OnePlus is at its best in the value segment. The company is making decent strides in challenging Samsung and Google in the high-end category with the OnePlus 8 series, but their pricing makes them inaccessible to a wide swathe of the audience. That’s why it’s exciting to see OnePlus once again turning its attention to the sub-$500 segment with the Nord.
The Nord delivers all the features that you’d expect from a OnePlus flagship — superb hardware, elegant design, clean software, and a lag-free experience — and it does so for several hundred dollars less than the OnePlus 8. With flagships steadily increasing in price, the Nord shows that you can get a comparable experience to $1,000 phones at half the cost.
The hardware itself is obviously great and you should have no issues with the Nord in day-to-day usage, but the differentiator for OnePlus is the software. With two guaranteed platform updates and three years of security patches, the OnePlus Nord is head and shoulders above most phones in this category.
