OnePlus Nord 2 long-term review

Refresh rate

The OnePlus Nord 2's screen is nice, but 90 Hz isn't 120 Hz, and not even Samsung is trying to get away with 90 Hz at this price point nowadays. This is one of the main downsides of the Nord 2, and there's just no way around it. If you've ever used a phone with a 120 Hz refresh rate for any reasonable amount of time, then switching to the Nord 2, things always seem a bit slower than they should be. It's the power of habit, it's the power of getting used to things, and you obviously can get used to the Nord 2's lower refresh rate, but not without always sort of knowing, in the back of your mind, that things could be better.

Or rather, that they should be. Much cheaper devices can be had with 120 Hz refresh rate screens, and that was also true when the Nord 2 launched. OnePlus really has no excuse for skimping on a higher refresh rate here, no matter how afraid it might have been about the Nord 2 cannibalizing sales of its higher-priced premium devices.

Refresh rate settings

See, this neatly illustrates one of the problems with brands that cover a wide range of price tiers. They inevitably don't want to negatively impact sales of the higher tier, so they always end up needlessly crippling the lower tier, so that doesn't happen. It's tipping the scales plain and simple, and it's a complex problem because you end up not making the best product you can make, but the best product that won't affect sales of your other, more lucrative products.

That's not a consumer-friendly thing to do at all, and people know this and act upon it - it's no coincidence that the brands that usually have the most success in the lower or mid tiers of the market are those that offer 'the best bang for the buck'. When it comes to refresh rate, the OnePlus Nord 2 definitely doesn't do that.

Of course, if your previous phone had a 60 Hz screen, you'll be very happy with the improvement you're getting here. The issue is - you should have gotten more of an improvement. As you'll see in the Performance section, the refresh rate also caps smoothness, which can not match that of any handset with a 120 Hz refresh rate - even ones that are half the price.

Display quality

Now that we got the elephant in the room out of the way, we can say that the Nord 2 has a high quality display panel, one that has never left us wanting in brightness, even on the sunniest of days. Sure, it doesn't get nearly as bright as some of the flagships out there, but it's still decently legible, which is pretty good for this price point.

Conversely, it also gets dim enough at night for it not to sear your retinas when looking at it in pitch darkness. The auto brightness curve is good, but could be better. We generally found that it preferred a setting that was slightly too bright in most ambient lighting conditions, but then it was very conservative in going up to the last 20% of the line - this became annoying outdoors sometimes, when despite there being ample daylight, if the sun wasn't directly hitting the screen the brightness would never actually go up to 100% on its own.

We fixed this in time with many manual adjustments, which were remembered as they should be. So overall, we would definitely not call this a bad performer when it comes to auto brightness, but in the past year or so, most devices we've long-term reviewed have actually had more or less perfectly set curves, and thus compared to that benchmark this experience was slightly disappointing. Unlike the refresh rate, though, this is actually something you can fix - with patience and perseverance.

Display settings

Like practically any other phone with an AMOLED screen, the OnePlus Nord 2 lets you pick your favorite color mode. In this case, you get only two options, Vivid and Gentle, and their names are self-explanatory. The former is tuned to the P3 color space, while the latter targets sRGB. Vivid is the default, and which one you prefer will depend on how much you like colors to 'pop' on your phone's screen. If not even Vivid is enough for you, then you can use "AI color boost" to go even further at the cost of some battery life. We kept this off because we're usually wary of such artificial enhancements. Maybe that's because we grew up with a lot of such settings enabled by default on TVs to the detriment of image quality.

Display settings

Speaking of which, there's also an "AI resolution boost" to "enhance the definition of low-quality videos", but we're having issues figuring out who'd actually need that. How low-res would a video have to be on your phone's screen to require such intervention? Do you have your collection of QCIF videos recorded on your Nokia Asha a decade ago constantly on hand and in need of being endlessly rewatched? On the other hand, props to OnePlus for using the "AI" buzzword as much as possible, we all know that simply adding "AI" to anything will automatically make it better (in case it wasn't obvious, yes, that was sarcasm).

Eye comfort settings

Like all modern phones, the Nord 2 has a blue light filter too, which is called Eye comfort. While this is nowhere near as customizable and feature-rich as MIUI's blue light filter has been in the past year or so, it's still pretty good. You can select the color temperature with a slider (the warmer you go, the less harmful blue light emitted), and you can also pick between color and black and white. Eye comfort is schedulable, and overall it's a competent implementation of a blue light filter.

Fingerprint sensor

The Nord 2's fingerprint sensor is of the optical in-display variety, and it's very good. It's fast and accurate - we had about 95% success rate with it in unlocking on the first try, which is on par with the phone's competitors and even matching some more expensive devices out there.

As with any optical sensor, registering your prints is a more tedious affair than with the latest ultrasonic ones, but you only need to do that once per finger, so we won't count it as a downside. There are a few different fingerprint animations you can choose from, and if you want to, you can even enable "Quick launch", which lets you set some app shortcuts to show up if you keep pressing the sensor area after the screen is unlocked. Then you can just slide your finger (without lifting it) to the app you want to go to, and it starts up. This is a neat enough system in theory, but for some reason, we never found ourselves using it (something similar is present in other Android skins too). You may find it essential, however, and so we're glad it's there.

Biometrics settings

Face unlock is also present, but since it uses the selfie camera it's less secure than the fingerprint scanner. There's a setting that you can turn on for unlocking to only happen when your eyes are open, and that works well in practice. We haven't really used face unlocking much on the Nord 2 because of how good the fingerprint sensor is, but the times we have relied on it, it was fast and accurate, too.

Ambient Display

The Nord 2 has an Always-on Display, naturally - one of the benefits of an AMOLED panel, since it doesn't need to wake the entire screen to display stuff on a part of it. OnePlus calls it Ambient Display, and the implementation of this function here is very good, with a ton of customization options available to you. You can pick between many analog and digital clock styles, and even a text clock. Notification icons are shown too, and you can even see the entire notification on the AOD for a short while when it arrives.

Ambient Display is schedulable, and we liked that you can choose some "contextual info" to show up if you want it to - things like media player controls and information and calendar events - so it's not just a clock with notification icons underneath.

Ambient Display settings

OnePlus took its sweet time bringing actually always-on functionality to its Ambient Display, but it is present in the Nord 2, and we appreciated that. If you don't want (or need) it to be always-on, you can set it so that it appears upon picking up the phone and/or if you tap the screen once. You may save some power this way, but, as our Battery life section makes clear, the Nord 2 is capable of very good battery life even with the Ambient Display always-on.