OnePlus Nord CE 5G review: The best value product OnePlus...

OnePlus Nord CE 5G is the start of a new chapter for the company in many aspects. It is the most affordable OnePlus smartphone in the last five years, brings decent under the hood prowess, and most importantly, guarantees a top-notch experience. But is the new Nord CE a device you should be excited about? India Today Tech tries to answer that in the review.

HIGHLIGHTS

OnePlus Nord CE 5G price in India starts at Rs 22,999 for the basic 6GB RAM and 128GB storage model.
The top-of-the-line model features 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage and is priced at Rs 27,999.
In our review, the Nord CE 5G fared well across almost all departments.

OnePlus Nord CE 5G is the latest entry in the company’s 2021 portfolio that already looks comprehensive, and we are just halfway through the year. What the new Nord brings for smartphone enthusiasts in India is the OnePlus experience at its lowest price in the last five years. More importantly, customers now have a OnePlus device at prices starting at as low as Rs 22,999 and going up to Rs 69,999. Well, that’s smart, and we can now say that there’s a OnePlus device for everyone.

But this is not the first time that OnePlus is trying its hands on an affordable device in India. The OnePlus X was the company’s first real attempt in the budget segment back in 2015, but it didn’t receive as great feedback as the company expected, and we never saw a successor.

With the Nord CE 5G, OnePlus is again back after six years in a slightly different market where smartphone manufacturers like Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo, Motorola, and more are fighting it out to woo customers in the sub-Rs 30,000 segment. The Nord CE 5G packs everything on paper – a decent processor, capable cameras, a fantastic display, and a battery that should keep users satisfied. For those unaware, CE in the OnePlus Nord CE 5G is short for Core Edition, and the company says it follows the Nord philosophy to offer phones at accessible prices.

What also goes in favour of the OnePlus Nord CE 5G is the aggressive price tag. But will the price tag and the overall experience combined with the OnePlus branding be enough to woo customers? India Today Tech tries to answer that and tell you if the Nord CE is worth your money.

OnePlus Nord CE 5G review: Practical design is appealing but lacks a premium feel

Ever since I took the Nord CE 5G out of the box, I have been impressed by the overall design. It is lightweight, sleek, and offers excellent one-hand usability. In fact, I don’t remember a time when I had to use both our hands for a specific task or function except while plugging the charger.

Everything is in reach of the thumb, be it the notification toggle or the power key. However, one big complaint with the OnePlus Nord CE 5G is that it misses the signature alert slider.

I got a chance to ask a OnePlus executive about the decision to remove the alert slider. What the company has done here is build a phone for a specific audience with aspirations of using a OnePlus phone who couldn’t so far. With the Nord CE 5G’s aggressive pricing, the company has made it accessible to a broader audience. The company believes that they may not find the slider very useful. Instead, the 3.5mm audio jack was the priority. While there’s no denying the fact that OnePlus has its reasoning for removing the slider from the Nord CE. In my opinion, the company should have stick to its primary design elements that differentiate it from the rest of the crowd.

Currently, only two major companies ship phones with an alert slider setup – Apple and OnePlus. When Apple launched the iPhone SE in 2016 at an affordable price point, it didn’t remove it because it has been an essential design element of iPhones since the beginning.

Coming back to the design of the Nord CE, the phone features an aluminium frame that offers sturdiness. However, the back panel isn’t glass. OnePlus tells me that the Nord CE rear panel features a composite material that has been widely used in the industry and is a mix of many materials. This pretty much explains how OnePlus managed to reduce the weight of the Nord CE

At 170 grams, the Nord CE 5G is lighter than the original Nord and is lighter than many of the phones available in the same price segment, like the Redmi Note 10 Pro Max. The Nord CE is also the company’s slimmest smartphone at 7.9mm thickness since the OnePlus 6T. It has been launched in three colours – Blue Void, Charcoal Ink, and Silver Ray. I got the Blue Void colour, which I believe is the best colour option for the Nord CE, and it reflects a slightly Ocean Blue colour at the sides when seen from some angles. The Nord CE features a matte finish at the back which means no fingerprint smudges.

Since the audio jack is included and located on the bottom panel alongside the charging port and speaker grille, the SIM card slot had to be moved. It is now located on the left panel, accompanied by volume rocker keys. The right panel houses the power button. I liked the tactile feel of the physical buttons.

