OnePlus Nord review: Android’s best bang for your buck

OnePlus is coming back to the budget smartphone market in a big way with the “OnePlus Nord,” a device with an odd name but a pretty spectacular feature set for the ~$450 price tag. We’ve had the phone for almost two weeks now and can say it’s easily one of the best Android phones on the market.

Let’s talk about what OnePlus is offering. With Snapdragon 865 phones often topping $1,000, this is the first phone we’ve tried with the cheaper Snapdragon 765G; at just one step down in Qualcomm’s lineup, this is what most manufacturers seem to be going with to bring smartphone prices back down to Earth. The phone still has a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and while it’s only using UFS 2.1 storage, the phone still feels plenty fast. The headline feature is probably the 90Hz display, which is sneaking out of the flagship realm and into less-expensive phones.

The biggest downside to this phone is the distribution; for now, it is not for sale in the US. OnePlus is sending a lot of mixed messages as to future US availability of the Nord. First, the official quote from CEO Pete Lau doesn’t totally close the door on the idea, saying, “We are going to start relatively small with this new product line by first introducing it in Europe and India. But don’t worry, we’re also looking to bring more affordable smartphones to North America in the near future as well.”

OnePlus both sent the Nord to US media and has the phone listed on its US website, which it usually doesn’t do for phones that aren’t launching here. The company is also running a “Beta Program” for the US and Canada that will see 50 people get the phone. People on OnePlus’ mailing list have been receiving a provocative email that screams “OnePlus Nord is coming to North America” (meaning all 50 units of the beta test).

You know, on second thought, maybe OnePlus isn’t sending mixed signals. Please just officially announce that the phone will be for sale here. It’s good!

Design—indistinguishable from a flagship

You wouldn’t know the Nord is a cheaper phone from the design or construction, since it’s basically identical to any high-end smartphone on the market. You get a standard all-glass smartphone with Gorilla Glass on the front and back. There’s a slim-bezel display with a hole-punch camera on the front and a ton of cameras on the back. Other than the option for a hyper-vibrant light blue color, it’s a positively generic design. In the case of a mid-range phone, that’s a good thing—there really haven’t been any corners cut here.

The OnePlus Nord’s primary sales pitch is that you’re getting the best display ever fitted to a mid-range smartphone. The 90Hz display means this phone looks and feels like a flagship from the past year or so, and it’s something no other company offers at this price right now. A faster display is one of the biggest improvements in smartphones in the past few years and makes everything about the phone feel faster and smoother. Scrolling, swiping, and animations all look and feel better, provided your phone has the horsepower to draw everything at 90fps, and we’re happy to say the OnePlus Nord is definitely fast enough. Once you’ve used a higher refresh rate display, it’s hard to go back to anything else.

Another major point for the OnePlus Nord display is that it’s completely flat, a stark contrast to the last few phones from OnePlus (and Samsung, and LG, and most Chinese OEMs) that have put a curve on the left and right side of the display. Curves have few upsides and come with a host of problems. A curved display can make the text hard to read and will distort the top and bottom of landscape videos. In some lighting, the curve gets a ton of glare, making it hard to see the sides of the display. Manufacturers have convinced each other that a curved display “looks cool,” but looking at a distorted screen doesn’t seem cool to me at all.

The Nord has a flat screen designed to display flat apps, webpages, and videos just like the creators intended, and it’s glorious. OnePlus says they did this because a curved display is more expensive, but curved displays are a gimmick. More expensive phones should use flat screens, too.

There’s a sizable cutout in the top-left corner of the display for the dual front-facing camera, making the phone look like a mirrored version of the Galaxy S10+. Beside the main 32MP front camera is the 8MP wide-angle camera, letting selfie shutterbugs get that wide shot without the need for a selfie stick. This is something manufacturers like Samsung and Google did a generation ago and then quickly discarded for the current generation, and no one really complained. I’m not sure why OnePlus is trying to bring back front wide-angle cams.

The oval-shaped camera cutout is the strangest part of the design. Being on the left side means it pushes the clock to the right, which now isn’t on the left side of the screen, or the right side, it’s just kind of floating around at the one-quarter mark of the display. It’s odd-looking.

