Skip to main content

OnePlus Nord review: Android’s best bang for your buck 90Hz, modern design, and a $450 price? Awesome.

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.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: ONEPLUS NORD
SCREEN6.44-inch, 2400×1080, 90Hz AMOLED

(408ppi, 20:9 aspect ratio)

OSAndroid 10 with Oxygen OS skin
CPUEight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G

Two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores, up to 2.4GHz, 7nm

RAM8GB, or 12GB
GPUAdreno 620
STORAGE128GB or 256GB, UFS 2.1
NETWORKING802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.1, GPS, NFC
PORTSUSB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C
CAMERARear: 48MP main camera, 8MP wide-angle, 2MP Macro, 5MP depth sensor

Front: 32MP main, 8MP wide-angle

SIZE158.3×73.3×8.2mm
WEIGHT184g
BATTERY4100mAh
STARTING PRICE~$456
OTHER PERKS30w quick charging, optical in-display fingerprint sensor

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 mid-frame (which, correction: is plastic, not metal) 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 AppleSamsungGoogleVerizon), so I can't ding OnePlus too much.






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.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: ONEPLUS NORD
SCREEN6.44-inch, 2400×1080, 90Hz AMOLED

(408ppi, 20:9 aspect ratio)

OSAndroid 10 with Oxygen OS skin
CPUEight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G

Two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores, up to 2.4GHz, 7nm

RAM8GB, or 12GB
GPUAdreno 620
STORAGE128GB or 256GB, UFS 2.1
NETWORKING802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.1, GPS, NFC
PORTSUSB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C
CAMERARear: 48MP main camera, 8MP wide-angle, 2MP Macro, 5MP depth sensor

Front: 32MP main, 8MP wide-angle

SIZE158.3×73.3×8.2mm
WEIGHT184g
BATTERY4100mAh
STARTING PRICE~$456
OTHER PERKS30w quick charging, optical in-display fingerprint sensor

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 mid-frame (which, correction: is plastic, not metal) 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 AppleSamsungGoogleVerizon), so I can't ding OnePlus too much.

                                                                       source:https://arstechnica.com/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Install Aircrack-ng on Ubuntu linux OS

Install Aircrack-ng on Ubuntu -AnoxBotox Aircrack-ng is a whole suite of tools for Wireless Security Auditing. It can be used to monitor, test, crack or attack Wireless Security Protocols like WEP, WPA, WPA2. Aircrack-ng is command line based and is available for Windows and Mac OS and other Unix based Operating systems. Aircrack-ng suite contains a lot of tools used for various purposes but here we’ll only look at some important tools that are used more often in Wireless Security testing. Airmon-ng Airmon-ng is used to manage wireless card modes and to kill unnecessary processes while using aircrack-ng. To sniff a wireless connection, you need to change your wireless card from managed mode to monitor mode and airmon-ng is used for that purpose. Airodump-ng Airodump-ng is a wireless sniffer that can capture wireless data from one or more wireless Access Points. It is used to analyze nearby Access Points and to capture handshakes. Aireplay-ng Aireplay-ng is use...

The star cluster closest to Earth is in its death throes-Stars in the Hyades are moving so fast it will disintegrate in 30 million years

The closest cluster of stars to Earth is falling apart and will soon die, astronomers say. Using the Gaia spacecraft to measure velocities of stars in the Hyades cluster and those escaping from it, researchers have  predicted the cluster’s demise . “We find that there’s only something like 30 million years left for the cluster to lose its mass completely,” says Semyeong Oh, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge. “Compared to the Hyades’ age, that’s very short,” she says. The star cluster, just 150 light-years away and visible to the naked eye in the constellation Taurus, formed about 680 million years ago from a large cloud of gas and dust in the Milky Way. Stellar gatherings such as the Hyades, known as open star clusters, are born with hundreds or thousands of stars that are held close to one another by their mutual gravitational pull. But numerous forces try to tear them apart: Supernova explosions from the most massive stars eject material that had been binding the clust...

Heartburn medicine doesn’t work as a COVID-19 antiviral - New findings don’t rule out the chance the antacid might help in other ways

An over-the-counter heartburn remedy probably won’t directly stop coronavirus infections, a new study suggests. Anecdotal reports from China suggested people hospitalized with COVID-19 who were taking famotidine (sold under the brand name Pepcid) had better outcomes than people who took a different type of antacid called a proton pump inhibitor. But famotidine has  no direct antiviral activity  against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to preliminary results reported July 15 at bioRxiv.org. Those findings, which have not been reviewed by other scientists yet, suggest famotidine won’t help prevent coronavirus infections or illness. But they don’t rule out that the drug might help in other ways, says Mohsan Saeed, a virologist at Boston University School of Medicine. “We’re not challenging that famotidine might help,” he says. “We’re saying that the mechanism of action is not antiviral.” The result isn’t a complete surprise. “A compound of this nature having ...