| Price: | $400 USD (Buy Now) |
| Launch: | August 2020 |
| Brand Country: | China |
| Display: | 6.44 inches (1080 x 2400), Type: Fluid AMOLED, HDR10+, (90Hz refresh rate. |
| Back Camera: | 48 MP, f/1.9, (wide), PDAF, OIS 8 MP, f/2.3, (ultrawide) 5 MP, f/2.4, (depth) 2 MP, f/2.4, (macro) |
| Front Camera: | 32 MP, f/2.5, (wide) 8 MP, f/2.5, (ultrawide) |
| Storage: | RAM: 6,8,12GB, ROM: 64,128,256GB UFS 2.1 |
| Battery: | 4115 mAh battery, Fast charging 30W |
| Processor: | Snapdragon 765G (7 nm) (Octa-core Processor) |
| Security: | Fingerprint (under display, optical) |
| OS: | Android 10, OxygenOS 10.5.4 |
| Body Design: | 158.3 x 73.3 x 8.2 mm (184g), Front & back (Gorilla Glass 5), plastic frame |
| SIM: | Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by) |
| Connectivity: | Wi-Fi 802.11, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot, Bluetooth: 5.1, dual-band A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO, NavIC, NFC |
| Features: | accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass |
How is the Battery?
Battery life is also good. Now I'll admit that it's still quite hard to gauge this given the amount of time I'm spending at home right now and I'll also caveat this by saying that I was connected to 4G rather than 5G networks.
But I was getting between eight and 10 hours of screen time between charges from the Nord's 4,115 mAh battery. And that includes everything, from watching copious amounts of YouTube to keeping in contact with friends and colleagues over Slack and WhatsApp, taking photos and of course browsing plenty of Twitter. There's no wireless charging but there is support for OnePlus' Warp Charge 30T standard which the company says should get you about 70% of your chargeback in half an hour. So good battery life doesn't seem to be exclusive to OnePlus flagships, it's more of a universal OnePlus feature.
What About Display?
Now we already know you're not getting exactly the same display on this as you did on the Oneplus 8, it doesn't have that same curve for example. It's also a little bit smaller at 6.44 inches compared to 6.55 inches with the 8. But honestly, if you hold them next to each other you barely notice the difference. So it's a very similar screen which means it's pretty great.
It's OLED so blacks are lovely and deep, colors are vibrant, it's still 1080p and hey, it's also got that 90 Hertz refresh rate display. Now I've said it before and I'll say it again but high refresh rate displays deserve to become the new standard. But there is a caveat and that's that the slightly less powerful processor on the Nord means that it doesn't feel exactly as smooth as the 8. I mean it's fine if you're scrolling through something simple like the app drawer but scroll through Twitter with its numerous videos and images and it does start to stutter if only a little. It's a little bit hard to show on video but trust me when I say it is there. It's still better than a 60 Hertz display but it just doesn't feel as smooth as what we've seen from flagship phones with 90 Hertz displays. It's an acceptable trade-off for the price but it's also something that's worth bearing in mind.
Fingerprint Sensor
It works basically every time and I've barely had to think about it. So a high-end display seems to be an OnePlus staple and not something that's exclusive to its flagships, even if you're not getting exactly the same performance.
Audio Quality
Audio isn't a strong suit of the Nord. There's a single downward-firing speaker here which means that there's no stereo and while it gets plenty loud enough there's just not that much base there. So I guess good speakers are a flagship exclusive.
So far we've been trying to work out what features OnePlus thinks all of its phones need to have and which it wants to keep for its flagships.
Camera
Now the good news is that the Nord's cameras are in a very similar ballpark to the OnePlus 8 and the better news is there's at least one feature here that is exclusive to the Nord. Now the Nord has a lot of cameras. I mean on the back there's four.
There's a 48-megapixel main camera, an eight-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera, a two-megapixel macro camera, and a five-megapixel depth sensor. And on the front, there's two. There are a main 32-megapixel camera and an eight-megapixel ultra-wide with a 105-degree field of view, a neat little exclusive for the Nord. Now that's a lot of hardware.
So here's what OnePlus actually does with it. In daylight, you get very similar quality photos to the OnePlus 8 with the OnePlus Nord. I mean check out this photo from my living room. And if I didn't label the photos I think you'd have a hard time telling me which phone took which photo. Sometimes the OnePlus Nord decides to add a little bit more saturation to photos than the 8 does but most of the time you can barely tell the difference. It's the same when it comes to faces.
There's more of a difference when it comes to wide-angle shots though where you really miss the extra resolution on the 8's ultra-wide camera. The Nord seems to overcompensate with a little too much image processing sometimes. it's probably acceptable at this price and I'd rather it was there than not at all.
It's the same deal with the wide-angle selfie camera. Sure, its images are a little softer than the main 32-megapixel sensor and the selfie camera, in general, seems to make my face a bit weird and bright looking, but it's super useful for group selfies, or I guess couple selfies if you're socially distancing. Whatever, I like it.
My Opinion
I think the Nord is a really solid mid-range phone, but it's not perfect. It's well spaced, yes. I mean, it's got lots of cameras, it's got that nice big high refresh rate display and of course, it's got
that big battery. But the reality of what it gets from that hardware sometimes leaves a little to be desired. That's not a bad thing at all, it just kinda makes it hard to unreservedly recommend this phone to anyone group of people.