OnePlus Nord review

Oxygen OS 10.5

Oxygen OS is a core and major part of the OnePlus experience. Always has been and especially now that the popular custom ROM has been through so many years of upgrades, iterations, polish, and most importantly - a constant user feedback loop. That's one of the things OnePlus does best. And sure, just like any software, it's not perfect, but its large loyal following in itself is indication enough of its quality.

Our review unit OnePlus Nord is running Oxygen OS 10.5.2, on top of an Android 10 core. In keeping with tradition, it retains a close to AOSP appearance, with all of the additional features carefully and unobtrusively stacked on top. Truth be told, modern Oxygen OS is a far cry from the near vanilla experience of old. The Nord is packed to the brim with various additional features. Even so, thanks to its careful iterative approach and major focus on low-level, input and output latency optimization, OnePlus has managed to maintain what is still one of the snappiest and most responsive Android experiences in the industry.

Oxygen OS is very welcoming to new users too. OnePlus Switch is the built-in data transfer tool that's compatible with other Android devices through the OnePlus switch app or iOS devices via iCloud login that will pull the data from a backup. It's one of the more versatile migration solutions out there.

OnePlus Switch

First introduced with the 6T, the in-display scanner has made its way into the Nord as well and is just as quick and reliable as always. One thing worth noting is its relatively low placement on the display of the Nord. An odd reality, seeing how the OnePlus 8 Pro specifically moved the reader up a bit for better comfort. On the Nord, you do have to resort to some thumb-stretching.

Security options • Fingerprint setup

In addition to fingerprint, you can register your face to unlock the phone, just know it won't be as secure. In any case, it works quickly and reliably.

Face unlock

The lock screen is standard for many Android UIs. Notifications populate here and a couple of shortcuts, each for Google Assistant and the Camera app can be reached by swiping from either the lower left or lower right corners.

Lock screen

An always-on display feature has probably been the most requested upgrade in the Oxygen OS community for quite some time now. It is finally a reality, in the shape of a customizable Ambient Display clock.

The AOD UI also contains optional notifications, as well as contextual controls, for things like music playback. You also get to choose whether to show the AOD upon picking up the phone or tapping the display. You can also enable both.

Ambient display settings

By default, the app drawer is accessed by vertically swiping. You can also opt to disable the app drawer, as is more popular with Chinese Android skins.

Home screen • App drawer • Google Feed

And that's just the tip of the iceberg of launcher customization options. The drawer can be set to automatically trigger the app search function, instead of just dropping you in a list of apps. The swipe-down gesture, typically reserved for bringing down the notification shade and quick toggles can also be remapped to show the proprietary Oxygen OS Shade, instead.

Launcher settings

Shelf contains quick access to a Toolbox, memos a digital wallet, weather, as well as a custom app shortcut list. Apparently, however, the particular screen wasn't seeing too much, since in recent versions of Oxygen OS a traditional Google Feed has taken its old spot as the left-most pane on the home screen. At least OnePlus didn't remove it entirely.

The notification shade is a standard affair. The second pull-down shows a manual brightness slider. Meanwhile, Quick Settings available include a "Reading mode" which reduces colors for a more comfortable reading experience, Zen Mode, Focus Mode, Screen recorder, and you can add additional ones like Data saver, VPN, Invert colors, Bedtime mode, and Live caption (which is also found in the volume menu).

Notification shade • Quick settings • Edit Quick settings

There are plenty of visual customization options in Oxygen OS as well, found under a dedicated Settings menu. Here, you can change the look of the UI, and you can choose a light theme (Illuminating light), dark theme (nuanced dark), or a semi-dark theme (vibrant tints).

Dark mode is technically a theme on Oxygen OS, so there isn't a way to schedule it to come on after dark like some other UI skins. Dark mode isn't to be confused with "Night Mode" which can be scheduled but deals with the screen's blue-light filter.

