OnePlus Nord 4

Verdict

OnePlus has produced something a bit different with the Nord 4, thanks to a unique all-metal build. Performance and battery life are also excellent, though its ordinary camera keeps it from rave reviews.

Introduction

Remember when smartphones used to be made primarily of tough metal rather than fragile glass or cheap plastic? OnePlus does, and has given us the first metal unibody phone of the 5G era in the OnePlus Nord 4.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t a cutting-edge flagship phone, but rather a mid-ranger. At a starting price of £429, it’s going head to head with the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G and undercutting the Google Pixel 8a.

That’s not all this strikingly built phone has to offer either, with a huge battery, a premium 1.5K AMOLED display, and decent performance also packaged in. Given such illustrious competition, is that enough to warrant a recommendation? Let’s find out.

Design

• Unique metal unibody build
• Striking Mercurial Silver finish
• Fairly heavy at nearly 200g

The biggest talking point about the OnePlus Nord 4 is its design, which is a refreshing thing to say about a mid-range smartphone, where scant resources are typically focused elsewhere.

OnePlus claims that this is “the only metal unibody 5G smartphone on the market”, and it might just be right. Most of the body is formed from one continuous piece of aluminium, although there is a small plastic section around the camera module, likely to facilitate those various antennae. Look carefully and you’ll also see plastic antenna lines dotted around the frame, and even around the perimeter of the display.

Still, the overriding sensation here is of solid metal. While I didn’t put it to the test, one suspects that the Nord 4 would be way more amenable to minor drops and dinks, though of course, the glass display will be as vulnerable as ever.

My model is the signature Mercurial Silver one, which really drives home that metallic theme with an etched diagonal lines finish. It’s purely a visual effect, and it’s not one I’m particularly partial to, but other members of the TR team feel otherwise. There are Obsidian Midnight and Oasis Green alternatives, and unlike Mercurial Silver, they also come in the cheaper 12GB RAM/256GB storage configuration.

Given that OnePlus has moved away from the OnePlus Nord 3’s plastic frame, the Nord 4 is heavier than its predecessor at 199.5g, but only by a smidgen. With a 7.99mm thickness and a 162.6 x 75mm footprint, it certainly feels substantial, but it’s not as bulky a phone as the Galaxy A55 overall.

An IP65 dust and water resistance rating doesn’t match the Pixel 8a and the Galaxy A55 5G, which are both on IP67, but it’s still pretty decent for a phone that retails this side of £500.

Screen

• Large 6.74-inch AMOLED
• Sharp 1.5K resolution
• Gets nice and bright

OnePlus may have made a striking statement with the metal body of the Nord 4, but it hasn’t forgotten about the business end of the phone. It features a 6.74-inch Fluid AMOLED display with a pin-sharp 1240 x 2772 (1.5K) resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.

It’s big and sharp, then, but it also gets nice and bright, with a stated peak of 2,150 nits. That relates to HDR content, of course, and Nord 4 supports the HDR10+ standard. In more general terms, with auto-brightness turned off, I measured a top brightness of about 485 nits. That’s not bad, topping the Galaxy A55 5G but falling well short of the Pixel 8a.

It seems to be well calibrated too, to the point where the default Vivid colour doesn’t come across as totally obnoxious. It’s still very punchy though, and the more muted Natural and Cinematic modes offer a more ideal presentation of everyday content.

The Nord 4’s display bezels are impressively thin on three of the four sides, certainly in comparison to the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G and the Pixel 8a. It doesn’t reach Motorola Edge 50 Fusion levels, but then that phone’s curved edges pose their own issues.

Performance

• Speedy, modern Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3 chip
• 12GB or 16GB of RAM
• Generous 256GB or 512GB of storage

OnePlus has equipped the Nord 4 with its latest mid-range chip, the Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3, along with either 12 or 16GB of RAM (here in the UK at least).

The company was the first to commit to using the Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3 in the China-only OnePlus Ace 3V when both launched back in March, so it clearly knows its way around this chip.

It results in a phone that feels fast and fluid, as all mainline OnePlus Nord devices have tended to do. The sensation that this is a thoroughly modern and capable chip is backed up by the benchmarks, which trounce the Galaxy A55 5G and are broadly comparable to the Pixel 8a.

That latter phone runs on the same chip as its flagship big brother, the Pixel 8 Pro, so this is genuinely impressive stuff.

It’s also worth pointing out that the OnePlus Nord 4 is packing that 1.5K display, so it’s having to push around more pixels than most of its rivals. Despite this, it still performs well with its ‘on-screen’ GPU benchmarks.

Storage capacities in the UK are a more-than-enough 256GB (with 12GB of RAM) or 512GB (with 16GB of RAM), which is a solid allotment all round. The larger spec comes in all three colours, and will cost you £479.