Of course, there’s also the non-Android competition to consider, and any mid-range phone has a big problem in the form of the new iPhone SE, which at just $400 in the US is a killer deal. Apple’s SoC prowess and Qualcomm’s Android monopoly mean this mid-range iPhone is faster than even the most expensive Android phones this year and might out-benchmark Qualcomm’s chips from next year, too. There is more to a phone than benchmarks, though, and the OnePlus Nord actually has a decent argument against the iPhone SE, thanks to the bigger, faster display and more modern design. Right now, OnePlus also isn’t going up against the $400 iPhone SE, which is the price in the US. In Europe and India, Apple’s mid-ranger is a lot more expensive, at about $570, so OnePlus is actually undercutting Apple by quite a bit.

The light-blue version I was sent is one of the most vibrantly colored products I have ever seen, and photos really don’t do it justice. The light blue back is nearly luminescent, and while it’s not the dramatic color-changing effect that we’ve seen on other phones, it feels like it’s part of the same branch of materials science. Light likes to bounce around and scatter inside the glass panel, and the whole thing kind of lights up. It’s pretty, but it’s also fragile glass, so most people are just going to put a case on it.

The metal mid-frame is exposed around the sides, and this, too, gets a hyper-vibrant color treatment: a metallic light blue with a mirror finish. On the bottom you’ll find the SIM slot, USB-C port, and the phone’s only media speaker. There’s no headphone jack or MicroSD slot. On the left side, you have OnePlus’ trademark three-position mute switch, which changes between sound, silence, and vibrate, followed by the power button.

There are four cameras on the back, and together with the front, that makes six cameras. I have to ask, is it really necessary to have a budget phone with six cameras? If you asked me to cut down a phone’s bill of materials, the first thing I would do is start hacking and slashing at the superfluous camera lenses, but this $450 phone has more cameras than even a $1,200 Galaxy S20 Ultra. Google’s budget approach of “one good camera” on the Pixel 3a seems like the more reasonable approach, and maybe if OnePlus did that, it could bring the price down even more!

For a mid-range phone, there really isn’t much missing here. You still get NFC, the same in-screen optical fingerprint reader as every other phone, and OnePlus’ fantastic 30W quick charging. Compared to a flagship phone, the big list of missing features would be the aforementioned single speaker instead of stereo, no wireless charging, and no official water-resistance rating. OnePlus says the phone still has gaskets to provide some water resistance, but with no official rating it’s hard to say how much, like “is this submersible?” Even with an official rating, no smartphone company stands behind its water-resistance ratings with an official policy to replace a water damaged phone under warranty (see policies from Apple, Samsung, Google, Verizon), so I can’t ding OnePlus too much.

A surprisingly strong argument against the iPhone SE

Android’s competition is stronger than it has ever been this generation, thanks to Apple’s launch of the iPhone SE. The SE has really upended the mid-range market by offering the same Apple A13 Bionic SoC that comes in the bigger iPhone, but in a $400 device. Android phones couldn’t compete with Apple’s SoC at the high end (certainly not at single-threaded performance), but to now have a $400 device that is still faster than the most expensive Android devices is downright embarrassing. Qualcomm, which is Android’s biggest SoC vendor, really has no answers at all for a mid-range device like this.

There’s more to a phone than just benchmarks, though, and I think the OnePlus Nord actually has a surprisingly solid argument against the SE. The 90Hz display is something the iPhone SE doesn’t offer, and it makes a major difference in how fast the phone feels. If you didn’t show them a benchmark first, I bet most people would say the 90Hz Nord feels faster than the 60Hz iPhone SE. The Nord also has a much more modern design with a huge display and thin bezels, while the iPhone SE design looks like it’s several years old. The SE design basically is several years old—Apple copy-and-pasted the iPhone 7 design from 2016. Some people might call the iPhone’s tiny 4.7-inch display a good thing, but, according to every smartphone manufacturer’s market research department and lots of sales data, those people are a vocal minority. Smaller phones also have worse battery life, a common complaint with the new SE.

There’s also the matter that the SE’s headline $400 price tag is a sweetheart deal for the US, and in the rest of the world, the SE is much more expensive. In Europe and India, where the Nord will actually be for sale, the SE is $570, so OnePlus is actually significantly undercutting Apple. The $450 price in Europe is already enough of a difference, but India gets a special, lower-tier SKU with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for ₹24,999, or $335.

