OnePlus Nord 5 review: selfie-centric midranger

The Nord 5 OnePlus does exactly what the company’s northern phones have always done: deliver solid specifications at a relatively low price. It is one of the most powerful phones at this price and should easily exceed the most expensive alternatives in Samsung and Google.

This is a formal telephone phone, where key sales are a powerful processor and a long battery life, which are boring pillars that tend to have the most importance in mid-range models like this. The problem for North 5 is that other mid -range phones in the markets where it is available – including Europe and India, but not the United States – offer even faster chipsets and larger batteries, leaving the new OnePlus phone a little stranded and dependent on a selfie camera greater than the average to distinguish it.

The performances are at the heart of the North Sales argument 5. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 chipset was designed for more expensive phones than that, although it was launched a little over a year ago. Combined with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage in the base of £ 399 / € 449 (around $ 530), and 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage for £ 100 /100 € (around $ 125) more, it offers powerful specifications for the price.

This lends itself well to the game, which explains why OnePlus opted for a large, brilliant and fast screen: an OLED panel of 6.81 inch with a cooling rate of 144 Hz. I am always skeptical about cooling rates so high in phones – few games will exceed 120 images per second. OnePlus says he has repositioned the antennas to better work when the phone is held in landscape mode for games, although manufacturers have been praising this kind of work for years.

The battery is the other half of the performance equation, and the capacity of 5,200 mAh here is also good. I spent my first week with the phone on a trip (that’s how I discovered discomfort: there is no ESIM support), which always requires power, and I have never felt a lot of battery anxiety. It will last a day comfortably, and halfway in a second, but I think you would have trouble doing two full days without recharge. The 80W cable load offers a full load in 45 minutes, including the bypass load which feeds the phone directly, without overloading the battery, if you wanted to keep it connected during the long game sessions. The main concession in Price is that there is no wireless load.

The problem is that for all this power, it is not the most capable phone at this price. The Poco F7 is slightly cheaper than North 5 and is delivered with better chipset, larger battery and faster load. The OnePlus phone wins on the cooling rate, but that is not enough to compensate comfortably less powerful elsewhere, which means that the F7 is always likely to hit higher image frequencies during the demanding games. Anyone who is looking for game performance above all will probably be attracted to the F7, when the North 5 can offer the difference?

The most unique element of the equipment is the Plus key, a new button that replaces the traditional OnePlus alert cursor. It is a customizable key which, by default, does the same thing as the alert cursor has done – it allows you to cycle between the ring, vibration and silent modes. But it can also be defined to open the camera, turn on the flashlight, take a screenshot, and more. It is not fully Personable, however, you cannot define it to open an application or trigger personalized functions.

The key Plus can also be used to take a screenshot and add it to the spirit space, an AI tool that analyzes images to summarize them, create reminders or generate calendar events. It is remarkably similar to the essential space of Nothing, which does almost the same thing – also using a dedicated hardware key – but unlike the version of nothing, you cannot add vocal notes to give more information to AI, obtain a longer audio recordings, or even an open mental space itself using the key, so a software intake is more basic.

There is nothing else to complain about the software side. North ships 5 performing Oxygenos 15, based on Android 15, will obtain a respectable (but certainly no category) four years of major updates and six years of security support. An additional bonus is an easy wireless file sharing between the phone and a Windows PC, Mac, iPad or iPhone, although you have to install the software O plus Connect on the other device – and unfortunately, there is no full Mac remote control found on the Pad 3.

OnePlus made an unusual choice by prioritizing the selfie camera of the phone, which has a 50 megapixel sensor larger than the average selfie cam. I am not a natural selfie lessee, but the results are good and wrapped with details. They are not much better than competitors in normal lighting, but it is because most telephone cameras now manage daylight comfortably. Portrait mode is the only small weak point, fighting to separate the strands from my hair most of the time. But this camera takes on its full meaning at night: the large sensor and the fast f / 2.0 opening helping north 5 to capture impressive details in the dark, when most other selfie cameras are disintegrated. If you need a phone to capture yourself, you and your crew, in the evenings and in weakly lit dinners, maybe this one.

The 50 megapixel main rear camera is good but not great. He finds it difficult with rapidly evolving subjects such as pets and children, and you will need a regular hand to get superb photos at night, but everything is typical of phones at this price. The colors tend to be a little supersaturated and artificial of this lens; The ultrawid of 8 megapixels is more moderate but loses much more details in dark spots.

North 5 faces strong competition on both sides. You could spend less for more power with the Poco F7 or spend € 100 /100 € (approximately $ 125) more for the Google Pixel 9A for comfortably better cameras, more difficult water resistance and more years of software support.

North 5 is not a bad phone. But we do not know what his unique sales argument is. OnePlus looked into power and performance, but it was surpassed by Poco. The Pixel 9a, although more expensive, beats it on the camera and the design. Even his dedicated AI button is better elsewhere, for less, in the phone nothing 3A. The best hope of the North 5 to find an audience is its selfie camera, better than any other phone around it, at least in low light. But as the outlets go, it looks like a minor.

Photograph by Dominic Preston / The Verge