OnePlus Nord CE 5G Review – The Best Cheap Smartphone
If you are after a budget phone, the OnePlus Nord CE is hands down one of the best cheap smartphones on the market. I bought this one as a replacement for my partner’s aging OnePlus 3T, and I was honestly blown away with what you get for your money. To make it clear, it’s no flagship killer, but it doesn’t claim to be and the tradeoffs you make I think are perfectly reasonable.
The first obvious tradeoff here is the specs, you get a Snapdragon 750G 5G, which while not the oldest or slowest isn’t quite a top tier chip. As the name suggests, it does support 5G though which is certainly a nice benefit to have. In raw performance terms, rather confusingly, it is faster than the 765G and the 765, although the 780G 5G, 855, 855+ and new 888 Plus 5G are all varying degrees of ‘faster’.
In terms of RAM and storage, you get two options. This is the cheaper 8GB RAM, 128GB storage model, although you can option it with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of UFS2.1 storage if you’d prefer. For this kind of money though, I think this model makes the most sense as pricing for the higher end 12GB RAM option puts it much closer to a number of other arguably better options including OnePlus’ own Nord 2 5G.
Beyond the 5G support, you’ve got up to 802.11AC WiFi – not quite the top end AX or WiFi 6E but perfectly fine nevertheless – of course Bluetooth 5.1, USB C for charging and data and A HEADPHONE JACK! Yes, that’s right, you can actually plug some damn headphones into these! Crazy, I know. You also get a dual sim tray although sadly no MicroSD card expansion.
Now, if you’ve ever used, or even held, a phone at this sort of price tag you’ll know how cheap they normally feel. Often covered in naff plastics and feel just a little too squishy or bendy – let’s call it “subpar build quality”. This though? This feels solid. Yes, the back is plastic instead of the glass I got on my 7T Pro, and yes the front glass isn’t the Gorilla Glass brand stuff, but when you actually pick it up you’d never know. It genuinely feels like a premium device with great build quality. While the front glass not being the Corning brand piece, much like how OnePlus makes mostly water resistant phones but never bothers to get it IP rated I’d expect this glass comes from a very similar factory and even if it doesn’t, it comes with a screen protector and a very nice phone case in the box so barring it potentially being a touch more likely to break on a drop I’d expect you to see no real world differences.
One other key area you often sacrifice in a budget phone is the cameras – and unlike the build quality this one does suffer at least to some degree. To make it clear, all the cameras do a serviceable job and if you are only sharing photos over messaging apps with your friends and family they’ll be perfectly adequate, but if your insta feed is important to you, this might not be for you.
On the back you get three cameras, the top being a 64MP f/1.79 main camera, the middle being an 8MP f/2.25 ultra wide with a 119° viewing angle and the bottom being a 2MP f/2.4 mono camera which is primarily used for depth information. You do of course get an LED flash, although it’s a single cool tone rather than the dual tone you get in the higher end models like my 7T Pro.
The main camera, by default anyway, outputs a 16MP image as it uses 4 pixels in a square to give better accuracy to the one pixel it actually outputs. Those images look fine, although the sharpening is definitely turned up to max, the contrast seems boosted and it looks a touch desaturated.
The images are really, really over sharpened. Like, really badly. Yes, it retains an impressive amount of detail but it really doesn’t look good. It’s also remarkably flat and desaturated – of course you can fix that in editing if you like but to have the processing dull the image isn’t great.
As for the ultrawide… Yeah, that’s terrible. It’s almost hopelessly soft. Perhaps for close up group photos it might come out ok, but you can see in this shot how everything from the leaves on the ground to the trees and even the bush now all look like little coloured blobs rather than nicely defined objects. Compared to my 7T Pro’s ultrawide – which actually has a narrower field of view – you can see just how much more detail you get.
Of course, when it comes to zooming in which I personally find myself using more often than the ultrawide, having no telephoto camera means you are stuck with zooming in on the main camera’s image. It’s not terrible or anything, but compared to a dedicated zoom camera there is just no contest.
When it comes to video, you do have the option to record at 4K30, or either 1080p30 or 1080p60 if you’d prefer, although the 4K video looks really, really bad. Like if you keep everything still it’s fine, but it won’t stabilise the footage well so you end up with a pretty horrible look and even in fairly bright sunlight it looked like it pinned the shutter angle to 360° meaning any level of motion is a smeary, blurry mess. This isn’t usable. Luckily at 1080p30 the quality improves greatly. It’s stabilisation algorithm is still terrible and gives an arguably more shaky output, but it doesn’t look like it wants to smear everything quite as badly – although it’s clear that it’s sharpening the clip whenever there isn’t much motion which can make a clip look unnatural and less appealing, not more.
