OnePlus’ Nord series earlier this year saw the Nord CE4, which became one of the better performers under Rs 25,000 and the CE4 Lite, which didn’t come across nearly as well for Rs 20,000. Now we have the company’s Nord flagship, the Nord 4, which starts at Rs 29,999 for the base model and goes up to Rs 32,999 for the highest variant.
Let us try and see how well it performs and where it lacks.
The first thing you might notice when holding the Nord 4 is its distinct metal body from any other Nord 5G device so far. The glass plus metal dual tone at the back does give it a nice feel and look, with the protruding camera setup on the glass and the dual tone LEDs set quite far apart from it, while the OnePlus logo sits on the middle of metal partition.
The device has curved corners and flat sides. The front has a 6.74-inch (20.1:9 aspect ratio) display with bezels that aren’t completely symmetrical but are really narrow. The right side has the volume buttons and power/lock key; while the left side has the Alert Slider near the top corner.
The top houses one outlet for loudspeakers, Infrared port and secondary mic; and the bottom locates the dual SIM card tray, primary mic, USB type C port and the other outlet for loudspeakers.
I didn’t see the back catching on to fingerprints and smudges quickly. With that material, the phone weighs about 200 grams, which may not be to everybody’s liking but it isn’t too much for its size.
The phone comes in Obsidian Black (the one I tried), Mercurial Silver and Oasis Green colour options.
Talking about the 6.74-inch 1.5K (2772 × 1240) AMOLED display, it supports up to 120Hz high refresh rates. This is a bright and clear display with good viewing angles for reading texts and viewing high resolution images.
For HDRo10 content, too, it’s can handle contrast and colour depth quite well without struggling with darker scenes that we do see in phones at this price range at times.
On the back, you get a dual camera setup – a 50MP (f/1.8) main camera, an 8MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide camera. The phone can take pretty nice and detailed shots in most occasion daylight. If you aren’t moving, the camera can capture the subject in good sharpness without overdoing it. Indoors and in low-light, though, the camera performance isn’t that great in terms of image processing. Night mode does help but it’s still not that great compared to the likes of the Realme GT 6T. Something like AI eraser feature does help quite a bit to remove unnecessary objects or maybe some extra reflective light in your image.
The front-facing 16MP (f/2.4) camera can take detailed and well-processed shots for your social media use and is more than capable of handling video calls.
The device is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 chipset (up to 2.8GHz octa core processor, Adreno 732 GPU and X63 5G modem) alongside 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB UFS 4.0 storage (base variant has 8GB plus 128GB UFS 3.1).
It is running on OxygenOS 14.1 based on Android 14 with the August security patch in place.
OnePlus promises four OS upgrades and six years of security updates for it. You get a few pre-installed apps out of the box while some can unticked for installation during the initial setup – both group of apps can be uninstalled without any fuss.
The phone handled regular tats, messaging, calling, watching YouTube videos at their highest resolution, scrolling through Instagram, playing Spotify in the background without any trouble.
A game like BGMI can be played on it at 60 frames per second with medium to high settings selected. I didn’t see any heating issues with the device other than only two-three times of charging it after the initial setup.
The Nord 4 is equipped with a 5,500mAh battery unit and comes with a 100 watts SuperVooc charger in the box that can charge the device in about 50 minutes.
The phone lasted me a full day almost every single time after a full charge and didn’t show any unusual battery drops during the usage.
Call quality and WiFi performance if the phone is top notch and so is its location lock-in for GPS. 5G network reception implementation didn’t show any issues for usage on the go even when tethered for WiFi hotspot.
The dual stereo speakers are pretty loud so that you can use it fit for your gaming and video playback indoors without losing out on depth from these speakers.
In a nutshell, the Nord 4 is a solid offering from OnePlus if you rank a smooth software experience for daily use up there; don’t mind its weight provided you do get long battery life and a metal unibody while not compromising on the display quality.
Its camera performance isn’t a home run, but overall, this is an Android phone worth considering if you’re looking for one around Rs. 30,000 to Rs. 35,000.