The rear panel is more of a minimalist this time around. There’s the OnePlus logo, and the same as the OnePlus 9 series, the company has stopped putting OnePlus name branding on the rear panel. The triple camera array sits on the left corner of the back panel and has “64MP AI Triple CAM” embossed. The LED flash is rounded and sits right next to the camera setup. The single selfie camera sensor sits on the left corner of the display and doesn’t hinder it while watching content on display.

Overall, the OnePlus Nord CE 5G feels like a phone built to last long. However, it misses out on the premium-ness factor that the original Nord offered. Apart from that, Nord CE 5G scores heavily on the design front. I like the practical design, and if I have to pick between the new Nord CE and the original Nord, I will choose this one for better aesthetics. The rounded corners sit comfortably on the palm, which means extended use will not be much of an issue for anyone.

OnePlus Nord CE 5G review: Impressive performance

The OnePlus Nord CE 5G is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G Mobile Platform, which has been a popular chipset choice in the sub-Rs 30,000 price category in India. The octa-core processor comes with an Adreno 619 GPU and clock speeds of up to 2.2GHz. The company has launched the Nord CE in three RAM and storage variants – 6GB+128GB, 8GB+128GB, and 12GB+256GB. I got the top-of-the-line model for the review.

During everyday use, the Nord CE 5G sails smoothly and handles multitasking with ease. While reviewing, I tested the Nord CE 5G with up to 20 apps running simultaneously in the background, and the phone didn’t stutter. Even while playing popular titles like Call of Duty: Mobile, Garena Free Fire, and Asphalt 9: Legends, I noticed that the Nord CE handled these games without any hassle. The phone does get warm after a couple of hours of gaming but not to an extent where you cannot hold it, and in my opinion, it’s pretty contained within the phone’s body.

I got the 12GB RAM version for the review and noticed that about 4GB of RAM is always available even if I was multitasking. Then, there’s also the RAM Boost feature, which is also on board that optimises RAM based on usage, a neat addition. There’s in-display fingerprint as well as face unlock features on the OnePlus Nord CE 5G, and both worked flawlessly.

One of the reasons why the OnePlus Nord CE 5G offers a buttery smooth performance is it runs on OxygenOS 11, which in my opinion, is one of the best custom UIs one can find right now. It offers a clean experience, and more importantly, there’s no bloatware issue which my colleagues at India Today Tech keep referring to in their reviews for Xiaomi, Realme, Oppo, and Vivo smartphones. However, there’s no denying the fact that OnePlus has slightly moved away from its initial stance of offering a near-stock Android experience with its latest OxygenOS 11 update and several OnePlus fans aren’t very excited about this idea. For example, the UI now includes some apps that cannot be uninstalled, like the Netflix app.

However, I believe that OxygenOS 11 still manages to impress us with tons of features like a refreshed UI for default apps like Weather, Notes, and Gallery. The OxygenOS 11 also adds support for Dynamic wallpapers and adds tons of new smart features in the Gallery. My favourite is the new Always-on display feature that lets users try out interesting AOD options like the Insight AOD. Of course, there are also improvements to Dark Mode, which can now be scheduled.

Apart from UI and performance, the Nord CE also offers excellent call clarity and can latch on to networks in zones where I usually see signals dropping. The phone also provides great Wi-Fi performance and packs connectivity options like NFC and Nearby Share. The good thing is, OnePlus hasn’t removed features that are widely popular among the community, like the Screen Recorder feature, which comes in handy. The all-new Games app offers all gaming-related optimisations in one place and is an excellent tool for pro-gamers. The Nord CE also comes with the company’s guaranteed two years of software updates and three years of security updates.

The 6.43-inch AMOLED display on the Nord CE feels apt for daily use. It offers a 1080×2400 pixels screen resolution and offers 410 PPI pixel density. The phone offers a 90Hz refresh rate and comes with a 20:9 aspect ratio. The display comes with features like Ambient display, Dark mode, and Reading mode. The display is decent for multimedia consumption and even gaming. The colours and text appear sharp. Even the blacks are rich on display. However, I feel that this is not the best display I have seen on a OnePlus device. Of course, the price proposition prompted the company to reduce some features while focusing on another set. The display on the Nord CE is suitable for most of the tasks and offers excellent visibility under direct sunlight as well. However, there are phones in this price segment that offer better screens than the Nord CE.

