OnePlus Nord 3 review: luxury with compromises

The Nord series is OnePlus’ mid-range phone series, and the Nord 3 is the latest in the line.

Like the previous Nord numbered entries, this phone is not launching in the US, and surprisingly it’s not coming to the UK either, but it was launched in Europe where it has competition from Google Pixel 7a, Xiaomi 13 Lite, and Samsung Galaxy A54.

Not too long ago we tested Nord’s first third-gen phone, OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G, a long and confusing name for a not-so-affordable phone with too many compromises on features, performance and design. In the more simply named Nord 3, OnePlus is more right.

Luxurious construction

It has a sleek design with a premium feel, luxurious materials, and a shape that’s as stylish as it is practical. With a 6.74-inch screen, it’s anything but small, but thanks to the screen’s thin edges and flat sides of the phone’s aluminum frame, it’s not too wide to grip. It’s a slightly larger screen size than the Nord CE 3 Lite 5G, but a millimeter smaller in external dimensions.

At the front, there is no Gorilla Glass but Dragontrail Glass from a Corning competitor called AGC. It’s hard to tell if it’s exactly as durable, but it should offer good protection against a drop. The glass rounds out in a teardrop shape along the edges directly against the matte aluminum frame, and the back is also glass, in this case Gorilla Glass 5 with a curved design tow ards the edges. The Nord 3 is available in two styles, with a matte grey-black back or a glossy green finish.

OnePlus

Much like the OnePlus 11 flagship, I’m a bit disappointed that I couldn’t get the more attractive green color with the comfortable matte back, but if, like most people, you put a protective case on the phone, it doesn’t. doesn’t matter. The Nord 3 has a power button and volume control on the opposite sides of the mobile phone, and at the top of the right side is the OnePlus-branded slider that can quickly switch the phone to silent or do not disturb. It was missing from some previous OnePlus models, so it’s a welcome sight.

High average performance

Mediatek’s Dimensity 9000 chipset delivers performance roughly on par with last year’s best phones. It delivers metrics in line with Google’s Pixel 7 mobiles, and with 16GB of RAM in the top-end model, I felt almost no stutter or lag. Only when loading large apps, where it is a bit slower than the best of the latest high-end mobiles. Not too bad for a mid-range phone.

With relatively high graphics performance and good cooling, it’s a great phone for gaming. It runs most of the most demanding Android games at a smooth high frame rate on its 1080p display, and it manages to maintain the frame rate for a long time even at very high loads.

However, there is an upper limit and the cooling of the phone is to blame. A thorough stress test shows that it manages to maintain peak performance for 10-15 minutes, then it quickly loses around 30% of its computing power. This should suffice in most situations, except for long gaming sessions.

Matthias Inghe

Premium screen

A 120Hz frame rate and up to 1,000Hz on-screen touch sampling make for pleasingly fast response. The resolution is a bit odd at 1,240 x 2,772 pixels.

It’s not full on-screen LPTO technology, but it adjusts the frequency in five fixed steps between 40 and 120Hz. In automatic mode, it’s seemingly seamless. But that doesn’t seem to be very good at keeping the frequency low, as I get almost the same battery life as when I manually launch the phone in 120Hz screen mode.

The screen is an AMOLED with excellent colors and high peak brightness for sunny days. 1,450 nits is the quoted maximum brightness, and using the phone outdoors is never an issue. With HDR10+ support and the right certificate for HDR content on Netflix and Prime Video, you can have a great cinematic experience.

Built-in stereo speakers deliver detailed sound, especially in the midrange. Unfortunately, it lacks a bit of bass power, so it can be a thin sound experience. Dolby Atmos is on and can’t be turned off unless you plug in headphones, and no matter which sound profile I choose, I never get any real fullness in the sound.

Matthias Inghe

Three cameras

On the back are two round camera pucks, which hold three cameras. A 50Mp IMX890 sensor with optical image stabilization in the upper, and a simpler 8Mp ultra-wide camera with fixed focus and 2Mp macro in the other. Next to each are white circles, but only one seems to be the LED flash, it’s the only one that activates when I’m taking pictures. What the other does is up to guesswork. Light sensor? Decoration? Who knows.

Photos in sunlight are crisp and detailed, and with fast focus and AI assistance, it’s easy to take the phone out of your pocket, point, click, and get a good reliable image. I get natural colors in all my test shots, but the dynamics are a bit unreliable. If the camera has large dark areas in the shadows, it wants to highlight them for detail, which means the bright areas are overexposed.

