[REVIEW] THE TRUTH ABOUT ONEPLUS NORD!

Hey! What's up guys I'm Technical Saviour here and OnePlus Nord is here. It's official as you probably already know about this phone by the avalanche in your sub box of YouTube or maybe its your first time hearing about this phone. So, I dropped my first impression about this phone and all the specs and all the official stuffs about it. This is the full review I'm going to button some things up and also just talk about this place OnePlus is in and the truth behind this phone.

So, like I said in  I'll stand by this pretty much every part of this phone is second best for the price meaning there's not going to be a super stand out flagship specs. Any place in this phone but all of them are going to be right up there with the best so the display is maybe the best example of this phone i.e it's a 1080p 90 hertz oled display. So not the bleeding edge highest resolution or highest frame rate but still quite nice and I've said I really like that it's a flat display and that the bezels aren't too thick now to pixel peep a little bit. I do see some off-axis rainbowing and some tint issues but it's minor and overall this screen is better than fine.

Its same with the specs Snapdragon 765 and I'm using the model with 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage now. It's number 800 series and it is UFS 2.1 storage.

Honestly, I just feel a bit slower especially with the heavier stuff like launching the big apps like the games and the camera that's where it's a little more noticeable.But overall it's fine and you know Oxygen OS for me has felt more or less like the same experience as the more expensive OnePlus 8.You have the bonus of 5G compatibility now. About the quality of the phone, the build feels good in the hand wiht metal and glass but that's not entirely true or accurate about this phone so it is glass on the front and the back it's plastic rails along the outsides and metal buttons so it's metal glass and plastic not that there's anything wrong with plastic.

We see it all the time especially in lower priced phones and it's technically more durable than glass a lot of times here it is painted to look like metal but like I said second best. So the other main things that we were waiting for the full review to talk about were the battery life and the cameras so like which do you want first the good news of the bad news . I think most people would probably pick the good news which is the battery and turns out the battery is quite good it's a little over 4 100mAh hours as you may remember and it was getting me comfortably through the end of all types of quarantine days five hours of screen on time no problem ending the lighter days with sometimes 20 or 30 % charge left and it definitely helped massively by it coming with the warp charger in the box. 





I can't understate how important that was for this phone now it actually comes with the european plug in the box since this phone's not coming to the US but I happen to already have a US warp charge 30t plug already. Plus there's one in my car I've been a fan of fast charging for a long time so this phone in the battery department definitely doesn't disappoint. Really it's in this price range only second place to like the crazy the more gimmicky energizer phone types you remember that did you guys know energizer made a phone the battery company that was a trip so then the cameras the bad news and really like it's more of it's just kind of a mixed bag at this point. I really think they've fallen victim to their own marketing department's hype so it's a quad camera system on the back all right 48 megapixel main camera with the hardware straight from the OnePlus 8 then an 8 megapixel ultra wide camera and a 2 megapixel macro camera and 5 megapixel depth sensor .
Okay let me try to be diplomatic here. 



The main camera is okay. It's the same hardware as the OnePlus 8 but it doesn't quite take the same photos I found it's actually a little bit noisier and little worse overall .But definitely in the same league decent photos if you don't pixel peep too much but once you zoom in you probably won't be too impressed by detail 



It's fine the ultra wide camera it does its job with the whole dramatic wide perspective for sure but it's immediately soft so no matter what the lighting conditions.It's just lacking the resolution fundamentally to match the quality of the primary camera in a wider field of view. You'd actually need a higher resolution than the main camera to achieve this but you know maybe that's just for flagships.Nevertheless I'm fine that it's here so you can probably see where this is going .The 2 megapixel macro camera on the back of this phone is just unnecessary because it is so bad and i think even OnePlus would know right away.