There’s not much new to say about OnePlus’ software for the Nord. It’s Android 10 with a mostly stock UI and lots of customization options, which is great. You get major OS updates for two years and security updates for three years, but OnePlus needs to do a better job with the security update frequency—if the past is any indication, they’ll arrive every other month instead of every month.

OnePlus’ crapware situation is a step below the hardline minimal app drawers you would get from Google or Nokia, but it’s still pretty good. Most of the apps are lightly skinned AOSP offshoots or straight-up Google apps, and for the Nord, OnePlus has moved closer to the Pixel app lineup by shipping the Google Phone app and Google SMS app. While anyone can install Google Messages, the Google Phone app is a big deal, since it can’t be installed aftermarket. It adds great features like Google’s spam detection and Google Assistant call screening. which you don’t get from the regular AOSP builds of the phone app.

OnePlus signed deals with Facebook and Netflix, so you’ll have pre-installed versions of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, along with Netflix. The Facebook apps are fully uninstallable, but Netflix is not.

There are a few OnePlus apps and duplications. There’s a OnePlus Forum app called “Community,” and a OnePlus Weather app, which are both uninstallable. There’s a phone settings transfer app called “OnePlus Switch,” which is not uninstallable, a pretty odd decision for an app that, by definition, you will only use once. The phone comes with two file manager apps (Google Files and OnePlus File Manager), and two galleries (OnePlus Galleries and Google Photos).

I really like what OnePlus has done with the physical power button by turning it into a multi-function button that can still serve its original purpose. A single tap turns the screen on and off. Holding the power button down opens the Google Assistant, and a double-press opens the camera. That’s a common new-age setup for the power button, but the new combo in OnePlus’ recent software is the ability to press “power + volume up” to bring up the power menu. Previously it has been common for setups like this to give you no way to open the power menu, but this extra key combo gives the power menu a nice place to co-exist with the other, more common functions. It also slots in nicely next to “power + volume down,” which is screenshot. I haven’t had to do this for years, but if by some catastrophe your phone completely locks up, holding “power + volume up” for a few seconds will also act as the hard reset, killing power to the phone no matter what.

The two big broken features in OnePlus’ software are the lack of a dark mode toggle in the quick settings, which easily lets you flip between light and dark colored app themes, and the lack of an always-on display feature. Both are long-standing issues with OnePlus’ software, and the company’s stubborn refusal to fix them in a timely manner is very annoying. An always-on display in particular is a major feature, and the company’s phones would be a lot better if they would just enable it.

OnePlus’ update speed for flagship smartphones has been pretty good, but since this is the company’s first non-flagship phone in a long time, it’s not clear how much effort will be put behind updates. OnePlus’ last big update test came with the flagship OnePlus 7 Pro, where it got Android 10 18 days after Google’s release, which, for Android, is very fast.

Performance—good enough for 90fps

The OnePlus Nord is one of the first phones we’ve tried with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765G, a chip designed for value-oriented mid-range phones like this. It’s also featured in the LG Velvet, the Nokia 8.3, and possibly two future Pixel phones.

The flagship Qualcomm chip, the Snapdragon 865, couldn’t take the usual path of fitting all the normal SoC components on a single chip, and Qualcomm’s 5G-at-any-cost engineering meant it had to ship with a separate chip for 4G and 5G connectivity. In addition to skyrocketing phone prices, the Snapdragon 865 is very hot, and it has been my experience that it regularly overheats in the summer weather. The Snapdragon 765G is the first Qualcomm chip with an integrated 5G modem and seems to be able to handle the heat a lot better.

The million-dollar question, though, is: “How fast is the Snapdragon 765G?” Well, the short answer is that CPU performance is somewhere close to a Snapdragon 845 from 2018, with better single-core performance and worse multi-core performance in Geekbench. The GPU is a bit worse, turning in Snapdragon 835-like (2017) numbers. As you would expect, spending over double the price of the OnePlus Nord will buy you a much faster design, but in day-to-day usage, you won’t really notice it. This phone runs very well at 90Hz and feels much faster than any 60Hz phone, no matter what the benchmarks say.

