OnePlus has always been about speed. Its phones are often considered to be the fastest Android smartphones around. This time, with its Nord 4, OnePlus is literally putting the pedal to the metal. The promise is not just of a fast phone but one that is built like a tank, arguably even better than the OnePlus flagship phones.
They just don’t make phones like the Nord 4 these days. The Nord 4 is surgically machined out of aluminium and features a unique pattern on the back on top of a clean metallic finish. The edges are flanked with plastic bits for the 5G antennas. You’d think this is a phone from the mid-2010s, but in 2024, some retro vibes from OnePlus are welcome.
It’s not that this phone is crazy slim — it’s fine at 8mm and 199.5 grams. Not too chunky for sure. Looks-wise, it is decent enough but is it a head-turner? No. However, it is built like a tank. I can attest to this because, while reviewing the phone, I had a bit of an incident.
At Paris airport, my cabbie, in a rush to catch another customer, dunked all my luggage on the main road outside the terminal, including my handbag. While I got everything up on the pavement, a lady driver in a rush kind of drove over my handbag, which contained my passport, wallet, power banks, cables, and yes, the Nord 4. The Nord 4 emerged unscathed with a minor dent on its back and is working perfectly fine. Rest assured, any phone with a glass back wouldn’t have survived this incident — my power banks didn’t.
On top of this, this is an IP65 water and dust-resistant phone, which makes it even sturdier. I am happy to report nothing has happened to the device since, and even while testing the water resistance, it held up fine. Bravo, OnePlus!
You get classic OnePlus features: the slider, the IR blaster, which has become a staple in recent launches, and also superb speakers and pinpoint precise haptics, which make typing a joy on the phone.
It is an immaculately designed product, something which shines through even more so when you consider it starts at just ₹29,999 ($400). You don’t get this level of build quality from even an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy at this price.
Flip it over, and you’re welcomed by the fluid AMOLED panel in all of its 6.74-inch glory, providing incredible legibility under sunlight, even under the sharp Parisian and Naples sun, thanks to its 2150 nits brightness. It also uses aqua touch technology, enabling me to use it easily when my hands or the display were wet.
It is a pin-sharp display on which I enjoyed watching shows like "The Boys" on Amazon Prime Video, going through my articles on Businessworld, and doing a bit of writing, including some of the editing of this very review in Google Docs. Sunlight legibility was at the core of this experience. And the colours, while on the colder side, were nicely vivid. This is a fun phone to have around. Oh, this display also features an in-display fingerprint scanner which works very reliably. It is damn impressive.
Of course, it is a bit of a speed racer despite not having a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 series chipset. It is one of the first phones in the world to get the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, which works in tandem with 12GB RAM and 256GB of UFS 4.0 storage. This is a potent mix. For daily tasks, it will dice through anything you throw at it like a sharp kitchen knife going through a plum tomato.
Even when it comes to gaming, this phone is fairly capable, one of the best in the business. It is able to play high-resolution games like Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact at very high settings with very limited graphical blips and frame rate drops. This phone also maintains sustained performance nicely, thanks to a mega vapour chamber which keeps this device running smoothly. Multitasking was never an issue with this phone, and at a given time, I had more than 30 apps open simultaneously. The phone also performs valiantly when running synthetic benchmarks, but that’s for the sake of correlation. The real-world experience of running apps on this phone and switching between them has truly been joyous.
One of the concerns around this phone would’ve been the call and 5G performance, but OnePlus really nailed it. I tested the phone not just in Europe while roaming but also in Delhi NCR on a Jio Network.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that OnePlus has cut corners in the domain of photography, but that’s not entirely true. Sure, you don’t get a gazillion cameras on the back. But then again, who needs so many? Even the standard iPhone 15 gets two on the back. This one gets a 50-megapixel Sony Lytia 600 series sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and an optically stabilised 5-element lens. It takes sharp photos with solid levels of detail and impressive levels of saturation, making the photos pop on Instagram. In low light, the night mode kicks in to take attractive shots too, which are highly usable. Make no mistake, this is no Vivo 100 Pro in the photography department, but then again, it is not far away from the OnePlus 12. In fact, I would say it takes better photos than something like the Nothing Phone (2) and is certainly leagues ahead of anything Samsung has at the price point.
It also managed to take decent 4K video, which can be used in professional work as b-roll when taken in good lighting. The portrait mode is also quite effective, with decent depth perception and edge detection, providing cinematic shots.
The story does fall apart a bit when I talk about the ultra-wide camera. Its biggest weakness is its rather narrow 112-degree field of view. It also has a rather shallow f/2.2 aperture, making it quite redundant in low light. However, in good lighting, it will take good landscape shots, and for me, it was a boon because I was in Europe — so the European architecture popped and how using this camera system.
For selfie addicts, there is a rather decent 16-megapixel camera that takes nice snaps, but in low light, it will need some flash support.
Battery life is excellent — actually class-leading. It gets a mega 5,500mAh battery, making this phone feel quite slim at 8mm and 199.5 grams. It lasts ages. You could charge the phone one day and not care about the battery until the end of the next day. And even when that happens, you’d probably not care because it will get charged in a jiffy thanks to 100W super VOOC charging. It’s not just the hardware that OnePlus provides but the way it has tuned Oxygen OS that is key to how this phone performs.
Oxygen OS is such a well-tuned operating system working on top of Android 14. It feels fast, fluid, and intuitive. It also doesn’t have a lot of bloatware, which makes it even more pleasant to use. OnePlus is promising 6 years of updates, which is impressive for a phone of its class. This phone also comes with some generative AI features like the AI eraser tool, which can remove objects and humans from photos you have taken. I tested the feature on the Nord, and it works surprisingly well.
The more I peer in for a weakness, the less I find one. The OnePlus Nord 4 is the best Nord ever. And that would be a big thing to say, but it could be the best OnePlus phone ever, which again is a big thing to say considering they have been on a roll with phones like the OnePlus 11R, OnePlus Open, OnePlus 12, and now the OnePlus 12R. If you have a budget between ₹30,000 and ₹35,000 ($400 and $470), there is a new sheriff in town, and it's called the OnePlus Nord 4.
Rating: 8.63/10
