OnePlus Nord CE5 Review: The core finally gets stronger

Pros:

Sturdy build with IP65-rated ingress protection

Newer design feels more premium

Competent processing hardware

Sharp and bright AMOLED display

Good primary camera with OIS

Excellent battery backup

Fluid UI with AI capabilities

4 years of OS updates, 6 years of security updates

Cons:

Significant performance throttling as the temperature rises

Limited camera capabilities

A little excess bloatware for a OnePlus phone

Suboptimal placement of fingerprint scanner

Rating: 3.75/5

Price: Rs 26,999

OnePlus Nord phones are now in their fifth generation and need no introduction. In case you are wondering how the Nord 5 series phones compare to their Nord 4 counterparts, we have you covered . The OnePlus Nord CE5 that we have for review today is a relatively less powerful but more affordable phone from the series. Though not too different in concept from its predecessors, the company has strived to give it some extra processing muscle this time. Is it sufficient to make it stand out? Let’s find out.

OnePlus Nord CE5 Design: Certainly looks better than its predecessor

For starters, the design is a lot better than its predecessor and it doesn’t look remotely as plasticky. So much so that we weren’t sure if its back was made of plastic or glass. It is plastic but of superior quality and the matte finish helps.

The all matte finish on the frame and the back keeps the body largely free of fingerprints and smudge marks and makes the phone look elegant. Ingress protection has been upgraded to IP65 from IP54, making it dust and splash resistant.

The OnePlus Nord CE5 comes in three colour options - Nexus Blue (our review unit), Marble Mist and Black Infinity; they all look good and cater to a broader taste. The phone feels a bit slimmer but is a tad bigger and heavier than the Nord CE4 with the weight now touching 200 grams, but with even distribution. The right edge of the phone has the volume rocker and the power button, and they are quite accessible. The placement of the in-display fingerprint scanner is not optimal though.

It is too close to the bottom edge when it should have been an inch higher for better accessibility.

The pill-shaped camera island at the back seems to draw inspiration from the Apple iPhone 16. A SIM tray that also has a shared MicroSD card slot, a solitary speaker and a USB-C port can be found along the bottom edge. You do not get a second speaker on this phone that is typically placed behind the earpiece. A 3.5 mm headphone jack is absent too. An IR-blaster is present on the top edge to use the phone as an IR remote control with certain TVs and devices.

OnePlus Nord CE5 Display: Very good display for the segment

The OnePlus Nord CE5 gets a slightly bigger 6.77-inch Full HD+ Fluid AMOLED display and it’s a little brighter too at 1430 nits (peak). The refresh rate stays at 120 Hz which is perfectly acceptable for the segment, however, you do not get a LTPO display here and the refresh rate can drop to 30 Hz in certain cases and not to 1 Hz as in case of certain more premium phones. There is no mention of any scratch resistant glass on the display but you do get a preapplied screen protector.

The 10-bit 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 quite enjoyable. The colour accuracy is quite good too. You get three screen colour modes - Natural, Vivid and Pro, along with colour temperature adjustments.

While the Natural mode is largely colour accurate and easy on the eyes, some may find it a tad dull. In that case, you may try one of the Pro modes - Cinematic or Brilliant, especially the former. If you prefer slightly boosted colours, go with the Vivid colour mode, but use a warmer colour temperature option for better results. Long story short, the Nord CE5 display is quite good for the segment.

OnePlus Nord CE5 Performance: Competent hardware that performs well but throttles as the temperature rises

With the exception of the first Nord CE phone (for its time), we have found its successors to be consistently underpowered. OnePlus is looking to change that with the Nord CE5 by using a Mediatek Dimensity 8350 Apex SoC and coupling it with 8 GB LPDDR5X RAM. You have a choice between 128 GB and 256 GB UFS 3.1 internal storage. This is one of the rare OnePlus phones to get a MicroSD card slot to expand the storage further.

Coming back to the Dimensity 8350, its performance in synthetic benchmarks is comparable to the Google Tensor G4 that powers the Pixel 9 series. As compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 present in the Nord CE4, the Mediatek chip returns significantly higher scores. To put things in numbers, in Geekbench 6, the Nord CE5 scored 1324 and 4034 in the single-core and multi-core tests respectively, which is 72% and 62% higher than what the Nord CE4 could manage.

The PCMark Work 3.0 benchmark score was again higher at 13968, a 14% jump over its predecessor. To test the gaming capabilities, we ran the Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay tests from the 3DMark suite. In the former, the CE5 scored 3040 with 18 FPS average, and in the latter, it managed a score of 4985 with 19 average FPS. While these are modest figures, they are still more than double that of the CE4. The real world gaming performance of this phone is decent but you will need to tone down the visual settings to get playable FPS.