 It's basically to increase the count of the cameras on the phone and it's not actually here to be a great quality camera and actually you want to know the biggest reason you know OnePlus knows this. OnePlus 8 pro has a macro camera and there's actually a software feature where if you get close to a subject it automatically switches the camera to macro mode because it's a good camera . It's useful it'll be high quality this phone the Nord absolutely doesn't do that it never automatically switches to that separate macro camera because often the photos from this macro camera are actually worse than if you just use the main camera and get as close as you can and then crop in. That's not an exaggeration seriously I tried this a few times and almost every time I just take the photo from the main camera crop in a bit and when you put it next to the macro version it's usually better and this makes the additional camera module 
feel pointless.




Then there's the depth camera which in theory should make for some improved portrait shots and they look pretty good mostly with some occasionally quirky edge detection but then I covered the depth sensor with my finger and kept shooting and it didn't complain once and continued to take basically the same quality portrait shots.I think it's pretty clear OnePlus and a bunch of other companies it's not 
just them but in phones like this they want to put a triple or a quad camera set up 
so that it looks like visually it looks like one of those flagship phones and when you look at the spec sheet it says quad cameras just like a flagship but because it's not and they're trying to save money they have to cut the quality of at least that second and third camera .So here's a crazy idea I don't know if I've said this before but just get rid of those last two cameras that are so bad that they're useless and put that money you save into something else because the camera really is one of those places where you can just cut the fat like that now a place where you can't .The speaker on this phone right, it's a bad single channel .It's a mono
downward facing speaker. You can block it easily low quality tiny not very loud. It's just bad but it's better than not having a speaker at all so they just put that speaker in there and it's functional. But these cameras logical thing to do here is cut it down to maybe one maybe two cameras. If you need them and take the money saved and put them into other things that might be more noticeable like wireless charging or a metal frame or just better primary cameras but either way that's just my opinion. It's something they could do but clearly have chosen not to but that brings us to my conclusion .


Now in case I wasn't abundantly clear I really like this phone and with the promised two years of software updates and three years of security updates, I'm actually confident I could easily daily this phone for a couple years and be happy. But the truth about OnePlus nord is this was inevitable like OnePlus right now doesn't quite have the brand clout to compete at over a thousand bucks. Now that's definitely goals they're getting there they're closing in but still like ask your five closest friends what they think of OnePlus phones and guarantee there's a couple of them that haven't even heard of OnePlus yet. And that is tough to convince people to buy something at over a thousand bucks from a brand they've never heard of over. Apple and Samsung the dominating players and OnePlus knows that so they know their goal is and probably always has been to get to the point where they can compete and sell those high margin thousand dollar flagships but if they do that they're kind of abandoning what got them there in the first place 
which is all this name recognition for good high quality cheaper phones. So as their phones year after year after year moved up and up and up over and over again in price. It was inevitable that they had to come up with something down. Here to fill in the gap to keep building that brand cash and keep building that reputation of making good quality phones for the price. While this continues to evolve the only difference now though is they can't make this a flagship killer because they make a flagship now and they're not trying to cannibalize their own sales .
So this has to be a distinctly mid-range separate experience separate branding 
separate phone so that it doesn't interrupt with or over lap with their flagship. Honestly we could have seen this coming when these phones came out. Do you think it's co-incidence that for the first time in the years and years and years of OnePlus phones they finally added wireless charging the ip certification just those 
last couple things people were asking them to add so that they can compete at the high price. Now they added all those things to this higher end phone to compete of course and make it a better phone but also now it makes a perfect opening for a couple months later OnePlus Nord to slide in and have basically all the same smart trade-offs that they've been doing over the years with their flagships from like 
2015 up. Until now what are the down sides of this phone with no ip certification, no headphone jacks,sub-cameras a little bit lower end stuff. But just making the right cut offs and at the end of the day they've made the right trade-offs. If you're shopping for a phone any where under 500 bucks or 500 euros or 30 000 rupees or whatever that magical price range is for you this is something to look at no question easy to recommend easy to consider .But now I'm looking forward to the rest of what the Nord range will bring I think inevitably, there's a version of this that comes to the US and I'll be excited waiting for that so there you go there you have it it's the truth about OnePlus Nord.