OnePlus Nord CE 5G review: Cameras are decent but still need a bit of work

OnePlus Nord CE packs some massive improvements in the camera department over the original Nord. To start, there’s a triple camera setup, unlike the original Nord that sports a quad-camera setup. Giving a big bump to the camera department, the company has added a 64-megapixel sensor with f/1.79 aperture and EIS, or short for electronic image stabilisation, which comes in handy while recording videos. There’s also an 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 2-megapixel mono-lens.

During the review, I tested out the cameras on the Nord CE in different conditions. I noticed that the 64-megapixel primary camera could click sharp images with a good amount of details. If you want to see how well this camera can perform, then try this out during the day in natural light, and you will understand how capable the primary sensor is.

The image samples I got were crisp and had vivid colours with abundant details when I zoomed into the photos. The 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera is great for landscape shots and offers an excellent field of view of 119-degrees. We, however, noticed that the colour accuracy on the primary sensor was slightly off in some of our shots, while at the same time, colours popped in images taken with the ultra-wide sensor. I doubt that the AI had something to do with this, though I make sure that any feature that enhances samples is turned off, like smart scene recognition and other similar features.

The Nord CE 5G also features the company’s popular Nightscape mode that helps during low-light shots. Shots taken with a light source around came out well, though, on zoom with noticed enough noise in the corners. I took a sample shot of the legendary Maruti 800 car where the Nord CE didn’t do justice to how well the owner maintained the white colour. Even the multi autofocus, which uses the combination of PDAF and CAF on the Nord CE 5G, seemed to struggle to focus on a subject when there wasn’t enough light around. In my opinion, the company will need to add some refinements to its cameras to improve the results further. Currently, it offers a decent experience, but it can do better.

The phone can also record 4k videos at 30fps as well as 1080p videos at 30 and 60fps. The test videos I recorded came out well. The 16-megapixel selfie camera is decent for daytime shots, though it isn’t great for low-light situations. There’s screen flash support, but it doesn’t help too much.

OnePlus Nord CE 5G review: Battery lasts long, really long

If there’s one department where the OnePlus Nord CE 5G stands out, in my opinion, it has to be the battery. It packs a 4500mAh battery, which is bigger than the original Nord. The Nord CE 5G comes with the company’s all-new Warp Charge 30T Plus fast charging algorithm that promises 0 to 70 per cent charging in 30 minutes.

During our review, the phone lasted for over a day with heavy usage, which involved gaming, browsing, reading, listening to some music with wireless earphones, and the usual host of apps always open in the background, like WhatsApp, Gmail, Instagram, and Twitter.

The new Warp Charge 30T Plus also helps with short charging durations. I noticed during the review that the Nord CE 5G could charge from 25 per cent to 65 per cent in around 15 minutes, which was again impressive.

OnePlus Nord CE 5G review: Should you buy it?

At a starting price of Rs 22,999, the OnePlus Nord CE 5G is one of the best mass-market product coming out from the house of OnePlus in all these years.

What are the things that go in favour of the OnePlus Nord CE? It has an appealing and practical design that consumers should appreciate in the sub-Rs 30,000 price segment. A capable processor with 5G support makes sure that you are future proof. OxygenOS onboard should keep you satisfied, and the company’s promise of future updates should help you in the long run as well. The phone offers splendid network reception as well as good call clarity.

However, there are a few shortcomings as well, like the phone doesn’t feel like a premium device thanks to the company’s compromises to bring down the weight and price. The display isn’t the best you get in this segment. The cameras also need some refinements. If you’re okay with these, then you cannot go wrong with the OnePlus Nord CE 5G at all.

Since I reviewed the 12GB RAM version (available at Rs 27,999), I cannot exactly comment on the 6GB RAM performance. But I believe that the 8GB RAM version (available at Rs 24,999) should be suitable for most people, even for those who are looking for a good gaming device at this price point. Of course, if you have the budget, then the 12GB RAM version is the best choice.

Looking at the current sub-Rs 30,000 smartphone choices, I believe that the Nord CE is a clear winner in this segment at the moment. So, to answer, should you buy it? Yes.