OnePlus Nord 4 5G Review: Reliable Smartphone That Won’t Strain Your Budget

OnePlus Nord series has always served as the company’s best affordable series. And the latest addition to the same was the OnePlus Nord 4 5G. I got the device for review pretty recently and used it left, right, and center to know all the good and bad things about the smartphone. One thing that I can say before even starting with the main review is that after using the phone, I know that it is best suited for people who want decently performing smartphones that don’t burn a hole in their pocket. Also Read: OnePlus Nord 4 Price Dropped Ahead Of Nord 5 Launch: Should You Buy?

OnePlus Nord 4 5G Review: Specifications and features

  Also Read: OnePlus Nord 5 And OnePlus Nord CE 5 Launch Date Officially Confirmed For July 8: All Details Inside

Design

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The OnePlus Nord 4 stands a bit apart in design from just about all of the smartphones in the same price range. The device has a metal back which offers it a premium look. The device has a smooth finish on the back with a glassy finish around the camera that covers 25 to 30% of it. The alert slider offered in the device just adds another star to its shoulder by enhancing the premium feel. The slider has three options – normal, silent, and vibrate.

The power and volume buttons are available at the right spine of the device. At the top edge of the device, we get to see a microphone, and an Infrared Transmitter (IR). On the bottom, there is a USB Type-C port for charging and data transfers, a speaker grille, and yet another microphone. In the box, you will find a charging brick and a USB Type-A to USB Type-C cable in addition to a package-translucent TPU cover that’ll get you started straight out of the box.

Display

The OnePlus Nord 4 5G sports a 6.74-inch flat panel Super Fluid AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate and Ultra HDR support. All four sides have slim bezels that give the device a premium feel. And the phone is safe from ghost touches and unresponsive edges that we often get to see in curved screen devices.

The panel is bright enough, comfortable to work with under the sun, and dims nicely at night, making it a real gem for use right before heading to bed. The 120Hz refresh rate gives a smooth and fluid feeling to everything, generally adding up to the best user experience possible. When it comes to display, I can surely say that OnePlus Nord 4 5G is a rare offering at this price point.

Camera

The OnePlus Nord 4 5G features a dual rear camera setup consisting of a 50MP primary shooter with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) and Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS), and an 8MP ultra wide angle shooter. When tested in sunlight, the photographs produced by the smartphone were actually beautiful. I tested the camera in multiple modes and the results were quite satisfying.

Nonetheless, the results were not that impressive when using Zoom. Furthermore, the camera performance in low light was just average and nothing to get wooed by. Talking about the 16MP front camera, it was really the star of the night. And by night here, I mean it was able to click some good shots in the night light too.

Apart from that the clicks from the front camera were not beautified and were raw which sets them class apart from the results produced by devices available in the same price range. All in all, I can say that the camera performance of the smartphone is decent enough considering the price point. Just don’t rely on it heavily in the nighttime.

Performance

The OnePlus Nord 4 is powered by a Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3 processor, which makes it just a notch below flagship performance. The chip stands pretty well on this one, as it is much stronger than the Exynos 1480 inside the Galaxy A55. However, the Pixel 8 with the Tensor G3 chip is just a tad better than the Nord 4 in both CPU and video processing tests.

To test the gaming performance of the game, I downloaded Asphalt 9 and the game was running super-smooth on the device without lagging behind in animation and clearly showing the mid-game effects.

Apart from that, the device is a boon for people who love to open 100 tabs at a time like me. I almost opened 60 to 70 tabs at the same time along with running YouTube in the background, and witnessed that the phone had zero impact on the performance and no issues related to heating were encountered.

And yes,  about long hours of gaming, when running a game like Asphalt, BGMI, etc, you can witness a little heating but that seriously had no effects on the performance. I don’t know as of now if the constant heating of the phone could have an effect on the performance in the future or not. The 8GB RAM of the device played a major role in delivering top-notch performance bundled with the processor.

Software

The OnePlus Nord 4 5G comes with OxygenOS 14.1 based on the Android 14 operating system. The phone is blessed with a plethora of custom animations, icons, and menus. And what makes me more happy is that OnePlus has avoided riding the AI wave like other brands and is offering a simple yet effective user interface. However, if you’ve been a OnePlus fan for a long time, you know that the unified OxygenOS is no match for the OG OxygenOS that we last got to see in the OnePlus 9 series. While I agree that new OnePlus users will find the UI and software of the phone more than impressive, but us, who have seen the glory of the original OxygenOS will not get impressed with the UI that easily.

Battery

The latest Nord offering by OnePlus ships with a 5500mAh monstrous battery that promises to go on for long hours without craving for charging. Once charged completely, I used the smartphone extensively, including watching videos on YouTube, playing Asphalt 9, making a couple of Gmeet calls, and listening to music all day long, with 24×7 WiFi, and the smartphone needed the next round of charging after almost 18 hours.

That’s a win for the people who look for a long-lasting battery in a device. In terms of battery drainage, the phone lost around 13% battery in an hour while running a heavy game like Asphalt, and it lost around 11% battery while running YouTube for an hour. Apart from that, any other function drained the battery in single digits. Coming to the charging, the OnePlus Nord 4 took around 31 minutes to get fully fueled up from zero to a hundred percent. The device is a boon for people who are always in a hurry as it can get charged from zero to 70% in around 14 to 16 minutes.

Verdict

OnePlus Nord 4 5G is a rare find at the price point it is being sold at. Whether we are talking about the hardware or the software of the device, it passes with flying colors for everything. The people who want out-of-the-world camera performance could taste a little disappointment while indulging in night photography and Zoom. Apart from that, the handset is a performance monster perfectly suitable for people who are looking for a device that can offer fast-paced performance with a trustworthy battery life.