OnePlus Nord CE 5G
A brilliant buy for the price, it marries good looks with great battery life, a capable camera and a lovely display
SCORE★★★★☆
PRICE 8GB/128GB, £249 (£299 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk
Nord is OnePlus’ budget brand, and whilst the Nord 2 ( see
p68) sits at the top end of the range, the CE “Core Edition” targets those with less to spend. That doesn’t mean it lacks appealing features.
Top of the list is its 90Hz 6.43in AMOLED screen, which delivers vibrant images that are a match for any phone in its price bracket. Brightness peaks at a solid 400cd/m², and colour accuracy in Natural
(sRGB) mode is excellent. You can’t expect such accuracy in its most lurid mode, AMOLED Wide Gamut, where the panel covers 114% of the DCI-P3 colour space. It’s an excellent display.
The Nord CE looks pretty good with the screen off, too. You have a choice of “void blue” or “charcoal ink” (black) for the base model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while the £369 12GB/256GB variant coming in “silver ray”. I was sent the blue model for review and it’s surprisingly attractive for a phone built entirely from plastic. The rear of the phone is subtly curved at the edges, and the blue colouring fades off to a metallic purple as the rear panel meets the chrome-effect frame. With a matte finish that successfully keeps fingerprints at bay, this is a very nice-looking thing.
It’s slim, measuring 74 x 159 x 7.9mm, and weighs a mere 170g; that’s 0.3mm thinner and 15g lighter than the first Nord ( see issue
313, p62). There’s dual-SIM support, too, although there’s no microSD expansion. The under-screen fingerprint reader works well and it also comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack – a feature the first Nord phone ditched. There are missing features: no rating for dust or water ingress protection, no Gorilla Glass and no sign of the OnePlus three-position do-not-disturb switch. You have to move up to the Nord 2 if you’re desperate for that convenience.
That will also buy you a faster processor, with OnePlus opting for a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G chip here. On paper, it’s clocked slower than the Snapdragon 765G in the original Nord (2.2GHz vs 2.4GHz) but, in practice, the two proved neck and neck in Geekbench 5. When it comes to graphics performance, however, the Nord CE takes a 10fps hit in GFXBench’s onscreen Manhattan 3 test compared to the Nord. That’s because the 750G has Adreno 619 graphics in tow where the 765G includes an Adreno 620 chip.
On the plus side, the Nord CE proved the more efficient handset, outlasting the original Nord by more than four hours in our video-rundown test with an outstanding time of 24hrs 43mins. That’s the twelfth best result we have ever seen from any smartphone.
Another area OnePlus cuts back is the camera lineup. Instead of four cameras on the rear, we have three: a 64MP (f/1 (f/1.8) 8) main camera, camera an 8MP (f/2.3) f/2.3) ultrawide camera with a 119° field ield of view, and a 2MP mono camera to o help out with black-and-white images. mages. It lacks the macro camera of the he original Nord, doesn’t have optical ptical image stabilisation and the front ront camera is half the resolution, but I’d argue that the 16MP on offer here is plenty.
I’m not complaining. Even placed side by side against the Google Pixel 4a ( see issue
313, p60), it mostly holds its own, especially in good light conditions. The main camera captures detailed and nd colour-packed images, and the ultrawide camera is useful for taking photos of large groups of people or dramatic landscapes. As with the
Nord 2, it lags behind the Pixel 4a for portrait shots, blurring the background only a little and defaulting to a wide angle view that makes it tricky to fill the frame with your subject.
Oddly, even without the assistance ssistance of the depth camera, the 16MP 6MP front camera makes a far better fist of portraits, competing manfully here with the Pixel 4a’s selfie
camera. amera. Google’s phone is still better, but only by a fraction, and the sole disappointment was the Nord CE’s low-light Nightscape mode. This is a poor relation to the Pixel’s excellent Night Sight mode, producing photographs that look overprocessed and oversaturated.
At least the Nord CE’s video recording mode is decent, using electronic image stabilisation to capture stable 4K footage at 30fps. Overall, the cameras are what you would expect at this price: not exceptional, but perfectly acceptable.
And that is the theme of my verdict on the Nord CE. For the money, it’s perfectly good. Performance is solid, the display is excellent, the camera delivers crisp, well-exposed photos in most circumstances and the battery life is superb. The Nord CE may not have the star quality of its more expensive siblings, but it’s a fine handset in its own right.
SPECIFICATIONS
8-core 2.2GHz/1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G 5G chipset 8GB/12GB RAM Adreno 619 graphics 6.43in 90Hz AMOLED screen, 1,080 x 2,400 resolution 128GB/256GB storage triple 64MP/8MP/ 2MP rear r cameras 16MP front camera 3.5mm m jack Wi-Fi 5 Bluetooth 5.1 NFC C USB-C 4,500mAh battery Android 11/OxygenOS 11.3 74 x 7.9 x 159mm (WDH) 170g 2yr RTB warranty via oneplus.com
“The Nord CE proved the more efficient handset, outlasting the original Nord by more than four hours in our video-rundown test”