While the Dimensity 8350 Apex chip performs quite well in most tasks, it tends to majorly throttle once the temperature goes past 40 degrees celsius. As you can see from the stress test results, the performance drops to one third of its peak as the temperature crosses 40. Now this may be a non-issue in day to day tasks but will certainly affect long gaming sessions. A wiser move would be to use bypass charging while gaming which draws power directly from the charger, reducing heat and throttling and also gives the battery some rest.

Other than that, the phone generally ran cool with absolutely no lag in day to day operations with multiple apps open simultaneously. As I had mentioned, this phone has only one speaker at the base of the phone, and while it is fairly loud, you won’t get much of a stereo effect. The phone is Bluetooth 5.4 compliant and has dual-band WiFi with support for a/b/g/n/ac/6 standards. The call quality and reception were perfectly fine during the course of our testing but the phone does not support eSIM.

OnePlus Nord CE5 Battery performance: Crazy good battery backup but charging could have been slightly faster

Just like the chipset, the battery capacity also sees a massive jump from 5500 mAh on its predecessor to 7100 mAh here; probably the highest on a OnePlus phone to date. That adds a few grams to the weight but not the thickness. The Nord CE5 supports 80W fast charging and the company bundles an 80W SuperVOOC charger along. Given the higher capacity battery here, we did expect the charging times to be higher but could have been a little better than what we clocked.

After enabling Smart Rapid Charging from the Battery section under Settings, the bundled charger and cable takes a shade under 70 minutes to take the phone from 1% to 100%. While 70 minutes is by no means a deal breaker given the battery capacity, under an hour would have been ideal. Probably a future software update can fix that. In its defence, the charging speed is at par with the more expensive OnePlus 13R despite having 1100 mAh extra reserves.

Speaking of reserves, the OnePlus Nord CE5 can go on for well over two days of moderate use and just short of three on a lighter load without any gaming. That is probably the best battery backup we have observed this year. And just for that, we can overlook the few extra minutes of charging time as you won’t need a charger for the next couple of days.

OnePlus Nord CE5 Camera performance: Not bad but nothing special

Just like its predecessor, the Nord CE5 has two rear cameras with a 50MP primary + 8MP ultra-wide combination. The primary camera here has a Sony LYT-600 sensor with OIS (optical image stabilisation). The 8MP ultra-wide camera from the previous generation has been retained and the same goes for the 16MP selfie camera; neither have auto-focus.

The primary camera clicks some crisp shots with impressive dynamic range in well lit conditions. Colours are close to natural and images exhibit a good amount of detail. The main camera can hold its own in low light photography too with a fair amount of detail and noise in check. The colour accuracy is not spot on but acceptable. 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 but avoid using it if the light isn’t great. Certainly do not go beyond 2X in low light as the results are quite poor.

The 8MP ultra-wide camera does a decent job in proper lighting with good colours but average detail. Its low light performance is passable at best. There is no option for macro photography on this phone. Portrait mode works reasonably 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 fair job with accurate skin tones but images appear a bit flat and overprocessed.

Moving on to videos, the main cameras can record videos in 4K resolution at 30 or 60 FPS. Super slo-mo 1080p and 720p videos can now be captured at up to 480 and 960 FPS respectively. You get OIS and EIS support to compensate for shaky hands only on the main camera. Captured 4K footage looks quite good and punches above its weight (price) class. The front camera can record 1080p videos at up to 60 FPS.

You can check the unedited camera samples shot using OnePlus Nord CE5 here :

OS and user interface: Fluid UI with several updates promised; could have done without the bloatware though

The OnePlus Nord CE5 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. However, this phone does have a bit of extra bloatware, something you do not expect from OnePlus phones. Candy Crush, really? Thankfully, most of it can be uninstalled.

You now 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 CE5 from the date of launch. That is commendable for a lower midrange phone as it will keep it secure and relevant for long.

Final words: A definite improvement over its predecessors on more than one count

The OnePlus Nord CE5 is priced at Rs 26,999 for the 256 GB storage variant and Rs 2,000 less for half the storage, with a one year warranty. For that price, you get a smart looking phone with competent processing hardware, sharp display, good main camera, excellent battery backup, clean UI with AI chops and at least 4 major Android updates. That makes the Nord CE5 worth its asking price if not something that would shake up the segment.

As for alternatives, you may want to check our top smartphone picks under Rs 30,000 .