Oneplus came out as the flagship killer brand, offering high end specs at a lower price. Now things have changed and with the new oneplus Nord ce 5g, they’ve got the mid Rangers in their deadly sights.
Design
The One Plus Nord CE or core edition isn’t exactly a successor to the One Plus Nord we saw last year. It’s more of a slightly trimmed down and refreshed version meant to take on this year’s hardest midranges from the likes of Xiaomi and Samsung. The Nordsee is less than eight millimeters thick, thinner and lighter than the original one plus Nord, the plastic back and frame don’t feel plasticky and our blue void gradient finish really pops. It’s a matte finish to which is soft, doesn’t show fingerprints and is overall quite grippy.
Display
The Nord CE displays a 6.43 inch amyloid with a 10 ADP resolution, a fast 90 hertz refresh rate and a punch hole in the corner for the selfie cam. That fast refresh rate means that swiping and scrolling on the screen looks quite smooth. And it’s adaptive switching to 60 hertz if you stop interacting with the display, or if you’re watching video content.
Unlike the regular one plus Nord, you don’t get HDR 10 support here and there’s no mention of gorilla glass protection. But other than that this display is great. The picture here is sharp and as contrast II two thanks to OLED technology, colors are vivid by default, but you can make them very accurate if you switch color modes and brightness is good. We measured a maximum of around 430 minutes with a slider and it boosts to almost 610 minutes and auto mode when out and bright side.
Audio
There is a 3.5 millimeter jack for headphones. But unlike some competitors, you don’t get stereo speakers here. The single speaker isn’t that loud scoring average on our charts. Sound quality is decent, but there’s not much as far as bass goes. And we noticed distortion at higher volumes.
Storage and feature
You can opt for either 128 or 256 gigs of storage on board the Nord CE, but that’s it. It isn’t expandable. The interface of the phone is one plus oxygen or West 11 over Android I love it. One of the nicest things about it is that it comes with a promise of two years of major software updates and three years of security patches from one plus, unlike older iterations of oxygen Oh s the current one steps away from stock Android of it, but it’s still quite fast and bloat free.
A lot of the icons and UI elements have a slightly different look and things are arranged for easier one handed use. There’s an always on display, which is quite customizable. Here’s a neat trick. You can use gestures on the lock screen to control Media Player or even launching app.
The noise see features and under Display fingerprint reader for your biometrics. It’s fast and responsive, but the placement is low and feels a bit unnatural. One cool thing you can do is hold your thumb on the fingerprint reader and this will activate a quick launch menu for shortcuts. The one plus Nord CE has a Games app which organizes your games and provides some settings for customizing the behavior of notifications and calls while you play. And there’s something called zen mode, which basically blocks your phone for a while giving you a chance to breathe.
Chipset on OnePlus Nord CE 5G
Behind all of these features is an 8 nanometre Snapdragon 750 G chipset. It’s relatively new and actually pretty powerful for this mid range price segment. On top of providing 5g connectivity compared to the regular one plus Nord, which runs on a Snapdragon 765 G CPU performance is pretty much on par here. The C II does fall behind just a bit in graphics tests, but the scores are still respectable in games run nicely here.
Battery
Now on to battery life, the OnePlus Nord CE has a 4500 milliamp hour battery larger than the original Nord but nothing too huge. Still, battery life is great here. The Nord CE is scored an endurance rating of 117 hours and our proprietary test routine. charging speed is quite fast, but not the fastest on the block these days. With the bundle 30 Watt adapter we were able to charge from zero to 67% in half an hour.
Camera
The OnePlus Nordsee CE 5g has three cameras on the back a 64 megapixel quad Bayer main cam, an 8 megapixel ultra wide cam and a depth sensor. During the day the main camera does a good job well about as good as you can expect for the class. This low noise good detail and wide dynamic range.
The bigger issue is that the One plus Nord CE main cam consistently produces daylight images for the cooler white balance which results in a distinct color change across the entire image especially noticeable with whites such as the building facades and the clouds. There is the occasional over sharpening to the Nordsee he has a depth sensor to help with portraits. And these have okay edge detection. However in almost every other respect, these aren’t competitive, they’re soft and lacking in detail with the visible noise and the saturated skin tones.
Videos
Videos can be recorded with the main camera up to 4k resolution at 30 FPS. These are sharp enough with quite a bit of detail. Plus in colors, good contrast and wide dynamic range. The ultra wide camera shoots in 20 dp and these results are softer but the contrast and colors are fine. electronic stabilization is available in all modes and it does a good job reducing shakiness to a minimum.
So that’s the oneplus Nord CE 5g, you get a beautiful and lightweight design, a bright 90 hertz OLED, great battery life and fast charging a solid chipset for the class and a snappy and blood free interface. But is this a mid range killer? A mid range murderer, flagship killer killer, honestly, probably not. You don’t have expandable storage or stereo speakers. The camera experience is just average and there are competitors with full on flagship chipsets for the same price. But still at the end of the day, the Nordsee 5g has enough going forward to stay competitive and in this market that’s saying something.
