Oneplus Nord CE 5G

Going south

Modest phone at an affordable price

SMARTPHONE | £299 from Amazon www.snipca.com/38756

Oneplus made its name with decent phones at affordable prices. Although it has recently wandered into more expensive territory, with phones such as the Oneplus 9 (£629, reviewed in Issue 607, www.snipca.com/38258), the Nord CE 5G is back on home turf. Prices start at £299 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, rising to £369 for 12GB RAM and 256GB storage.

The phone is slim and light, measuring 7.9x159x74mm, and weighing a mere 170g. It can take two SIM cards, which is useful if you’re using one phone to mix work and personal calls, but there’s no option to expand the storage with microsd. The under-screen fingerprint reader works well and it also comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack.

A few corners have been cut elsewhere to keep the price down, with no dust or water protection and no Gorilla glass to protect the screen from scratches.

The screen is the best feature, though. Measuring 6.43in across the diagonal, it uses AMOLED technology to give vibrant, colour-accurate images that match any phone in its price bracket. It has perfect contrast, and is bright enough to use outdoors on all but the sunniest days.

By using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G processor, Oneplus hasn’t pushed the boat out in terms of performance. In our benchmark tests it performed a little faster than the Nokia X20 (reviewed in Issue 608, www.snipca.com/38411), though it’s disappointing when it comes to games, where we’ve seen other similarly priced phones outperform it.

On the plus side, this has a positive impact on battery life. The phone ran for 24 hours and 43 minutes in our videoplayback test, which is excellent.

The camera setup includes a 64-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera (with a 119-degree field of view), and a 2-megapixel mono camera that’s just there to help the others out.

The main camera performs well, especially in good lighting conditions, though it can’t rival some similarly priced phones. It captures detailed, colourful images, but it’s not brilliant at portrait shots, failing to blur the background enough for our taste.

VERDICT Has a good screen and battery life, but other phones in this price bracket are faster and have better cameras

ALTERNATIVE Xiaomi Poco F3 £329 This Android phone performs superbly well and has a brilliant screen, but doesn’t have the best camera