Camera

• 50MP f/1.8 Lytia LYT-600 main camera
• No dedicated zoom camera, but there’s an 8MP ultrawide and a solid selfie cam
• Competent, if not class-leading shots

The OnePlus Nord 4 goes with a 50MP f/1.8 Lytia LYT-600 image sensor for its main camera. This is a notably smaller but more modern sensor than that of the Nord 3.

It’s also the exact same main sensor that you’ll find in the OnePlus Nord CE 4 Lite 5G, which is a phone that sells for £130 less. That’s a good look for the CE 4 Lite, but not so good for the OnePlus Nord 4.

None of that will matter if it can turn out excellent shots of course, and in my testing, the results were pretty decent. It’s not going to be challenging the Pixel 8a for the mid-range camera title, but it puts in a creditable performance nonetheless.

It notably doesn’t punch colours up like many other phones – including many previous OnePlus phones. It generally handled challenging HDR scenarios adequately, balancing light and shadow nicely.

However, one or two snaps on a sunny day edged towards feeling a little washed out, while another on a cloudy day underexposed the subject. Meanwhile, the main camera struggled with shots of people indoors positioned near to bright natural light sources, with the light streaming in either rendering the subjects pale or (where captured) blowing out entirely. We’re definitely not in flagship territory here.

Conversely, indoor food shots looked particularly sumptuous. It does a reasonable job with 2x hybrid zoom shots too. Detail definitely drops off, but colours look nice and natural, and are obviously a match for the 1x mode.

Night mode produces solid shots, which get the brightness and balance right, even as it renders details a little soft.

There is a dedicated 8MP ultra-wide camera which, if anything, punches up its colours quite a bit more than the main sensor. Blue skies look way bluer with this sensor. These ultra-wide shots have a more processed look in general, alongside the obvious drop in detail level, but it doesn’t do a bad job overall.

The 16MP front camera did a pretty good job capturing skin tones and bright colours, rendering reasonably natural shots, though it’s not too hot on rendering sharp subjects.

This being 2024, you also get a couple of familiar AI shooting functions. AI Best Face (fix those group shot blinkers) won’t be available until later this year, but the usual lasso-to-delete-background-element feature and the ability to auto-detect and remove people with a tap are in there already.

Software

• Fast and fluid OxygenOS on Android 14
• Four guaranteed OS updates, six years of security patches

The Nord 4 runs on Android 14, with a custom UI known as OxygenOS 14.1. This isn’t the clean and stylish affair it used to be, having essentially become a variant of Oppo’s functional but rather charmless ColorOS years ago, and the overall experience is similar to what we saw recently on the Oppo Reno 12 Pro.

It’s very fast and fluid though, with bags of customisation potential and nothing in the way of lag or wallow. OnePlus also joins the AI rush with features like AI Summary, which generates simple round-ups of long articles. AI Audio Summary does a similar thing for recorded lectures and meetings.

Bloatware is an issue, but then it is with most non-Google Android phones. You can opt out of the likes of Microsoft 365, Block Blast, and Weather 24 at set-up, but there are still three rubbish games and a handful of third-party apps that you don’t have any say over.

As for home-brewed efforts, Zen Space is notable for allowing you to block out distractions when you really need to knuckle down.

OnePlus is promising four major Android upgrades here, with six years of security updates. That’s pretty good going for a mid-ranger, and it goes a little beyond the Galaxy A55 5G with an extra year of security updates. It still can’t match the Pixel 8a’s seven-year promise, though.

Battery Life

• Huge 5500mAh battery for two-day stamina
• 100W wired charging support, but no charger in the box
• No wireless charging

OnePlus has given the Nord 4 a huge 5500mAh battery, much like the OnePlus 12R before it. That makes for phenomenal stamina.

Using the Nord 4 as my regular phone, I was able to get through a 16-hour day of moderate usage – about four hours of screen on time – and was still left with about 65%. It’s genuinely possible to get two days out of this thing, or a full day of extremely intensive usage depending on your use case.

It also managed to get through an hour of Netflix streaming whilst losing only 4% of its charge. That’s an excellent result, with the Pixel 8a (to use one high-profile example) losing 7% in the same task. It only lost 3% after 30 minutes of light gaming.

Charging is way more rapid than pretty much any of the Nord 4’s rivals, though you’ll need to supply the OnePlus SUPERVOOC 100W charger yourself. Fortunately I still had the OnePlus 12R’s to hand, and I recorded a rapid 0 to 100% time of exactly 30 minutes.

There’s no wireless charging provision, alas, though that’s still not a normal feature at this price. You’ll get it with the Pixel 8a and Pixel 7a, and that’s about it.

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