As for the details, the Snapdragon 765G is a 7nm chip just like the Snapdragon 865. The eight-core chip is split across two Cortex A76 cores and six A55 cores. Qualcomm’s three-tiered “Prime core” layout is still here, with one “Prime” A76 Core clocked at 2.4GHz for better single-core performance, the second A76 is clocked at 2.2GHz for medium-duty, and the A55s are all at 1.8GHz for background and low-power duty.

This is a 5G chip, and “5G” here means “sub-6GHz 5G” only, which even the very-biased carriers say will only be a “small” upgrade over 4G. The overhyped, much faster form of 5G, mmWave, is not supported, which is understandable since it greatly increases the cost (+$100) and complexity of a smartphone, and carriers have said mmWave will “never” be available in most areas. 4G LTE still lives on our most premium, ~700MHz spectrum, and 5G, rather than being a pure upgrade, is more about extending network capacity by making use of whatever scraps of spectrum are left over. 5G is still not something you should be concerned about, at all, when buying a smartphone. So while you probably won’t see much benefit from 5G, the integrated modem on the Snapdragon 765G means 5G is, at least, not actively harmful.

For benchmarks, we dug into the archives and put the Snapdragon 765G up against a OnePlus phone from each of the past few years. If you don’t know these by heart, the OnePlus 8 Pro (2020) has a Snapdragon 865, the 7 Pro (2019) has a Snapdragon 855, the 6T (2018) has a Snapdragon 845, and the OnePlus 5T (2016) has a Snapdragon 835. We also have benchmarks against the 2020 iPhone SE, which is a brutal, NSFW massacre of the poor OnePlus Nord. It was so young.

Camera

OnePlus is promising a “flagship-class” camera, with the main camera being “the same as the OnePlus 8.” While the OnePlus 8 Pro camera was pretty ok, the OnePlus 8 camera was not, so we’re not very optimistic here. The OnePlus 8 Pro had a brand-new Sony IMX689 sensor, while the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus Nord have the older, cheaper, smaller IMX586.

I totally get the cheaper phone having a cheaper camera, except that there are six cameras on this mid-range budget phone, which seems like a total waste. If we cut that down to two cameras, one front and one back, could the OnePlus Nord have afforded the better IMX689? I would definitely rather have one good camera instead of four mediocre cameras, but OnePlus apparently disagrees.

OnePlus is not an expert camera company to begin with, and pulling its punches like this with a cheaper sensor means the Nord tends to turn in gray, dull photos if you’re not blasting the subject with sunlight. That’s something that’s kind of to be expected from a cheaper Android phone, and only Google has shipped a top-tier mid-range camera thanks to all its software camera magic. The camera isn’t terrible, but it’s disappointing to see OnePlus choose to spread the camera bill of materials thinly with a bunch of cameras, instead of focusing on a single good camera.

Blowing away the mid-range Android competition

The OnePlus Nord is one of OnePlus’ strongest launches ever, just because it offers so much for such a low price. Like the OnePlus 7 Pro launch last year, the Nord is one of those phones that is just so miles ahead of its Android competition, it will probably compare favorably to mid-range phones that launch next year, forget about this year. This is mainly due to the 90Hz display, which will have to be a standard mid-range feature in 2021 now, but if you can buy a OnePlus Nord today, why wait?

You can spend more money and get a better phone than this, but the next time someone asks me to recommend an Android phone, the first one I point to will be the OnePlus Nord. It’s a great balance of specs, performance, and price that is good enough for most people. With the 90Hz display and modern design, you really aren’t missing much, and there’s little reason to spend more on an Android phone. You can get a better camera if you buy a Pixel phone, but Google doesn’t seem too interested in launching a mid-range Pixel phone any time soon.

The biggest downside is that Nord isn’t sold in that many countries. If you can buy one, though, it’s better than anything else in its price range—at least as far as Android devices go.

The Good

• A 90Hz display, at this price range, is an absolutely killer feature.
• A flat, distortion-free display, just like every content, app, and website creator intended.
• A modern, slim bezel design that is indistinguishable from a flagship smartphone.
• A mostly normal build of Android that focuses more on customization rather than repainting the entire OS.

The Bad

• OnePlus doesn’t do monthly security updates. It’ll be more like every other month.
• No always-on display.
• Facebook crapware.

The Ugly

• Shipping six mediocre cameras instead of two good cameras.