OnePlus Nord 2 long-term review

OxygenOS vs. ColorOS, bugs

The OnePlus Nord 2 runs OxygenOS 11.3 (based on Android 11), which is best thought of as ColorOS with an OxygenOS skin on top. It's not yet full-fledged ColorOS with just another name - that's coming with the Android 12 update, presumably. But the underlying codebase is unified with ColorOS.

OxygenOS 11.3

So it's once again a middle-ground sort of thing - not OxygenOS exactly as it used to be, but not ColorOS either. And that's... fine, really. We know this will be a controversial statement for fans of the 'true' OxygenOS, but here's the thing. ColorOS 11 and ColorOS 12 have consistently been among the best Android skins out there, with excellent performance and a good blend of customizability that doesn't go overboard but still lets you alter the experience in many ways if you please.

True, the disappearance of true OxygenOS will, unfortunately, mean that there's going to be one less player in the Android skin market, and that loss of diversity is, well, a loss. This, we get. Hating on ColorOS because of that, however, we find quite unfair. And let's not forget that over the past few years, OxygenOS has been getting progressively more buggy, seemingly as OnePlus has expanded its product portfolio more and more. Maybe there weren't enough software engineers there to properly take care of all the issues, and hopefully, OnePlus' ColorOS will one day become as bug-free as Oppo's ColorOS has been for a while now.

That's not the case on the OnePlus Nord 2. Maybe the transition period is to blame, we don't know. But Do Not Disturb Mode has simply not worked on the Nord 2, at all, for at least 3-4 months, during which time our unit got three different updates. So we really can't fault OnePlus for the update cadence here, and while the security patch level isn't always current, it was never more than a month old while we used it, which is much better performance on this than some of its competitors put out (cough... Xiaomi... cough).

Current software and security patch

But these updates sometimes fix random annoying bugs while introducing others, and as we said, they all ignored the well-reported DND issues. As a consequence, one of the main "it should just work" things for a modern smartphone, at least in our opinion, has been broken for months, despite OnePlus knowing about this. That's not a good look.

DND settings don't do anything

After one of the updates, the phone's proximity sensor would randomly stop working while on calls - but this got fixed with a reboot every single time. Why? Who knows. Thankfully the next update fixed this issue for good, and we haven't seen it since. The latest update introduced a bug that randomly makes the Eye comfort blue light filter feature not work on the in-call screen in the Phone app - it works everywhere else all the time, and there some of the time, but not always. Why? Who knows.

For a while now (since the last-but-one update), YouTube is randomly killed when running in the background, which, dare we try a bit of sarcasm, is great for when you're listening to a podcast or some such thing. This happens once every few days and doesn't seem to be tied to how heavy the RAM use is - sometimes it happened while YouTube was the only thing running.

But perhaps the most annoying bug of them all, which has been there from the beginning of our use of the Nord 2, is related to Bluetooth. We're not sure if this can be blamed on the MediaTek SoC or not, but here's what happens when we connect a pair of earbuds that have a Qualcomm chipset - the right earbud always plays the music we're listening to, while the left one randomly stops. For a few seconds, or sometimes even a few minutes. Then it randomly starts playing again, for a few seconds or a few minutes... until it randomly stops again.

To merely call this "annoying" would be putting it very mildly, but we've checked - it only happens with TWS earbuds using a Qualcomm chipset (regardless of the codec being used - we tested with SBC, AAC, and aptX). There's no such issue with earbuds using any other chipset. It took a fair bit of sleuthing and testing to reach that conclusion, which most people we assume wouldn't go through, and in the end, the fact that we know the conditions for the bug to appear doesn't in any way help us get rid of it.

Nor do any of the Bluetooth-related options and toggles in Developer settings, by the way - we played with them all. Would the average consumer even know which chipset their TWS earbuds are using? Probably not. Would they know that the blame isn't actually with the earbuds? We ask since this has never happened to us before, using the exact same earbuds with at least a dozen other phones. And we're talking about two different pairs, from different brands - but both with a Qualcomm chipset.

While we're on the Bluetooth topic, the Nord 2 also, unfortunately, has that thing where it doesn't want to automatically reconnect to previously connected speakers and car systems 9 out of 10 times - and you need to manually select the accessory from the Bluetooth menu in order to make it connect. This, hilariously, never happens with earbuds, regardless of the chipset, but has consistently happened with two portable speakers and one car system (same ones we've used without such problems with other smartphones before).

The point of all this is that you should expect to see random bugs here and there on the Nord 2 in the current state of its software, and while updates do come often, and they sometimes do fix things, they can also bring new bugs with them for the ride. That's definitely not optimal from a UX perspective.