OnePlus Nord series is supposed to be a more budget-friendly series with the lite moniker being further lower down the price list. The Nord CE4 Lite starts at Rs 19,999, which is quite a competitive price segment in the smartphones space. How it stacks up, let’s try and find out.
The device is made of decent plastic materials with a 6.67-inch glass display on the front. It has curved edges and flat sides, with a box-like look to it. The bezels around the display are not too thick but these aren’t symmetrical. The back of the device looks nice, especially in the Super Silver colour that I tried (also comes in Mega Blue and Ultra Orange colour options). It features an oval shaped cutout that carries the dual camera and LED setup; while the OnePlus branding sits at the middle. The back does catch a lot of smudges and fingerprints quite quickly. On the right, there’s volume buttons and power/lock key near the middle; while the left side locates only the dual SIM card and hybrid microSD card slot. The top houses one outlet for loudspeakers; and the bottom has the 3.5mm audio jack, primary mic, USB type C port as well as the other outlet for loudspeakers. The phone weighs above 190grams and I didn’t find it particularly slippery to carry around.
Sporting a 6.67-inch full HD+ (1080x2400) AMOLED display with refresh rates of up to 120Hz, the phone doesn’t have a bad display. It’s quite bright and usable under direct sunlight outdoors provided you are using it at least 50 per cent brightness. The display has good viewing angles and does a good job when watching high resolution videos. Its colour calibration isn’t the best that I have seen from a Nord device. I did try different colour modes but still found it to be slightly underwhelming in terms of colour accuracy.
The phone sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 chipset (up to 2.2Ghz octa core processor, Adreno 619 GPU and x51 5G modem) along with 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB UFS 2.2 internal storage (base model has 8GB + 128GB configuration). It runs on OxygenOS 14 based on Android 14 OS with the June security patch installed. There’s no double tap to wake or lock the screen up option, which OnePlus has been using for years now. The phone’s performance has been decent at best during my usage. In their marketing material, OnePlus has mentioned about adding more third party apps than before something that a lot of loyal OnePlus users may not like. You can uninstall almost all of them, but it’s there out of the box. The phone handled scrolling inside social media apps, YouTube and Gallery without hiccups, but every now and then I did see apps such as Gmail showing glitches. Plus, animation dropped frames every once in a while, when switching between two apps. You can expect to play games like Monument Valley smoothly but nothing graphic intensive like Wuthering Waves on this phone.
Coming to the camera performance, the phone sports dual cameras on the back – 50MP (f/1.8) main camera (with OIS) and a 2MP (f/2.4) depth sensor. The camera can take some good shots in daylight provided you aren’t moving and neither is your subject. Slightly tricky lighting condition, even in daylight, the phone can struggle to capture details. Like the phone’s performance, the camera app, too, can be a little sluggish when switching between modes or when trying to take shots in the Pro mode. On the front you have a 16MP (f/2.4) camera that can take well-tuned shots in good lighting but can lack in sharpness when taking shots indoors, though it’s fine for making video calls.
Powered by a 5,500mAh battery unit, this is perhaps the phone’s biggest strength. I found it to last a day almost every single day during my usage with brightness set at 40 per cent most of the time, watching videos for two hours or so across different apps, using it for social media like Instagram and a lot of WhatsApp and Telegram usage as well. You get an 80 watts SuperVooc charger in the box and the phone charges from 1 per cent to full in just under an hour.
I didn’t find any trouble with the device’s WiFi, GPS as well as call quality on the go. 5G network reception was also quite reliable to be used as a WiFi hotspot source when working on the go. The dual stereo speakers on the phone are loud and do a good job for watching YouTube videos, though they seem to lack as much depth and details as some other Nord devices.
In a nutshell, the Nord CE4 Lite doesn’t quite perform up to par on several fronts, including performance as well as camera. It does have a good battery life and display to go with it, but it doesn’t come across as something worth recommending, especially since OnePlus’s own Nord 4 CE, yup, that’s priced Rs. 5,000 more, provided a significantly better experience in nearly every department, so you have better options from the likes of iQoo and Realme among a few others.