OnePlus Nord Review | The Ultimate Blog

The smartphone market is pretty saturated and it is becoming increasingly hard to know if you have bought the right phone. With similar so-called “high-end” specs the decision making usually boils down to the minute details.

Never Settle

The brand makes itself loud and clear and there’s your answer. If that wasn’t a satisfying answer, continue reading this blog post, where you’ll find a personal, highly biased (and not sponsored) justification as to why NORD would be ‘the’ choice in the mid-range phone category. But before we dive deep into the details, here’s a few things about my mindset with phones that might give you some context.

I love clean UI. Here I’m referring to Android in its purest form aka Vanilla (more on this later)
I am greedy when it comes to getting the latest app updates and OS and I judge brands on their ability to roll out patches and updates.
Irrespective of how the phone is, a good camera that satisfies the inner photographer in me is a must.
Oh, did I mention that I want all of this in a minimal budget?

This essentially acts as my “bias meter” to love or hate a phone. With that out of the way let’s jump right into the NORD review.

The Specs

The review is based on the top-end variant

Storage: 256GB
RAM : 12GB
Battery: 4115mAh Li-Po
Processor: Snapdragon 765G
Primary Camera: 48MP
Screen: 6.44” 20:9 aspect ratio 90Hz Gorilla Glass 5
Build: Plastic frame that looks metallic.
Color: I went for the Blue Marble :)
Headphone jack: 2020 so no.

NORD ( The overall feel )

With a catchy name and a modern, flagship-like design, this long sleek phone has an optimal curvature which is perfectly ergonomic. The build is light-weight owing to the plastic and yet feels sturdy when held. Overall, my personal opinion would be that it looks and feels like a premium flagship even if it's not.

Screen and Battery

The OLED 90Hz screen delivers a smooth and crispy experience and I seriously did not expect to get by with 20+% of battery left at the end of the day with such a high refresh rate display. I typically had 4-5Hrs of screen on time during the week-long testing and used all sorts of apps, video streaming, reading, video-conferencing, etc. A quick head’s up though, I am not a mobile-gamer so this review does not cover battery usage in that aspect. Coming to the battery recharge time: Insanely fast, would be the right word.To be more precise it took less than 40 minutes to go from 20-90% ( the typical charge cycle).

The Camera

A one line summary would be “It has great potential”. Why do I say this and not “it’s a nice camera”. It’s because compared to its nearest neighbour - Google pixel 4a, the camera sucks. But here’s the catch, with my previous experience with a budget phone : Moto G5S+ running Gcam, I know for a fact that most of the magic lies in the software and NORD’s camera can become one of the best and even surpass its competition with enough software upgrades.

Even in this bad state I was able to capture some exceptionally good photos. ( Trust me when I say they are good because I’m a photographer :)

Just to reiterate, NORD has epic camera hardware, and once the software catches up the camera will definitely be unparalleled. Which is evident from the forum discussions where the developers are active listening and making fixes.

*( If any OnePlus developer finds his way to this blog, my suggestion would be that:

White-balance, Smoothing and Denoising algorithms need immediate attention :)*

The OS

Ever since I found the Pixel Experience custom ROM (thanks Sid) I have absolutely been in love with the minimal, untouched android experience. Narrowing down which new phone to buy was relatively easier owing to the amount of trash OS out there (sorry samsung and redmi). As stated earlier no delayed rolling of updates, the material design, no bloatware makes it a pristine experience for me and the Pixel ROM delivered.

However I never expected that there would be a day where I would tell another OS was better, but here we are. A week into Oxygen OS and I absolutely love it. Unlike most OS out there, it only tampers with the vanilla experience where necessary. (For example: The close all apps and the mini app icons in recent apps is a simple yet huge upgrade over scrolling past the pure android experience just to find the app or reaching the end to hit “close all”). Pair that up with an active developer community which works on the tiniest of details and you have an intuitive, up-to-date OS experience.

Money-Money

Let's consider the serious question, “IS IT WORTH IT?”. Well, In the present market, comparing NORD against its counterparts, it's immediately noticeable that not many can boast such high end specs and storage at a 30,000 INR (~ 400$) price range. Were trade offs made: Yes, the plastic build, 700series is used and not the latest Qualcomm processor (but do bear in mind that the difference between 800 and 700 series is not noticeable in daily usage) and not so good speakers are evidently visible. Which would lead us to the thought that maybe some budget could have been used on a metallic build by removing a couple of cameras. Keeping these aside along with the fact that the in-box clear case has a pungent plastic odour there really isn’t much to complain about, or as some would say be a “Deal-breaker” for the price range it’s available in.

I hope that answers most of your questions about OnePlus NORD. Feel free to reach out if I have missed covering something or you went ahead and bought one and as always thanks for reading and happy learning!