Customization menu • Light and dark themes • (not to be confused with) Night Mode

That is not to say that if you want dark mode, you are only limited to one of the default themes. On the contrary. You can mix and match visual elements to your heart's content and tweak different aspects of the look and feel. The Tone option, in particular, has a dark mode, alongside a regular "single accent color" light mode and a colorful one. No colorful dark mode for now, though. If you go for a single accent color option, you can choose exactly what that color is in the corresponding menu.

Tone settings • Accent Color settings • System icons • Icon packs

Some of the other customization menus allow you to change the shape of quick setting icons, and set a different icon pack if you wish. Oxygen OS offers standard compatibility with most popular packs already on the Play Store. Finally, you can set a new font as well. The default is Roboto, but you can also set it to OnePlus' own "Slate" font.

Continuing with the customizations menu, here you can also change the wallpaper, the clock style for Ambient Display and the fingerprint unlocking animation. "Horizon light", as seen on the OnePlus 8 Pro is notably absent. Since there are no curved edges on the Nord's flat display to light-up, OnePlus decided to skip the feature.

Customizing: Wallpaper • Clock • Fingerprint unlock animation

Live Caption is a relatively new feature, now making its way to OnePlus devices and Oxygen OS. It is actually a Google feature, first introduced with Android 10 on the Google Pixel 4 duo, that can transcribe any audio into on-screen captions without needing an internet connection. It is helpful for deaf or hard of hearing users since it can transcribe stories or other kinds of media where closed captions are otherwise unavailable. As of this writing, it only supports English and has its ups and downs. Music lyrics trip it up more often than not, but it consistently nails articulate speech.

Live Caption

Here are some other notable features that are part of Oxygen OS under the "Utilities" menu in the Settings. The first is called Quick Launch and is accessed through the fingerprint scanner. If you unlock the phone and keep holding your finger, a carousel will pop up. From here you can drag your finger to a set of customizable shortcuts or apps.

Utilities menu • Quick launch

Oxygen OS supports dual instances of supported apps in its Parallel Apps feature. You can use it to manage a second account on Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, WeChat, or any other app that many not support multiple logins.

App locker will block selected apps from being used until you enter the phone's passcode or a fingerprint. This isn't to be confused with "Hidden Space", which is a sneaky way of hiding apps in the launcher.

Parallel apps • App locker and Hidden space

If you play a lot of mobile games, Oxygen OS has its own game-optimizer tool called Game Space. If you want to go all-in on your gaming experience, Fnatic mode will block all notifications, restrict background activity, and even disable the second SIM to make sure that all resources will go to the game.

Game Space

Fnatic mode

Despite including most aspects of AOSP, oxygen OS still has quite a few in-house apps for basic features. Often times, doubling existing Google solutions. These are typically styled consistently and play along with system-wide UI customization, which is a plus.

Clock • Calculator • File manager • Notes • Recorder • Weather

The built-in gallery app is versatile and offers few, but well-implemented and essential editing tools.

Gallery app

Synthetic benchmarks

OnePlus has a solid track record of optimizing the performance of its handsets. Through a combination of lean software and some fine-tuned low-level enhancements to things like CPU governors and schedulers, OnePlus devices have frequently ended-up on top performance charts, for their respective silicon.

That being said, the Nord is not a flagship, with its Snapdragon 765G chipset and we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. It has two Kryo 475 custom ARM cores at its helm, the Prime one, running at 2.4GHz and its Gold sibling reaching 2.2 GHz. Then there are six 1.8GHz Kryo 475 Silver units. On the GPU side of things - an Adreno 620. Nothing to phone home about, but perfectly adequate to deliver solid all-round performance. More than plenty for the average Android user.

The Snapdragon 765G chipset is paired with plenty of RAM and storage in our review unit. We are examining the top-tier 12GB, plus 256GB one. This, in itself, could result in a small boost in some benchmark numbers. If nothing else, bugger flash chips tend to be a bit faster than their slower counterparts. Even so, the RAM here is LPDDR4X and the storage chips operate at UFS 2.1 speeds. It's not cutting edge hardware, but well suited for the class and solid enough for most users. Plus, with its small 7nm manufacturing process and integrated X52 5G modem, the Snapdragon 765G is engineered for efficiency first, rather than blazing performance.

