Oppo Reno 13 FS 5G Review

Design

• Clean and simple design
• Two colours available
• Dual speaker setup

In a lineup of similarly priced handsets, you’ll struggle to pick the Oppo Reno 13 FS 5G out of a crowd. Available in just Graphite Grey and Luminous Blue flavours, it’s unlikely to cause much commotion. Two lenses protrude from the rear array, with a flush macro lens for close-ups. An identically sized flash sits underneath.

The rest of its back end is entirely unassuming. There’s no glittery finish, nor any of the extravagant textures found on cheaper handsets looking to stand out, like the leather-clad Moto G55. What it is is smooth and smart. The matte finish is pleasingly soft in the right light, making the whole body professionally sleek and unassuming. 

The bottom of the device features a double speaker grill coupled with a USB-C port, SIM/MicroSD tray, and a microphone. The right side houses nothing but the typical volume rocker and power button, leaving the left completely blank.

Interestingly, the very top of the device houses another speaker grill as well as another microphone. Why interesting? Because the earpiece is noticeably long and powerful. That’s more speaker than we’re used to in this price bracket, which makes for loud audio that, while not impressively warm in profile, is much fuller compared to most other handsets in the low-to-mid-range market.

At 192 grams and around 7.76mm thick (or curiously slightly thicker in the Blue variety), it’s easy to grip and is just heavy enough to feel premium. Just note that there’s next to nothing inside the box. No charger, no case, and no USB cable. It’s as barebones as they come. But there is a film screen protector pre-installed.

Screen

• Clear and bright edge-to-edge 6.7-inch AMOLED panel
• 120Hz refresh rate
• Underscreen fingerprint reader and dynamic notification zone

Sporting a 6.7-inch FHD+ AMOLED display with a hole punch front camera, this is a bright and vibrant screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. You can lock this to 60Hz to conserve the battery, force 120Hz for super smooth scrolling, or let specific apps control the experience on the fly.

Power the device on and you’ll note its wonderful colour depth. This is a sharp AMOLED panel that Oppo claims covers the entirety of the sRGB colour space in Natural mode. It also hits the highs of DCI-P3 grading in Vivid mode.

Bright highlights pop, and shadows are balanced well enough. In the bright but moody scenes of Breaking Bad, this solid contrast helps to keep an actor’s face from blending into the darker backgrounds. 

In the searing sun of the New Mexico desert, bright skies can look overexposed, but not enough to sour the experience. It’s also plenty bright enough to maintain decent visibility outdoors for reading on the beach or watching some YouTube in the garden. Just find some shade to avoid excess glare.

Interestingly, the hole punch camera zone expands across the top of the screen, mimicking the Dynamic Island feature of recent Apple devices. It’s a neat feature to see on a budget Android blower that makes notifications a little less annoying.

Cameras

• 50MP main shooter
• 32MP selfie camera
• No telephoto lens

Other than the AI camera system moniker etched into the back bump, there’s little on-device to suggest the quality of the images you’ll snap with the Oppo Reno 13 FS. But with a common 50MP main shooter, 8MP ultrawide, and a 2MP macro lens, there’s little cause for concern. Point and shoot performance is strong.

On an increasingly (and concerningly) common bright blue day in the north of England, the main and macro sensors both managed to capture impressive detail for their price. There’s always a bit of post-processing cleaning up the final image as you tap to review your handiwork, which makes a noticeable improvement in most cases, but that’s hardly unusual in today’s handsets.

The blindingly bright conditions of the outdoor shoot were often a tad too harsh for the main shooter, but all was well with a few minor tweaks in post. In shady areas, the main sensor did a terrific job of focusing on some unripe strawberries and catching the sharp details of their little seeds with accurate colours.

Even in those bright conditions, blades of grass were kept separate, and you can easily notice the pollen and miscellaneous garden debris on the lawnmower and its battery. Note that the photo samples here are completely unedited outside of a crop. If anything, they’re compressed.

Inside the garden room, the Oppo Reno 13 FS had no problem accurately capturing the colours of various toys, game controllers, and vintage tech. Smooth background blurring was easily managed with no manual input, and while the front camera goes a little too hard with the blurring in Portrait mode, it’s typically only stray hairs that get the chop, suggesting some less-than-perfect edge detection that’s well within the right of a budget blower.

