Design

• Distinctly iPhone-like design
• Flagship-like metal and glass build
• IP68/IP69 rated

Oppo has applied very little imagination in constructing the Reno 13 5G, but boy, is it well built. While it looks a lot like an iPhone – flat surfaces, curved corners, squircular(ish) camera module – you simply can’t fault the construction.

While I could tell from holding the phone that it featured an aluminium frame and a matte glass back, I felt compelled to double-check the spec sheet. A £500 phone shouldn’t feel this premium.

This sense of quality runs deep, too, with both IP68 and IP69 certification. That’s just like the Oppo Reno 13 Pro 5G, and goes above and beyond most IP68-rated flagship phones. Bravo, Oppo.

With dimensions of 157.90 x 74.73 x 7.29mm, it’s very pleasant to wield, and a weight of 181g feels just right. The screen bezel isn’t as skinny as a genuine flagship phone, but it is at least fairly uniform.

The only thing I can criticise the Oppo Reno 13 5G design for is that it’s derivative. Like Samsung, Google, and many others, it’s clearly cribbing from the Apple playbook. Even so, I can’t say that it’s boring, because I find this level of quality at £500 to be quite exciting.

Screen

• 6.59-inch 120Hz 1256 x 2760 OLED
• Completely flat
• 1200 nits peak brightness

The Oppo Reno 13 5G’s display is a solid component. It’s a little smaller than average at 6.59 inches, though I certainly wouldn’t class this as a compact phone.

This is a vibrant OLED panel with a 1256 x 2760 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. It’s not an LTPO panel, so it can only scale down in rough increments to 90 or 60Hz.

A peak brightness of 1200 nits, together with HDR10+ support, ensures that the right video content looks good, though we’re not talking about flagship levels of brightness.

You don’t get the quad curved edges of the Pro model, but that doesn’t feel like a huge compromise to me. Plenty of more expensive phones adopt a similar dead-flat approach.

Dual stereo speakers flank this display in landscape view, and they provide decent clarity and volume.

Camera

• 50MP main camera
• 8MP ultra-wide
• 50MP selfie camera with AF

As a result of the price creep that has affected Oppo’s Reno range, the Oppo Reno 13 5G doesn’t offer as compelling a camera package as last year’s £500 option, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro 5G.

You get a similar setup, with a 50MP main sensor, an 8MP ultra-wide lens, and a 50MP selfie camera. What you don’t get is a dedicated telephoto camera, which really stood out in last year’s model. In its place, you get a 2MP depth sensor.

It’s a shame, but what’s left is pretty strong regardless. The 50MP main camera, in particular, takes sharp and vibrant shots in most lighting conditions, with impressive dynamic range. Night mode shots aren’t the best I’ve seen at this price, with a slightly soft look and some grainy skies, but it’s perfectly serviceable.

Another small criticism of this main camera was some off-putting motion blur in moderate indoor shooting conditions. You’ll need to make sure your subjects sit still for those restaurant shots. If you do, though, the resulting shots will be nice and sharp.

Without a telephoto camera, zoomed shots appear a bit fuzzy beyond 2x. That’s to be expected. Oppo applies heavy processing to smooth off extreme zooms of up 20x (you can see the effect being applied live in the viewfinder), but it results in rather soft, smudgey shots that are best left well alone.

While the 8MP ultra-wide angle experiences an understandable drop-off in clarity, I was impressed at how close it got to the tone of the main sensor. That’s not something you can always count on in phones of this price. This also doubles as a macro camera, should you wish to get up close and personal.

Even more impressive is the phone’s 50MP selfie camera. With the rare provision (especially on a mid-range phone) of autofocus, selfies look nice and sharp, with the subject popping against the background and nice natural skin tones.

Oppo also supplies three zoom levels here. This might only be a case of cropping in on that unusually pixel-dense sensor, but the extra framing options are welcome nonetheless.

Video capture extends to 4K at 60fps, which is nice to see in a more affordable phone. More impressively, that applies to the selfie camera too – amateur vloggers take note.

Performance

• Same MediaTek Dimensity 8350 as Pro
• 12GB RAM, 256GB storage

Oppo has equipped the Reno 13 5G with exactly the same MediaTek Dimensity 8350 as the Pro model, which is always nice to see. It’s also the chip that powers the £600 Motorola Edge 60 Pro.