Starting with some pure-CPU tests and GeekBench, we can see the OnePlus Nord holds its ground well, basically squeezing as much performance as possible form the Snapdragon 765G. For the sake of thoroughness, we also ran GeekBench with the OnePlus Fnatic mode on. Having it on does not measurably influence benchmark scores, with numbers coming in within margin of error. This is expected, since Fnatic and the OnePlus Game mode are meant to ensure steady and high performance for prolonged sessions. Not to push the chipset harder for short bursts, as required by benchmarks.

GeekBench 5.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  3399
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  3332
• Realme X50 Pro
  3175
• OnePlus 7T
  2858
• OnePlus Nord
  1953
• OnePlus Nord (Fnatic)
  1945
• vivo X50 Pro
  1937
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  1898
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  1815
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  1781
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  1733
• Motorola One Fusion+
  1705
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  1694
• Realme 6 Pro
  1666
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  1517
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  1413

GeekBench 5.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  919
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  916
• Realme X50 Pro
  911
• OnePlus 7T
  776
• vivo X50 Pro
  636
• OnePlus Nord
  610
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  609
• OnePlus Nord (Fnatic)
  605
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  589
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  569
• Realme 6 Pro
  565
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  542
• Motorola One Fusion+
  542
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  521
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  398
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  315

Moving on to more compound tests and AnTuTu 8, we once again find the OnePlus Nord making the best out of its hardware. Once again, the vivo X50 Pro, rocking the same Snapdragon 765G chipset, manages to inch out a slight lead. However, it's a marginal one, at best, and impossible to translate in real-world performance terms.

AnTuTu 8

Higher is better

• Realme X50 Pro
  592447
• OnePlus 8
  564708
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  538221
• OnePlus 7T
  485585
• vivo X50 Pro
  323736
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  315641
• OnePlus Nord
  312794
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  308231
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  299926
• Realme 6 Pro
  268785
• Motorola One Fusion+
  267980
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  263396
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  261359
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  253271
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  227810
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  196545

Since AnTuTu has quite a few GPU components to its test runs, both off and on-screen ones, this is the point at which we started running our tests in both the basic 60Hz mode and the higher 90Hz one. Like we already mentioned in the display section of the review, the high refresh rate behavior on the Nord is a bit complex and not straight-forward. Not all apps are guaranteed to take advantage of it in any way. AnTuTu is one of those apps. We verified that regardless of refresh rate settings, it always ran at 60Hz. Hence, the extremely close test results we got between the 60Hz and "90Hz" runs.

What about true GPU benchmarks then? GFXBench did, in fact, comply with the 90Hz setting and did not bump the refresh rate down while running. However, the Adreno 620 GPU only had enough power to push a maximum of 50fps onscreen in the lowest-intensity Manhattan OpenGL ES 3.0 test, we still run. That, in turn, makes the current refresh rate a moot point.

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  127
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  126
• Realme X50 Pro
  123
• OnePlus 7T
  112
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  90
• Huawei P30
  88
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  56
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  56
• OnePlus Nord
  55
• vivo X50 Pro
  51
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  50
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  42
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  42
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  41
• Realme 6 Pro
  41
• Motorola One Fusion+
  38
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  19

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  60
• Realme X50 Pro
  60
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  60
• OnePlus 7T
  59
• Huawei P30
  59
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  59
• OnePlus Nord
  50
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  50
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  48
• vivo X50 Pro
  45
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  43
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  37
• Realme 6 Pro
  37
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  36
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  36
• Motorola One Fusion+
  34
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  16

