Review: OnePlus Nord N30 5G

It's apparently hard to compete with the likes of Google and Samsung. I've been testing several cheap phones over the past few weeks, like Motorola's new Moto G Stylus and Moto G Power, and my takeaway almost always ends up being a recommendation to buy a similarly priced Samsung or Google phone instead.

That's generally how I feel about the new OnePlus Nord N30 5G, but not entirely. It will be great for some people, particularly if you prioritize battery life over all else and if you're looking for a headphone jack and a microSD slot in one package. It also has one big upgrade over its predecessor: It works on all major US carriers on 4G and 5G. Yep, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.

Photograph: OnePlus

The Nord N30 5G looks like any other smartphone in its drab Chromatic Gray color. I do like its flat edges, as it offers up a nice grip when holding the device. And you need it—with a 6.72-inch screen, it's on the larger end of the smartphone spectrum. It's a lot more narrow though, so it's manageable to hold with one hand, though your fingers will stretch to reach the top of the screen.

The two best parts of the Nord N30 are its battery life and performance. The 5,000-mAh cell easily lasted two full days on a single charge, hitting 15 percent by 10 pm at the end of the second day. My second day was pretty busy too, with lots of photography, GPS navigation as I rode my scooter from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and music playback. Even better, OnePlus includes a 50-watt charging adapter in the box that can bring the battery back up to 80 percent in just 30 minutes, and that lined up with my testing. This is one area where it outperforms all of its peers, with only Motorola coming close with its similar battery life.

It's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G chipset with 8 gigabytes of RAM, and my benchmark tests put it slightly behind the Moto G Power 2023 and the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G. What does that mean in real-world usage? It's pretty good! Yes, you'll see some hiccups here and there, but I've had a fairly smooth experience juggling multiple apps and even playing games like Dead Cells. You're in a good place when you don't have to worry about performance, especially at $300.

Photograph: OnePlus

You're going to be staring at this thing all day, and the good news is the screen is pretty nice. There's a 120-Hz screen refresh rate that makes all the animations and scrolling look buttery smooth, and everything looks sharp thanks to the 1080-pixel resolution. The bad news? It's an LCD screen. This is usually fine, and it’s typical of a budget phone, but last year's Nord N20 5G had an AMOLED screen that delivered rich colors and inky blacks. It might be because the LCD gets brighter than the AMOLED—it's easy to read on sunny days—it's just odd to go back.

Another weird relapse is the fingerprint sensor. Gone is the in-display sensor in favor of a snappy side-mounted one built into the power button. Usually, I prefer these capacitive sensors to the under-display ones, since they're almost always faster, but I don't like ones built into the power buttons. They're so easy to trigger when you're just holding the phone. If you're going with a capacitive sensor, just put it on the back of the phone like in the good old days, which would allow you to unlock it with both hands.

This phone has a near-field communication (NFC) sensor so you can make tap-to-pay payments at storefronts that support it or with public transportation, something missing in most Motorola budget phones. There's a headphone jack for all you wired lovers (heh), a microSD slot to expand on the built-in 128 GB of storage, and stereo speakers that get so loud that I had to turn it down when I was outside. It's still a phone, so they don't sound particularly robust and you're better off with a cheap Bluetooth speaker if you want to play music, but it gets scary loud and can be handy when you're trying to watch Starfield's gameplay deep dive outside while walking the dog.

The problems with the Nord N30? The haptics and the cameras. The vibrations coming out of this phone are super-weak as if the haptic motor is minutes away from its last breath. As for the cameras, you get a 108-megapixel primary sensor along with a 2-MP macro camera and a 2-MP depth sensor for improving the blur effect in portrait mode photos. They're nothing to write home about.

The primary camera struggles with high-contrast scenes, so the sky is often blown out in the background, though it can still take some decent photos in even lighting. When the sun gets low, you can use the Night mode to take better low-light images, but the colors are off and things still end up a little blurry unless you have a surgeon's hands and can stay really still. Selfies are often over-brightened, though my facial features are pretty darn sharp, which is nice.

OnePlus shows off a 3X zoom mode in the camera app, but this is technically just digital zoom using the 108-megapixel camera. Because there's no optical image stabilization, you'll find yourself retaking photos because the first one is almost always blurry. OnePlus may call it a “lossless zoom," but these photos have an over-sharpened look to them. Still, it's nice to have the option to zoom in a little bit more and get better results than many of its peers. As for the macro camera, don't get me started. I didn't like any of the photos it captured.

Then there's the software. OnePlus has tweaked the Android 13 interface so much that I don't enjoy using it as much as the interface on Motorola, Google, and Samsung phones. It also doesn't help that the company matches Motorola on software updates, promising only one OS update (to Android 14) and three years of security updates. When you can't get any new features after Android 15 rolls around next year, it'll feel out of date.

The year-old Google Pixel 6A regularly goes on sale for less than $300 and will get software updates for longer. So will the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G, which frequently dips to $375. Both have a camera system that's leaps and bounds nicer than the OnePlus, with better software, AMOLED screens, and IP67 water resistance. (The Nord N30 is not water resistant.)

If the lack of software updates isn't a barrier, you want a headphone jack and a microSD slot, and the two-day battery life is more important than camera quality, then you'll be happy with the Nord N30 5G. But I think OnePlus could stand to keep its budget handsets updated a little longer, and it needs to go back to the drawing board with its cameras. (Fewer megapixels and better image processing, maybe?) There are just too many better options out there—especially last year's flagship phones that creep down in price, like the OnePlus 10 Pro, which is currently on sale for $150 more than the Nord.