This isn’t MediaTek’s top chip, but it does supply decent performance, especially backed by 12GB of RAM as it is here. I couldn’t fault the day-to-day experience, with smooth animation and snappy app startup times, with nary a hint of lag or stutter.

Benchmark results are suitably strong, falling short of the Pixel 9a in the Geekbench 6 single-core test, but drawing level with it on multi-core. It matched the Samsung Galaxy A56 5G in both categories.

It fell right in between those two major mid-range rivals in GPU benchmark terms, dropping short of the Pixel 9a but comfortably topping the Galaxy A56.

The phone will run complex 3D games like Genshin Impact fluidly on medium settings, so it’s not a gaming powerhouse by any means. You can get the Redmagic 10 Air or the Poco F7 Pro for similar money if this is what you’re after, but this is a solid level of performance in a regular mid-range phone with plenty of other good things to offer.

You only get the one 256GB storage option here in the UK. Google and Samsung offer more choice, but this should prove an ample amount for most people.

Software

• ColorOS 15, based on Android 15
• New AI features
• Three major OS updates, 4 years security updates

The Oppo Reno 13 5G runs on the company’s custom ColorOS 15 UI, which sits on top of Google’s Android 15. As we found with the Oppo Reno 13 Pro 5G, it’s fast and flexible, if not the most aesthetically pleasing interface on the market.

Bloatware remains a persistent issue, with an excessive number of pre-installed third-party apps. That includes a folder labelled Must Play, which contains a bunch of games that are anything but.

You also get Netflix, Facebook, TikTok LinkedIn, AliExpress, Booking.com and more as standard, alongside the obligatory duplicate web browser app. Suffice to say, the Pixel 9a’s clean slate is sorely missed, though Oppo is far from alone in ladening its phones with too many apps.

Like every other manufacturer releasing smartphones in 2025, Oppo is at great pains to push its AI credentials. The Reno 13 5G can do a lot of the AI-powered things that other phones can do, often powered by Google.

So, for example, the Photos app can remove reflections and unblur shots. The Oppo AI Studio, meanwhile, can generate three-second ‘recordings’ based solely on a static short, turn people into freaky-looking puppets or anime characters, and more.

Away from photography, Oppo’s AI tools can summarise, translate and transcribe text. AI Speak will read out a web page in a way more natural voice than the stock Google provision.

All in all, it’s the usual mixture of the genuinely useful, the impressive but pointless, and the flat-out useless that we’ve come to expect of the early smartphone AI era. Oppo certainly couldn’t be accused of holding back on AI features for its latest mid-ranger, however.

Oppo is offering five major OS updates and six years of security updates here in the UK. That’s pretty decent, though it falls short of the Pixel 9a (seven years for both) and Galaxy A56 (six years for both).

Battery Life

• 5600mAh battery
• 80W wired charging
• No charger in the box

The Reno 13 5G has a slightly smaller battery than its Pro brother, but at 5600mAh it still trounces much of the opposition.

More importantly, it’s sufficient to grant the phone fantastic stamina. On one day of moderate usage, with 4 hours and 40 minutes of screen time, I was left with 60% left in the tank.

On another occasion I put the phone’s two day potential to the test, with a combined 7 hours and 11 minutes of screen on time and simply leaving the phone on Do Not Disturb overnight, and was left in the slightly precarious (but still impressive) position of having 5% right at the end of the second day.

Media playback hardly puts a dent in the phone’s battery life. After an hour of Disney+ playback, the Reno 13 5G lost just 5%, while 30 minutes of light gaming on Slay the Spire didn’t even drop the capacity below the 100% mark after a full charge.

Oppo supports 80W wired charging, though it doesn’t include a charger in the box. It can be difficult to find a third-party charger that maximises those SuperVOOC 2.0 speeds, so keep that in mind.

Using a 120W Vivo charger I had to hand (Vivo being a sister brand to Oppo), which produced the requisite SuperVOOC symbol and the promise of “Ultra-fast charging”, the Reno 13 5G hit 22% in 15 minutes and 53% in 30 minutes. A full charge from empty took exactly an hour.

There’s no wireless charging provision, but that’s still not a standard feature at £500. It places the Oppo Reno 13 5G at a disadvantage compared to the Pixel 9a, but not the Samsung Galaxy A56 5G.

Should you buy it?

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