, that's kind of a bummer cuz I really like this phone, but it's not going to have all the bands required to be great in the US. But, I got my
1:34 hands on it anyway. And there's basically three things you need to know. The first one is obvious. It has full flagship specs on paper. Snapdragon 8 Elite, 12 gigs of fast RAM, and up to a half TB of UFS 4.0 storage. And this display up front is 6.3 in. Like I said, extremely small and even bezels all the way around and really easy on the eyes. Almost 1440p resolution, still 120 Hz LTPO and up to 1600 nits or all the way down to 1.1 nits with PWM dimming. So, they've cut down the size, but not really any other qualities of the screen. And even beyond the on paper specs, this feels like a flagship phone, too. It's compact, but this is a rock solid phone. Also, really clicky buttons. And then, of course, this nice
2:20 satin glass on the back, and it is very up to speed on the flat front and back aesthetic that is trendy with 2025 smartphones, which I also happen to be a fan of. And then with this relatively normal looking camera square on the back, if this phone was like 20% bigger, it would basically look and feel exactly like any other normal flagship, but thanks to its dimensions, it's a little bit lighter, a little bit more reachable, and a little more comfortable in every way. But also, they have done the OnePlus thing and that either means nothing to you or you hear that and you wse a little bit because you've watched these videos for a while and you remember that doing the OnePlus thing means number one, they didn't add wireless charging to this phone. And number two, the camera is, I would just
3:05 say, not going to be the reason why you buy this phone. But here's the battery situation here. And this one is so interesting to me. The battery is the strongest part of the OnePlus 13S. Inside, this thing has a 5,850 mAh battery, which is incredible. Just for context, 4,000 mAh, 5,000 mAh, 5850. I mean, that's incredible. This phone has easy 2-day battery life with normal use. Like I said, Zen Phone reincarnated type stuff. And I'm using my phone at a high brightness, high refresh rate, everything on endless battery here. And then the cherry on top is it's also 80 watt fast charging. So you can always plug in for a few minutes every couple of days and be good to go again. So yeah, there's no wireless charging and that's an easy ding. But
3:51 this is absolutely the perfect use case for a silicon carbon battery. It lets us break physics a little bit and make the phone smaller but still have a massive flagship size capacity. Is what I would say if this was a silicon carbon battery, but it's not. All of the specs I just said are true. 5,850 mAh, 80 watt charging, two day battery life, not silicon carbon. When I first saw the spec sheet for this phone, I literally assumed it was silicon carbon because this is a tiny phone. It's impossible, right? It can't be a regular lithium ion battery, but it's not. And that was kind of shocking. I kind of can't believe it's not. But then the second cherry on top for this phone is the version they're selling in China
4:37 is going to swap out the 32 megapixel selfie camera for a 16 megapixel smaller camera and does have a silicon carbon battery because of the different priorities in that market. So that version is a 6,260 milliamp battery. Wow. I cannot imagine how good the battery life of that phone is going to be. Either way, the battery is a huge highlight of this phone. It's pretty sick. Now, the cameras, as I mentioned, not so much. I mean, they're fine. You've heard this about OnePlus phones in the past. They're passible. They're just not going to be the reason you buy this phone. This is the same sensor as the ROG Phone 9 and the Moto Edge 50, just to give you an idea. And they chose to pair that main camera with a 2x telephoto for some reason instead of an
5:25 ultrawide or a better zoom. But you can immediately get much more out of an S25 with its triple cameras, for example, or even others with a dual camera where one of them is an ultrawide. But the third and final thing you should know about this phone is that OnePlus's AI has arrived on it. Uh, and I've been testing it for a little while. It's one of those things that again, you can easily dive all the way into it or totally ignore it and not use any of it. I tend to not use a lot of this stuff, but of course they want to make it as easy as possible to dive right in because they've replaced the usual beloved alert slider with a single button here. And you can see where this is going. This is a customizable button called the plus key. And sure enough, just like the iPhone's action button, they've built a special very dark UI that they've stapled into
6:10 their settings app for customizing exactly how you want this button to behave. And the default is saving whatever you're doing to the mind space, which is this AI organized memory bank for all your screenshots and taking action on them and pulling information out of them later. Pretty damn similar to the nothing phones essential space. I've talked about this before. Cool concept. Like every once in a while, it's that really cool useful thing. Like someone sends you a text with a screenshot of a concert poster and then you can like save it and get the information later. is nice, but it also doesn't work anywhere outside of this phone. So, it doesn't sync anywhere. I can't triage this on a bigger screen on my laptop or something like that. So, it breaks my number one rule of
6:57 organizational software of not being multiplatform. But, there's also other little stuff like there's an AI editor in the photos app now that will unblur moving objects and erase reflections and glass or erase background objects. Pretty classic stuff that we've seen. And there's a translate app that does live audio translations for multilingual conversations. Nothing like mind-blowing or groundbreaking that we haven't already seen on other phones before. Uh but it is nice that OnePlus at least has this stuff built in now instead of relying on Google for it. Um this is also coming via a software update to the OnePlus 13. Although that phone still has a slider instead of the button, so you have to access it with a three-finger swipe up instead. I'd take the slider. Now, some other little things I noticed while
7:42 dailying this phone should come with the context of the price. So, here is that price. It's pretty good. 650 bucks roughly equivalent in the US. Again, feeling like the Xen phone reincarnated, but I did notice things like the fingerprint reader under the display being optical instead of the faster ultrasonic fingerprint sensors. Not a huge deal, but makes sense at this price point. I also found the lack of doubletapping the power button for camera kind of weird on this phone. I feel like 99 out of every hundred Android phones that crosses my plate automatically has double click for camera turned on or at least lets me easily turn it on. But unless I'm missing something, this is like the one out of a hundred that doesn't. Uh but you can I guess remap the plus key to be the camera quick launch if you want to do that instead. But then speaking of
8:28 the plus key, that animation, I mean, do I do I really have to say it? I mean, we all know they just Okay, as long as we're on the same page. Also, sweet new feature that I discovered on this phone, but that's probably more useful on bigger phones. This icon pull down gesture in Oxygen OS 15. This is so smart. It basically just takes all of your clickable icons on your home screen and just drags them down to the corner to make them reachable with a single swipe. It is so clever. I love it. But overall, moral of the story is the benchmark for compact or small flagship phones has moved up basically over 6 in now. But if you want the one with the best battery life, there's no question this is it. Um, super smooth software, super fast charging, and it has the AI
9:14 features built in now, which is great. If it's a camera you're after, this probably isn't the one. If you live in the US, sorry, probably can't really get one here, or if you do, it'll be kind of a pain. Speaking of a pain, does your dad's back hurt? Is he always constantly misplacing things? Does his wallet look like this? Your dad may be suffering from something called dad wallet. We've all seen it. A massive wallet that's probably older than you, filled with who knows what. Listen, it's time to upgrade him for Father's Day, and Ridge has it covered. Ridge has wallets for all sorts of dads. There's hard wallets, soft wallets, even some with his favorite sports team. So, there's so many colors and material options to choose from. I can kind of already hear him saying, "That's sharp." when he opens it for the first time. And the best part, he'll
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