Mid-range is now the popular category it seems as more and more companies are focussing on this segment. Frankly, profit margins are being squeezed in the budget category and users want things like ultra-wide camera and stereo speakers. OnePlus has always been a tough rival in this segment and its latest phone — Nord CE3 5G — is quite an all-rounder.
Good display, audio but….
A photo taken on Nord CE3 5G. Colours are vibrant and perfect for social media
There are many things that work for the phone but there’s one element that doesn’t impress. Looking at build quality, it’s good. There’s a polycarbonate back, plastic frame and it comes in two colours — Grey Shimmer and Aqua Surge. There’s an IR blaster on the top, it skips the headphone jack and the same goes for the alert slider. I don’t know what’s wrong with OnePlus because they first got rid of the alert slider and a lot of people complained. The company brought it back and that helped. And now it’s missing... again. There needs to be some kind of consistency. Otherwise, it’s a light phone and slim. There’s no complaining about the looks and it has whatever one expects from a typical mid-range Nord phone.
OnePlus has got the display right. It’s a bright, 6.7-inch FHD+ AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate. It’s a 10-bit panel, so the contrast is high and there is HDR10+ support. This is as smooth as it can get on a mid-range phone. Streaming content on the phone looks vibrant while the display is bright enough.
Keeping the display company is a set of stereo speakers. There is a speaker at the bottom and the earpiece acts as a secondary speaker. The speakers are loud and clear while voices come across as crisp.
Performance and camera departments
Under uneven lighting, the camera performs well
In the performance department, the phone comes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 782G chip. In benchmark tests, it does well and the phone rarely throttles. You get steady graphics, which is important for gamers. Most tasks are handled smoothly; plenty of apps remain open in the background while loading them isn’t an issue. You should not expect every game to support high-graphic settings on the phone but you do get good performance.
Coming to software, there is Oxygen OS 13.1 running on top of Android 13. The OS is very clean, exactly what you would expect from OnePlus and it is one of the reasons why I would recommend the phone.
Let’s talk about the camera system. It’s close to what we have seen on the OnePlus 11R, which is a good thing. The triple camera system comes with 50MP main snapper (Sony IMX 890 sensor with optical image stablisation), 8MP ultra-wide and a 2MP macro sensor. On the front, there is a 16MP selfie snapper. The rear camera supports 4K video at 30fps and the front camera, 1080p@30fps.
The main camera doesn’t fail you. It’s not a phone where photography is the focus. The colours are vibrant and there is no shutter lag. Details are retained, even in shots taken at night. Selfies have roughly the correct skin tone. But when it comes to changing from the main camera to the ultra-wide angle, there is a colour shift. What impressed me most about the camera section is the quality of the microphone, which can cut out unwanted noises to a large extent.
Should you buy it?
The battery on the phone is a standard 5,000mAh pack, which easily lasts a day even after watching plenty of videos on YouTube and taking pictures, besides some gaming. You’re also getting an 80W charger in the box that juices up the battery very fast.
It’s a good phone if you looking for an all-rounder that does everything reasonably well — good performance, a good camera set-up and a good processor. And that has become the definition of a mid-range phone. OnePlus goes a step further by giving a clean software experience.
At a glance
Device: OnePlus Nord CE3 5G
Price: Upwards of Rs 26,999
High notes
Clean OS experience
Good camera capabilities
Excellent battery life
Muffled note
Alert slider is missing