As we ramped-up the test difficulty, this trend remained consistent. We ended-up getting the exact same numbers, both on-screen and off-screen, with just the occasional margin of error deviation of a single frame. These results are also about as high as we can expect from the Snapdragon 765G and its Adreno 620 GPU, meaning, once again, that the OnePlus Nord is making the most out of the hardware it has to work with.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  88
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  87
• Realme X50 Pro
  86
• OnePlus 7T
  79
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  56
• Huawei P30
  54
• OnePlus Nord
  38
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  38
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  38
• vivo X50 Pro
  36
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  33
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  31
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  30
• Realme 6 Pro
  30
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  30
• Motorola One Fusion+
  27
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  20
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  13

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Realme X50 Pro
  60
• OnePlus 7T
  59
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  59
• Huawei P30
  48
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  48
• OnePlus Nord
  34
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  34
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  32
• vivo X50 Pro
  31
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  29
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  27
• Realme 6 Pro
  27
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  26
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  26
• Motorola One Fusion+
  25
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  17
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  10

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  52
• Realme X50 Pro
  51
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  51
• OnePlus 7T
  48
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  33
• Huawei P30
  29
• OnePlus Nord
  21
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  21
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  21
• vivo X50 Pro
  20
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  19
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  18
• Realme 6 Pro
  18
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  17
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  17
• Motorola One Fusion+
  16
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  7.3
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  7.1

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  46
• Realme X50 Pro
  45
• OnePlus 7T
  41
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  40
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  28
• Huawei P30
  26
• OnePlus Nord
  19
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  19
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  18
• vivo X50 Pro
  17
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  16
• Realme 6 Pro
  16
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  15
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  15
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  15
• Motorola One Fusion+
  14
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  7.4
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  5.6

The OnePlus Nord did exhibit slightly odd behavior during the most-intense GFXBench Aztek runs. Both while using the OpenGL ES and the Vulkan API. Certain results don't quite line up neatly. Then again, looking at other similarly-equipped devices, like the Motorola Moto G 5G and the Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G, we can also see sporadic behavior. Perhaps, we are bumping against some odd software bottleneck of the benchmark. Regardless, this is an unreasonable and unrealistic amount of stress to put on a mobile GPU in terms of real-world use. Android games are extremely well-optimized nowadays and you even with the heaviest titles, you can expect smooth performance and automatic behind-the-scenes readjustments taking place. In that sense, the OnePlus Nord might not be flagship-grade, but is not starved for power, either.

3DMark SSE OpenGL ES 3.1 1440p

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  7290
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  7223
• Realme X50 Pro
  7221
• OnePlus 7T
  6296
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  4279
• Huawei P30
  4055
• OnePlus Nord
  3285
• vivo X50 Pro
  3214
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  3214
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  3187
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  3031
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  2512
• Realme 6 Pro
  2506
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  2467
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  2464
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  1243
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  1125

3DMark SSE Vulkan 1440p

Higher is better

• OnePlus 8
  6720
• Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro
  6660
• Realme X50 Pro
  6472
• OnePlus 7T
  5540
• Huawei P30 (perf. mode)
  4264
• Huawei P30
  4163
• OnePlus Nord
  3067
• Oppo Reno3 Pro 5G
  2995
• vivo X50 Pro
  2983
• OnePlus Nord (60Hz)
  2960
• Motorola Moto G 5G Plus
  2821
• Oppo Reno4 Pro
  2377
• Realme 6 Pro
  2334
• Samsung Galaxy A71
  2253
• Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
  2248
• Oppo Reno3 Pro
  1551
• Sony Xperia 10 II
  1121

3DMark did manage to properly run at 90Hz, as well and with its combination of off and on-screen tests did manage to put the difference in refresh and hence, maximum potential frame rate in numbers. Not terribly practical numbers, though.

The main takeaway here is that the OnePlus Nord lives up to OnePlus performance claims and manages to get the most out of its hardware. Unlike its OnePlus 8 siblings, it does not have flagship silicon at its disposal. But its number-crunching potential is perfectly adequate for most users.

The extra attention to smoothness and fluidity constantly being put into Oxygen OS, from the surface all the way down to the kernel optimizations, does pay off. The Nord is very snappy and responsive. A true pleasure to use.