The MOST UNDERRATED Budget SMARTPHONE DEAL!

Let's take a look at how smartphones have evolved since 2026 - they are becoming more costly (though they may not be "popular"), but the worst thing is that inexpensive phones are becoming more costly, and we can see an increase in phone prices and features. What will you expect from your phone for less than 20K rupees in 2026? And now, if I put this mystery phone beside this, apart from the camera, everything, this mystery phone is superior. And a fun fact, this mystery phone is currently selling on Amazon for 18,000. And if you further add offers and discounts, the price comes down to around 17,000 rupees, which makes this smartphone the most underrated budget smartphone deal right now. 

All about the OPPO K13:

This is last year's budget king, the OPPO K13. We have used the phone for quite some time now. We recommended it previously quite a lot, but then Oppo suddenly hiked the price to 22,000, and now it's back again at a discount. So what are the pros, what are the cons? At 18,000 plus, there's an interesting twist at the end. This is a super long-term review, like for more long-term reviews, pretty please, Pratik Dealwise. Let's get into it.

I believe four pros make this phone the best in 18,000, and it's not those obvious pros. Like, there are some obvious things: it's a budget phone, and you get a plastic back, plastic frame. And we have been brutal with this phone, like it has fallen, it has dropped, there are battle scars, scratches on the back. After having our hands on it for a while now, I can confirm that the IP65 certification will allow this device to withstand splashes of water from rain. 

Display and Brightness:

The device is honestly pretty generic-looking. You will notice many impressive features once you get your hands on the smartphone in question. One of my favourite features of this smartphone is its 6.67" AMOLED display (120Hz). It uses flat glass rather than curved, and it has a regular-sized bezel; much better than most budget smartphones. Watching and streaming on your smartphone, you will feel like you are using a high-end device.

Whether people have asked me or not about the lumens (the brightness) of this phone's display. So, when I say many ask me about brightness, that should give you a good idea of how impressive the touch screen is. When I look at the Oppo website, the maximum brightness it has is only 1200 nits; however, when I actually use it to watch movies and outside in direct sun at the max brightness, it is actually 1200 nits. You may think that 1200 nits is low compared to the 1800 nits that most Android devices have in this price range, but for my purpose, I didn’t have any issues due to the brightness.

In addition to a fantastic AMOLED display, the phone has stereo speakers as well. It's pretty loud. But the surprising fact to see on a budget phone is that if you use wired IEMs like me or a good quality high-res TWS, you get support for LDAC or high-res audio. So all of this is something which you don't see often in the budget price range.

Software and OS:

Now another pro has to be the software. The K13 is currently running the latest Colour OS 16 based on Android 16. Now this phone was launched with Android 15, so updates have been on time. And Colour OS might be one of the few Android skins to have such a smooth experience, even on a budget phone. Let me show you why. Starting with the lock screen, if you see the wallpapers and animations, they are pretty good. There are many customisation options as well. Also, look at this jiggly animation.

 If I pause the music and swipe it off, see how the lock screen widgets change their position. Or even if I open and close apps, there's animation. And on top of it, it's pretty fast. Not just that, if you select some apps on the home screen and move them around, you see those jiggly animations. Now these animations are not that common on budget phones because usually the processor is not that powerful.

Other than these animations, there are also some practical features that no other budget Android skins offer as of now. Now I use Swiggy to order groceries via Instamart. Usually, I'll have to open the app and then tap and go to Instamart and then start searching for groceries. But on the K13, I can just slightly tap and hold the Swiggy icon, and now I can add the Instamart widget here. 

So now I can just directly tap on it and go inside Instamart. And the same thing you can do with chat apps, where you can pin your favourite contacts or chats on WhatsApp or Slack. You also get the OPPO phone dialer, so you can now record calls without announcements. Now there are other Oppo AI and useful features. If I start listing them out, it would be a proper Colour OS 16 video, which we already have.