The front facing camera is a Sony IMX471 sensor with 16MP, an f/2.45 aperture and even electronic image stabilisation. It’s not awful, but compared to my 7T Pro it’s not amazing. Mine offers significantly more detail despite being the same actual sensor albeit with a wider f/2.0 aperture, and much more saturation that offers a more true-to-life look, although the Nord CE still does fine. In low light conditions it definitely struggles more.
As for video, you can do either 1080p30 or 1080p60, which in good lighting looks reasonable, although still can’t compete with my 7T Pro’s camera, not that I’d really expect it to. In low light, much like in stills it’s far, far from perfect, but not unusable.
That front camera is actually a hole-punch cam, which is punched through a rather nice 6.43” 2400×1080 90Hz AMOLED display. Yes, this budget phone has a 90Hz AMOLED! It’s incredibly smooth and fluid to use, on top of the otherwise vibrant and rich colours and a perfectly good 410 ppi pixel density meaning everything from text to videos are nice and crisp. Brightness isn’t bad either, I think you’d only struggle in direct sunlight much like most phones on the market.
One of the big benefits of OLED displays is the ability to only turn on the pixels you need, which means things like ambient displays work really well. You can customise how you have it, but I like the clean style with the time and notification icons personally, and of course being an OLED you aren’t draining the battery turning the whole display on just to show that thin text and small icons. Oh, and if you are worried about the 90Hz refresh rate draining the battery as well, you’ll be happy to know that the OS drops the refresh rate down to 60 when you aren’t using the screen, or in certain apps like Youtube which seems to be locked at 60Hz regardless of if you are watching a video or not.
Of course in games it will generally sit at 90Hz for the most smooth gaming experience possible, and despite its relatively mid-tier core (and Adreno 619 GPU) it actually games fairly well. It’s clear the games are turning the settings down – you can see the lack of anti-aliasing or staircasing on edges quite clearly – but as long as you aren’t a PUBG mobile pro this should suffice. In fact, that sums up it’s overall performance well. If you aren’t an absolute power user you should have no problems with using this. It’s smooth and responsive, loads everything fast enough, and while I can’t speak for how it’ll handle in a year or two’s time, I can’t say it’s all that slow now.
I’ve mentioned the battery-saving features, but not much on the battery itself. That is a 4500mAh cell, which in our experience with it will easily last a full day even with moderate use. You should be able to expect around 6 hours of screen on time, and should you want to top up the included Warp 30 fast charger will pump around 70% charge from fully dead in around 30 minutes which is fantastic. Sadly there isn’t any wireless charging here, although you do get NFC meaning wireless payments through Google Pay work fine.
When it comes to security for those payments – or the phone itself – you have an under-screen fingerprint reader. This feels a bit faster than the one on the 7T Pro, although still in the same pretty convenient position for my hands towards the bottom of the screen. If you’d prefer face unlock you can use that instead, although it’s not the most secure as it is just the camera rather than FaceID with lidar and depth sensors.
The other thing the Nord CE is missing up at the top is a second speaker – of course it has the earpiece speaker, but that isn’t used when listening to music or watching videos. Only the bottom firing speaker is used there, and while it does get reasonably loud, it’s not the best quality. Again, much like the rest of this phone it still works perfectly fine and for most people who just want some music playing in the background or to listen to a Youtuber talk at them for 20 minutes at a time (sorry), it’s good enough.
There is one rather key point about this phone I haven’t explicitly mentioned yet, and that’s it’s price. Originally, this phone retailed for £300 for the ‘base’ 8GB RAM, 128GB storage version. For that kind of price, it’s in some pretty hot competition from a number of other brands like Xiaomi, Realme (oppo, a ‘sister’ company to OnePlus) and of course Samsung, but that’s not the price you can buy it for right now. OnePlus will sell it to you for £250, which makes it a significantly better value proposition. For comparison, the Poco F3’s lowest ever price was on black friday sale this year for £269, but the Nord CE 5G is now £244 full-time. And since we are talking about on-sale prices, that’s when I bought this one, on black friday sale, for just £200.
For £200, there really aren’t many new phones that feel this well built, this good of a software experience (and two full versions of Android updates along with three years of security updates), this nice a display, and what I think are reasonably balanced cameras, battery life and features. This is, for me anyway, the best budget smartphone you can buy right now. If you can’t afford a flagship, or maybe you are a parent looking to get your kid a phone for Christmas and don’t want to get them something insanely expensive or high end, this is an exceptional option, especially at that on-sale price tag.
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