OnePlus Nord 5 Long-term Review: Two steps forward, three steps back

Pros:

Powerful processing hardware with efficient cooling

Sharp and bright AMOLED display with 144 Hz refresh rate

Sturdy build with IP65-rated ingress protection

Good primary camera performance in good lighting

Impressive front camera with auto-focus

Excellent battery backup

Fluid UI with AI capabilities  

4 years of OS updates, 6 years of security updates

Cons:

Phone feels uncomfortably large and heavy

Poor macro photography and average low light performance

Storage downgraded to UFS 3.1 from UFS 4.0 in the Nord 4

Suboptimal placement of fingerprint scanner and volume rocker

Rating: 3.5/5

Price: Rs 31,999 onwards

We reviewed the OnePlus Nord CE5 a while back and thought it was a notable upgrade over its predecessor on multiple fronts. The Nord 4 though was always going to be a hard act to follow, and OnePlus would have had to go the extra mile to get there. Does the Nord 5 do enough to be a worthy successor, let’s find out. Before you proceed, you may want to take a quick look at how the Nord 5 series phones compare to their Nord 4 counterparts.

OnePlus Nord 5 Design: Not bad at all but not better than the Nord 4

The Nord 5 design is one that may polarise opinions. I for one liked the Nord 4 design a lot better, especially its metal back. While the design is not bad at all, especially the Marble Sands variant with a marble-like texture on its glass back, it isn’t as distinct and unique like its predecessor’s. On the bright side, the matte finish on the frame as well as the back keeps the body largely free of fingerprints and smudge marks and makes the phone look elegant.  

The IP65 ingress protection has been retained, making the phone dust and splash resistant. The phone feels noticeably bigger and heavier in hand with the weight now crossing 210 grams. Personally, I am not a fan of large phones, and this is one of the largest around. The right edge of the phone has the volume rocker and the power button; while the latter is accessible, the former tends to be a stretch. The same goes for the placement of the in-display fingerprint scanner which is far from optimal. It is too close to the bottom edge when it should have been an inch higher for better accessibility.  

The left edge has a programmable Plus key that replaces the Alert slider and offers additional functionality like a camera or a sound recorder shortcut, speech translator etc. You get a pill-shaped camera island at the back, clearly inspired by the Apple iPhone 16. It is beyond me why several brands have opted for that design, when there’s nothing special about it. A SIM tray, a speaker and a USB-C port can be found along the bottom edge. Unlike the Nord CE5, a MicroSD card slot isn’t present here. However, an IR-blaster is located at the top to use the phone as an IR remote control with certain TVs and compatible devices.  

OnePlus Nord 5 Display: Excellent display with 144 Hz refresh rate

The OnePlus Nord 5 gets a large 10-bit 6.83-inch 1.5K Swift AMOLED display with a resolution of 2800 x 1272 pixels. This HDR10+ compliant display has a peak brightness of 1800 nits which is 350 nits lower than the Nord 4; the difference is not very noticeable in reality though. Interestingly, the refresh rate has been bumped up to 144 Hz, which makes it the highest among all current phones from the company including the flagship OnePlus 13. The screen is protected by a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 7i.

The display is compliant with HDR10+ but not Dolby Vision. You do get Ultra HDR image support. Watching HDR content from OTT platforms like Prime Video on the phone’s sizable display is a treat. The colour accuracy is quite good too. You get three screen colour modes - Natural, Vivid and Pro, along with colour temperature adjustments. The Natural mode is easy on the eyes but some may find it a tad dull. The Vivid mode here is calibrated quite well, and using it with a slightly warmer colour temperature gives excellent results with lively colours. The Cinematic mode under Pro modes is also very usable.

OnePlus Nord 5 Performance: Sufficiently powerful processing hardware but slower storage

Unlike the CE variants, the processing power on the Nord flagships has never been an issue, and the Nord 5 is no different. It now gets the tried and tested Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s chip which is amply powerful for a midrange phone. It is coupled with either 8 GB or 12 GB LPDDR5X RAM; our test unit had 12 GB. Even the base variant of the Nord 5 has 256 GB storage, which is a good thing given that there is no expandable memory option here. The bad part being it has been inexplicably downgraded to UFS 3.1 from UFS 4.0 in the Nord 4.

There is nothing new to report about the Snapdragon 8s SoC and it puts out some strong scores in synthetic benchmarks as you can see from the image below. Even better, this chip probably throttles the least among everything we have tested even when the temperature goes up. Due credit to the large vapour cooling system present on this phone that does its job incredibly well. That along with the 144 Hz display makes the Nord 5 a very good option for gamers.  

Mind you, not all games can make use of the high refresh rate but some popular ones like BGMI and COD-M can. More will follow soon. The Nord 5 has a large battery too (which we will talk about in the next section) that promises 5-hour long uninterrupted gaming sessions. If you wish to go even further, you can use bypass charging while gaming which draws power directly from the charger, reducing heat and throttling and also gives the battery some well-deserved rest.

Other than that, the phone generally ran cool with absolutely no lag in day to day operations with multiple apps open simultaneously. This phone has two speakers - one at the base of the phone and the other behind the earpiece, and collectively they do a pretty decent job with sufficient loudness. The phone is Bluetooth 5.4 compliant with support for all popular audio codecs. You get dual-band WiFi with support for a/b/g/n/ac/ax standards. The call quality and reception were perfectly fine during the course of our testing but the phone does not support eSIM.  