Now, the only thing to note in the OPPO K13 is that there are pre-installed third-party apps. Now you can easily uninstall them, but one thing I found really annoying is that if you search in the app drawer, there are a lot of app suggestions from Oppo Store. Now there's a way to disable it; you can just go here in the settings and turn off global search. But all these annoying notifications and app suggestions are what you get by default.

The battery king is here:

Now the third pro, and this is a big one, like literally battery. It comes with a 7,000 mAh graphite battery. Like in my medium usage, the phone lasted me around one and a half days without any issues. In fact, the battery here feels like a power bank. You can charge other phones or even TWS with it. And not only does it last longer, it even charges pretty fast.

SuperVOOC 80W charging on the K13 is insane at this price point. You will be able to recharge your battery from low to full within ~30-45 minutes based on how discharged the battery was originally (based on the previous battery level). The charger is also included in the price!.

Processor and speed test:

In addition to all of these features, the K13 is also a great value because it uses a Snapdragon 660 Processor, 128GB of UFS 3.1 storage, and has exceeded 10 million points on Antutu's benchmark test making it the best performing smartphone at this time! Old devices would have rated approximately 7-800,000 points on older versions of benchmark software, while new devices have graphics at much higher levels than were available 5 years ago and have been designed to use A.I. for many functions. 

Gaming test:

And that's why in 2026, you see every budget phone scoring 7 to 8 lakh, and even in that regard, this scores way higher. Now, in terms of gaming, the K13 can play BGMI at 60 FPS. And in my long-term usage, I have played quite a lot of BGMI. You can easily get 60 FPS. And I've also played a mix of COD Warzone while it was there, and I've never had any issues. The gameplay was smooth. The phone can easily handle light to medium gaming. Even for multitasking and other normal browsing, real scrolling, almost a year later or so, the phone is still as smooth as new. And mostly this is because of UFS 3.1 storage. And if you leave a couple of phones, 90% of the phones in the budget come with UFS 2.2, whereas here you get UFS 3.1.

This might be some cons:

So now we've heard all the pros, tell me things that no one says, what are the cons? Well, first, and it's not exactly a con, but the Oppo K13 launched with Colour OS 15, and now it's running Colour OS 16. And as per its software update policy, Android 17 will be the last update for K13. So it just has one more year of software updates and 2 years of security updates. The second con would be the cameras. It comes with a single 50 megapixel main camera. This second one is just 2 megapixels. Yes, I know some of you may think the device comes with a dual camera, but this is what we get from the device. Now, other phones in this price range, like CMF, come with a telephoto camera, or at least you get a main and ultra-wide-angle camera.

Camera options:

But even if you keep the camera options aside and just think about whether the main camera is good, then it's all good. Well, in daylight, the photos come out okay. It tries to maintain skin tones, and the photos have detail and clarity. But as soon as the light goes down, you start seeing problems. The photos get blurry. In fact, we took some photos side by side with the Motorola G96; the photos aren't even bright on the K13. The reason is that the K13 has a very small camera sensor. For reference, the G96 has quite a big camera sensor. And also, K13 doesn't get OIS, so you'll get shaky footage. And even on the front 16 megapixel selfie camera, it can only do 1080p 30 fps.

Final conclusion and this phone might make sense in 2026:

So if your priority is the camera and you want to shoot reels or shorts on this, I would recommend staying away from the K13. Motorola G96 and CMF Phone 2 Pro are better choices. And if you are that serious about making videos with your phone with the help of a phone camera, then I should suggest going for at least 25 to 30,000 rupees. Now, who should get the Oppo K13? I think this phone is good for most people. Whether it be performance, speaker quality, battery, charging, or software, it's just an overall better phone than anything you get in the competition right now. It is so good that this year Oppo launched the successor to Oppo K13, and they just made everything worse.

From the processor to the display to the storage type, everything is a downgrade. So OPPO made the K13 so good that they couldn't even repeat it twice. Like, stay kilometres away from K14 and get the OPPO K13 instead. Even after a year, this phone makes sense in 2026.