OnePlus Nord N300 review

Oxygen OS 12

The Android 12 update was not well received by OnePlus customers when it initially launched. It had major bugs, and the look and feel were drastically different than what OnePlus users were accustomed to.

Stability and performance of OxygenOS 12 are better now. Although it no longer has a stock-Android vibe, Oxygen OS 12 is still feature-rich with plenty of things to customize.

Home screen • App drawer • Notifications • Quick settings • Customize: Home screen

You can choose between gesture and button navigation. There are a couple of layouts for button control, and there are some customization to the behavior for gesture navigation.

Button navigation • Gestures

Like many Android devices that T-Mobile sells, the Nord N300 comes with a second newsfeed. This one contains "curated" content from T-Mobile, including TV shows and movies, with ads supporting T-Mobile's free content that ranges from movies and TV shows to news (video and written articles) and sports.

T-Mobile Play

One unique element of Oxygen OS is the "OnePlus" shelf. A quick pulldown from the upper right corner of the corner reveals a drawer that you can customize with widgets, apps, or action shortcuts. You can also disable the feature altogether.

OnePlus Shelf

Aside from Shelf, Work Life Balance and Scout are two more core features of OxygenOS. Work Life Balance lets you create notification profiles for different scenarios like Work or Study time. Scout is a universal search built into the launcher. It searches for apps, documents, contacts, news, articles, weather, nearby locations, SMS, notes, and more.

Scout • Work Life Balance

App switching brings you to a carousel of apps. Tapping on the three-dot-menu lets you Lock the app, so the RAM manager doesn't close it in the background, start split screen for supported apps, or tap on "Manage" to see which apps are locked.

Split screen • Recent apps

There's a "Dirac Audio Tuner" that lets you choose from preset sound profiles. There's no custom EQ, nor is there an option to disable the tuner. Otherwise, there's Live Captioning available, as well as settings for haptic feedback.

Sound and haptic settings

You'll find plenty of preloaded apps on the Nord N300, including a calculator, Clone Phone for data transfer, My Files, Notes, Recorder, Weather, and Zen Mode.

Preloaded apps

Performance

MediaTek's Dimensity 810 is a midrange chipset that we've encountered before. It's a 5G chipset built on the efficient 6nm manufacturing process. It has two quad-core clusters: four "big" Cortex A-76 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and four "little" Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 2.0GHz.

Graphics are powered by a modest Mali G-57 MC2 with two cores, which likely won't yield any impressive benchmark scores. Most games these days, even graphic-intensive ones, are playable on midrange devices like this one. The display can handle gaming at 90fps, but only for a select handful of games.

In CPU benchmarks, the Nord N300's Dimensity 810 managed to get slightly higher single-core scores when compared to the Snapdragon 680. Multi-core scores were comparable to other devices of this class: devices with both the Snapdragon 680 and Snapdragon 695.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  4629
• Xiaomi 12T
  3756
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  1945
• Nokia G60 5G
  1908
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  1780
• Oppo Reno7
  1653
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  1632
• Realme 9
  1601

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  1729
• Xiaomi 12T
  925
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  676
• Nokia G60 5G
  668
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  596
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  380
• Realme 9
  380
• Oppo Reno7
  380

The GPU performed well in its range, and that's partly thanks to the display's lower 720p+ resolution. Even so, the promise of gaming is quite good with decent frame rates, though do expect to see some reduced graphics to achieve them.

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  60
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  23
• Nokia G60 5G
  17
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  16
• Realme 9
  7.3
• Oppo Reno7
  7.2
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  6.7

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  97
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  20
• Nokia G60 5G
  20
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  15
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  8.3
• Realme 9
  8.2
• Oppo Reno7
  8.1

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  60
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  51
• Nokia G60 5G
  30
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  29
• Oppo Reno7
  14
• Realme 9
  13
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  12

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  146
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  35
• Nokia G60 5G
  34
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  27
• Oppo Reno7
  20
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  15
• Realme 9
  15

3DMark SSE Vulkan 1.0 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  2744
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  2585
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  1261

Antutu 9 fared reasonably well. The score sits right between the Snapdragon 680 and 695.

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12T
  780204
• Apple iPhone SE (2022)
  723486
• Nokia G60 5G
  402664
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  380672
• OnePlus Nord N300 5G
  335440
• Realme 9
  290097
• Oppo Reno7
  289250
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  273554

OxygenOS 12 lets you configure up to 3GB of additional RAM borrowed from the storage space. You may not feel a noticeable difference, but you may notice that apps will stay in the system memory for longer before they are purged from recent apps.

RAM expansion • Additional RAM shown at the bottom

Performance stability here is excellent. We saw no throttling throughout the 1-hour CPU test. Even under intense use, the Nord N300 stays surprisingly comfortable to the touch: the plastic body doesn't really get warm.

CPU stability test

The 90Hz display and the Dimensity 810 make this a decent gaming device and one that you can expect to see pretty good frame rates with. Both casual players and children will be able to enjoy games on this device with no issues. More demanding games are possible but likely to come with a reduction in frame rate.

There's a game launcher included with Oxygen OS, and it lets you adjust the phone's resources when playing games in full screen. It even lets you tweak how the touch input behaves.

Games launcher