OnePlus Nord 4 review: A heavy-metal smartphone experience

The Nord series launched back in 2020 with the singular goal to restore OnePlus to greatness in the mid-range segment that it once dominated with the initial OnePlus flagships – the segment the brand had since slowly and steadily vacated with each successive launch.

Now in its fourth generation, the OnePlus Nord 4 ( ₹29,999 for 8GB/128GB onwards) builds on all its strengths – spirited performance and fast charging at a relatively competitive price point – and serves it up with a side of metal mettle.

Yes, the OnePlus Nord 4 is the first metal unibody phone in the 5G era, a departure from the regular glass-sandwich design that’s been all the rage for years. It’s a design choice that harks back to the time of all-metal phones like the HTC One M8 and the OnePlus 3T, which sadly gave way to glass, ceramic and plastic for better signal strength on 5G devices.

Build and design

It’s a solid move (pun intended), allowing the phone to stand out considerably from the competition. Not only does it look distinctive particularly with the etched pattern on the silver variant, but the 7.99-mm aluminum unibody chassis is comfortable to hold and doesn’t dig into the palms like many other flat-edged phones do, with the rear panel curving into the flat sides. It’s not all metal, though, with OnePlus employing a glass window on the rear not dissimilar to what you’ve seen on Pixels of the past. But the overarching sensation is one of solid metal.

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At nearly 200 g, it’s expectedly a little heavier than its plastic-framed predecessor, but it retains all the good design choices we’ve come to associate with the series – an alert slider to switch between notification profiles, an infrared blaster to control home appliances and a respectable - if not class-beating -- IP65 dust-water resistance. And while I was initially cynical about signal strength due to the all-metal chassis, the clever antenna design on the Nord 4 seems to work well, and nothing in my week-long usage of the phone has ‘signaled’ any concerns in this regard.

Display

As striking as the design is, OnePlus hasn’t scrimped on the basics, kitting the Nord 4 with a 6.74-inch AMOLED display with a 1240 x 2772 (1.5K) resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.

Keen eyes would note this is the excellent panel from the Nord 3, only brighter. It’s a big, sharp display, slightly better than what you’d expect from a phone in this price segment, and it goes past 2000 nits while displaying HDR10+ content on Netflix or Amazon Prime. You also get Ultra HDR functionality for displaying brighter highlights in photos taken from this phone. Colors are equally good, and you have the option of changing color modes if the default Vivid color profile isn’t to your liking. On-board speakers are serviceable for casual use, with a full sound and strong vocals, albeit with shrill highs at higher volume.

Performance and battery

Powering the OnePlus Nord 4 is the new Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 chip, which puts it clearly in mid-range territory but a step up from the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 phones, with improved, more powerful cores, better graphics and better on-device AI capabilities. The Nord 4 has plenty of power for daily use – routine everyday tasks and demanding gaming titles at medium settings -- though it does throttle down performance to keep things cool over extended gaming sessions.

You’ll want to consider the upgraded 256GB storage variant as that uses the speedier UFS4.0 storage – the 128GB storage base model sticks with the dated UFS3.1 type. Battery performance is dependable – the 5,500mAh battery (10% bigger than the Nord 3) goes past six and a half hours of screen time, and the phone lasted about a day and a half on a single charge before it had to be charged again. And when you do have to charge it, 100W charging with the bundled charger gets you topped up in around 30 minutes.

OS and camera

As with other recent OnePlus devices, the Nord 4 runs Android 14 out of the box, and you get the usual OxygenOS user interface and the usual ‘fast and smooth’ experience. Though I do note with a raised eye that newer OnePlus devices are shipping with a number of pre-installed apps out of the box, all of which you can uninstall, to be fair. Four Android OS updates and six years of security updates isn’t bad either.

One thing that’s new in the Oxygen OS 14.1 is the AI integration, which we noted was missing in the OnePlus 12 and 12R. You get text summarization from emails and text you read on the web, an AI translator and AI-powered voice transcription. Not a patch on the stuff Samsung and Google have pushed out recently but a good start, nonetheless.

The Nord 4 goes with a 50-megapixel f/1.8 Lytia LYT-600 image sensor for its main camera, along with an 8-megapixel Sony IMX355 for the ultrawide, with no 2-megapixel macro shooter to pad up the spec sheet (I’m not complaining). This is the same primary sensor as was last seen on the Nord CE4 Lite, a phone that retails at Rs10,000 below the Nord 4. That said, it turns out decent shots, keeping colors accurate and handling trickily lit shooting scenarios well, balancing light and shadows well. Low-light images offer natural colors and restrained noise levels. Ultrawide images, both in good light and poor, were passable and suffered from the fate of many ultrawides – insufficient sharpness and dynamic range -- when compared to the primary shooter. Selfies (16MP) are soft on details and underwhelming.

Verdict

Save for the camera setup, there’s a lot the OnePlus Nord 4 gets right, starting with that patently original and out-and-out premium design in a mid-range package and ending on high marks for display, capable (if somewhat restrained) performance, fast charging, slick software and overall durability. It goes up strongly against the likes of the POCO F6 and the Pixel 7a. If it’s good old heavy metal you seek, the OnePlus Nord 4 is the only game in town.

Tushar Kanwar, a tech columnist and commentator, posts @2shar.

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