Name: OnePlus Nord review: the best of OnePlus, for less
Uploaded: 2020-10-23T20:10:36.000Z
Duration: 9 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- The OnePlus Nord is an important moment for OnePlus.

Adverbs of manner

For years OnePlus has basically stuck to flagships.

Nowadays it likes to do them two at a time

but they're both designed to sit more or less

Now it's expanding with the Nord, its first serious attempt

Launching a mid-range phone means making some tough

decisions about what the OnePlus name means to people.

It still needs to have those features that people buy

OnePlus phones for in the first place but it also needs

Not just because it needs to make it cheap

but also so that once it is cheaper it doesn't end up

so good that people choose it over your flagship phones.

It needs to draw a line between OnePlus features

It's a balancing act where if you get the balance

slightly wrong you could end up with the same kind

of flagship killer that OnePlus liked to call

Only now OnePlus has flagship phones of its own

that risk getting caught in the crossfire.

So what does a mid-range OnePlus phone look like?

Which flagship features do you get to keep

The model I've been using has 12 gigabytes

of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage and costs 469 pounds

But there's also a step down model with eight gigabytes

of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage which costs 379 pounds

So it's a mid-range phone sitting in a similarish

sort of price category to this year's entry level,

419 pound iPhone SE or the 429 pound Galaxy A51 5G.

Both models are releasing in Europe and India but OnePlus

is only planning a limited beta launch in the US for now.

At either price you're getting what is on paper

with a 1080p resolution and a 90 Hertz refresh rate,

a quad rear camera array based around the same 48 megapixel

sensor that OnePlus used for the 8, dual selfie cameras,

including one with an ultra wide lens, and you're getting

Now the trade-off, on paper at least, is that the Nord

is powered by a Snapdragon 765G processor which isn't quite

as fast as the flagship processors OnePlus used in the 8

But specs can't tell you how premium a device feels to hold.

And the OnePlus Nord's design is one of the more obvious

I like the simplicity, there's no messing around

with screens that curve round the edges of the device.

Instead you're gonna get a flat screen with a smallish

hole-punched notch for the Nord's dual selfie cameras

Generally the whole design does feel less premium

than the 8 but not in a way that feels cheap,

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

But I was getting between eight and 10 hours

of screen time between charges from the Nord's

And that includes everything, from watching copious amounts

of YouTube to keeping in contact with friends and colleagues

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 charge back

So good battery life doesn't seem to be exclusive to OnePlus

flagships, it's more of a universal OnePlus feature.

Now we already know you're not getting exactly the same

display on this as you did on the 8, it doesn't have

It's also a little bit smaller at 6.44 inches

But honestly if you hold them next to each other

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,

Now I've said it before and I'll say it again

but high refresh rate displays deserve to become

But there is a caveat and that's that the slightly less

powerful processor on the Nord means that it doesn't feel

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OnePlus Nord review: the best of OnePlus, for less

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decent

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recommend