OnePlus Nord 5 Battery performance: Very good battery backup but charging could have been a bit faster

The battery capacity has seen a big jump from 5500 mAh on the Nord 4 to 6800 mAh here. But the peak charging capability has dropped from 100W to 80W. Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it as there was hardly any difference in charging speed between the company’s 80W and 100W chargers. The company bundles an 80W SuperVOOC charger that takes the battery from 1% to 100% in about 65 minutes after enabling Smart Rapid Charging from the Battery settings. Add another 10-15 minutes if you do not enable it.

Given the higher capacity battery, we expected the charging time to be higher but not more than double for a 24% increase in battery capacity. While 65 minutes is not a deal breaker given the large battery, about 45 to 50 minutes would have been ideal. For the record, Nord 4 takes about half an hour to charge its 5500 mAh battery fully. But no complaints about the battery life as the OnePlus Nord 5 can go on for close to two and a half days of moderate use without any gaming, placing it among the best this year.  

OnePlus Nord 5 Camera performance: Good main and selfie cameras, poor macro quality

Just like the Nord 4 and the Nord CE5, this too has two rear cameras with a 50MP primary + 8MP ultra-wide combination. However, the primary camera here has a better Sony LYT-700 sensor with OIS (optical image stabilisation) as compared to the LYT-600 on the other two. The 8MP ultra-wide camera seems to be the same but with a slightly broader 116 degrees FOV. The selfie camera gets a big upgrade with a 50MP Samsung JN5 sensor and auto-focus.  

The primary camera clicks some crisp shots with good dynamic range in well lit conditions. The colour reproduction is good and images exhibit a reasonable amount of detail. Its low light performance is passable for the segment but nothing special. The images aren’t noisy but on the softer side and seem a tad over-processed. Colours can be a hit or a miss in low light, so best to click multiple shots. As you can see from the camera samples, an orange part of the lantern appears distinctly yellow in one of the images while it’s perfectly orange in the other.

You get a 2X zoom toggle in the camera app, but it is digital zoom as there’s no telephoto camera here. The 2X zoomed shots in good lighting come out pretty well and they surprisingly exceed expectations in low light too. But avoid going beyond 2X in low light. The 8MP ultra-wide camera is usable in proper lighting with good colours but average detail. Its low light performance is nothing great. The ultra-wide camera claims to have auto-focus but I doubt it. You do get a macro option here but the results are consistently poor with focusing issues on parts of the subject.  

Portrait mode works well with human subjects with good foreground and background separation. It can be a hit or a miss with other subjects like flowers. The selfie camera does a commendable job with good focus and accurate skin tones. The portrait shots it can click are actually as good as the main camera. It can record 4K videos too at 30 and 60 FPS with support for gyro-EIS.

On the topic of videos, the main camera can record videos in 4K resolution at 30 or 60 FPS. Super slo-mo 1080p and 720p videos can be captured at up to 120 and 240 FPS respectively. You get OIS and EIS support to compensate for shaky hands on the main camera. Captured 4K footage looks quite good and perfectly acceptable for the segment.  

You can check the unedited camera samples shot using OnePlus Nord 5 here:

OS and user interface: Fluid UI with several updates promised

The OnePlus Nord 5 runs Android 15 with OxygenOS 15 out of the box. OxygenOS is fluid, free of ads and remains one of the best Android UIs around with a handful of tweaks to customise it further. The UI is smooth, lag-free and easy to comprehend even if you haven’t used a OnePlus, Realme or Oppo smartphone before. This phone does have a bit of bloatware, something not expected of OnePlus phones. But it’s significantly less than what you get on the Nord CE5. Thankfully, most of it can be uninstalled, and no Candy Crush either.

You get a bunch of AI tools built-in like AI VoiceScribe, AI Call Assistant, AI Translation etc in addition to Google Gemini. You also get a few image editing options like AI Eraser, Reflection Remover and more. One can expect further additions and enhancements as the company has promised four years of Android updates and six years of security updates for the Nord 5 from the date of launch. That is commendable for a midrange phone as it will keep it secure and relevant for long.  

Final words: Evolutionary upgrade but Nord 4 still a better buy if you can find one

The OnePlus Nord 5 is priced at Rs 31,999 for the 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage variant and Rs 3,000 more if you want 12 GB RAM instead. You get a one year warranty on the product. If you look at it in isolation, you get a good looking phone with powerful processing hardware, a large and vibrant high refresh rate display, decent main camera, excellent battery backup, fluid software experience with AI chops and at least 4 major Android updates for a little over 30K, which is not bad. But the Nord 4 that came a full year before is still better at it in a few areas and would be a better buy if you can find one for less.

The competition has also gotten stiffer this year around the Rs 30,000 mark which doesn’t make the Nord 5 a straightforward recommendation. As for alternatives, you may want to check our top smartphone picks under Rs 30,000 . While it is not a bad phone at all, OnePlus could have possibly done more with it. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to take the 13s route and make the next Nord flagship a compact midrange phone, a void nobody has looked to fill yet.