Although image stabilisation doesn’t apply to video, resulting in very bumpy mobile recordings, the detail you can capture when recording at 4 K/30fps is impressive enough to overlook the shortcomings. It won’t suit busy livestreams or vlogs, but setting it down before hitting record or hopping on a video call should produce very usable footage.

Performance

• Three-year-old Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 SoC
• Solid everyday performance
• Suitable for older 3D games

Packing UFS 3.1 storage and the three-year-old Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, the Oppo Reno 13 FS 5G isn’t going to be the fastest phone at this price range. 12GB of RAM will certainly help, and 512 GB of default storage should be more than enough for anyone. This is about as much phone as most people will need.

Swiping is fast, and while the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 SoC is anything but new, its eight cores can power through everyday scenarios without much trouble. The speed of the storage might hold things back when saving those AI-assisted photos, but that’s about it.

To put numbers to the claims, the Snapdragon SoC scored a modest 926 in the single-core benchmark. That shot up to 2608 on the multicore test, suggesting a fairly capable device for day-to-day use, even if it does trail behind the similarly priced competition.

In terms of graphics performance, the 4K 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test managed a score of 662. That’s around 3fps, which isn’t entirely unexpected, and not at all an indication of how it performs in the average mobile gaming scenario.

To test that claim, we fired up Roblox, a popular kids’ gaming platform with a wide variety of user-made titles. Performance was solid in a CPU-heavy simulator-style game with hundreds of simple computer-controlled characters running in and out of multiple restaurants.

Things got a little warm, and the battery was draining at a noticeable rate, but it’s indicative of a phone that can perform as needed.

Software & AI

• Image cleanup and upscaling features
• Pages of pre-installed bloat
• Four years of security updates

Boasting AI Live Photos and an AI Editor on its product page, it’s clear that Oppo is firmly onboard the artificial intelligence bandwagon.

In practice, that means little more than what most other smartphones have been offering for years: largely image object erase and quality enhancement features (like a “4K UHD” image sharpening engine that failed on a very clear photo), and battery life improvements based on your usage patterns. When it comes to the virtual assistant, it’s still Google and its Gemini tech running the show.

What you’ll soon notice after setup is the sheer volume of pre-installed apps. Though padded with the Google suite, secondary browsers, app stores, and gaming services are still found on the front page.

Swipe right and you’re inundated with not only the heavy-hitters like Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, and Spotify, but Temu, close to two dozen games (both in and out of a dedicated folder), and countless utility apps.

At its core, the Oppo Reno 13 FS 5G runs Android 15 with its own ColorOS 15 skin. Oppo’s usual software support should see this one through to Android 17 with a total of four years of security updates. That’s a bit low, considering the much cheaper Galaxy A36 5G offers six years of combined OS upgrades and security updates.

Battery Life

• Huge 5800mAh battery
• Notable drain in 3D titles
• 45W fast charging

The 5800mAh battery within the Oppo Reno 13 FS 5G is one of its stand-out features, offering a larger capacity than some flagship smartphones. This, unsuspectingly, translates to strong all-day battery life for most users, potentially extending into a second day of use depending on what you’re up to.

Though the Oppo Reno 13 FS 5G doesn’t ship with a charger, it is capable of 45W fast charging.

Paired with a suitable plug, we managed to charge the empty 5800mAh battery to 23% in 15 minutes. That went up to 51% in half an hour, suggesting a device you can comfortably top up in just over an hour – around 68 minutes to be exact.

Tested with our usual hour-long Netflix benchmark at medium brightness to simulate indoor viewing, this trickled down by 6% – a common result for this type of device.

Similarly, intense 3D gaming, as explained above, chugged back around 12% in half an hour. That’s a little more than we typically see, but more optimised titles like Diablo Immortal fell closer to the 10% mark.

Light gaming with titles like Wordscapes only asked for a minuscule 2-3%, with more visually appealing games like Board Kings taking around 3-4% in the same timeframe.

Should you buy it?