For the most part, however, it looks good, and the ultra-wide and selfie camera matches the main camera in terms of colors and light levels. The small macro camera has paler color saturation and constant noise in the image. In pro mode you can control the exposure in detail and you can choose to shoot in RAW format.

Matthias Inghe

Night photography with a daytime feel

OnePlus is keen to point out how good the Nord 3 is at night photography, with its large sensor, optical image stabilization and its own multi-exposure technology called Turbo RAW. So I went around the neighborhood and tried a few shots. The results show that OnePlus isn’t lying: you can get plenty of detail and nuance with a crisp, nearly noise-free image.

There is only one problem: it is Also bright. Instead of giving me great colors, it pushes the light compensation to the max, so it suddenly looks like I’m shooting in the early evening rather than the middle of the night. The best cameras I’ve seen manage to capture detail and color while maintaining a realistic nighttime feel to the image. It’s possible to change this in the app’s manual pro mode, but it’s not easy.

As a video camera, the Nord 3 comes in handy. You get a stable image with a combination of optical and digital stabilization, and you can shoot up to 4K and 60fps, with simple yet intuitive controls. In horizontal mode you even get a stereo microphone, which I think sounds convincing, and with good noise and wind noise filters. If you want to connect an external microphone via USB or Bluetooth, that’s fine, but unfortunately it’s not possible to switch to it in the app; you’ll have to dig into the system settings menu for that.

M3

System and battery

The interface is OnePlus’ usual OxygenOS, now at 13.1, with a few improvements over the 13.0 that comes with OnePlus 11, including an extended Zen mode you can activate to disconnect and relax.

It’s of course based on Android 13, and OnePlus promises three years of Android updates and four years of security updates. It’s not as good as the premium OnePlus 11, but it’s on par with what Google itself offers.

OxygenOS is, as always, sleek and well-tuned for a speedy experience, and it’s also said to aid in battery optimization to help maintain battery health and maximize charge cycles. This means it has only marginal capacity loss after up to 1,600 charge cycles. Says OnePlus. Of course, it’s impossible for me to test without having used the phone for so long that you can’t buy it anymore and you have to test the Nord 6 or the Nord 7 instead.

A 5000mAh battery powers the phone and is enough for a full day of active use. The phone isn’t hugely power efficient in certain situations where others shine, like video streaming, but you can still catch a season of your favorite show before the battery runs out. Brightness and audio volume affect battery life more than frame rate.

When it’s time to recharge, you get super fast charging with the included 80W Supervooc proprietary charger. It takes just over half an hour to charge a full battery, so it’s easy to do with your morning coffee.

Matthias Inghe

The first OnePlus Nord was a hit, and the Nord 2 was even better. Now, OnePlus has bet on its good qualities and above all offers a higher sense of luxury than before, but at a higher price.

The Nord 3 starts from $499 for 8GB + 128GB, rising to $549 for 16GB + 256GB, a big jump from the previous starting price of $399 for the Nord 2 and Nord 2T.

Features

Product Name: OnePlus Nord 3
Maker: One Plus
Circuitry: Mediatek Dimension 9000
Processor: Cortex-X2 3.05GHz, 3x Cortex-A710 2.85GHz, 4x Cortex-A510 1.8GHz
Chart: Mali-G710 MC10, 848MHz
Memory: 8/16 GB
Storage: 128/256 GB
Model tested: 16/256 GB
Display: 6.74-inch AMOLED, 1240 x 2772 pixels, 120Hz
Cameras: 50Mp + 8MP ultra wide, 2Mp macro, 16Mp front
Connections: USB 3 Type-C
Communication: 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, GPS, Galileo, NFC
Operating system: Android 13 with OxygenOS 13.1
Other: Dual SIM, in-screen fingerprint scanner, alert slider, splash resistant (IP54)
Battery: 5000mAh, 16h40 of video online (Wi-Fi, high brightness, 60Hz), approximately 15h of mixed use (4G, low brightness, 120Hz), approximately 36h of calls
Battery charging: 80W USB-C (SuperVooc), 30W USB charger included.
Size: 16.2 x 7.5 x 0.82cm
lester: 194g

Performance

Antutu Benchmark 10: 850,773 points*
Geek Bench 6: 3,297 points
Geekbench 6 single-core: 1,093 stitches
Calculation Geekbench 6: 6,040 dots
3dmark Wild Life Unlimited :8,663 points
3dmark Extreme Wildlife :2,302 dots
Storage read: 1687.7 MB/s
Storage Write: 1628.3 MB/s

* New version of Antutu. Whether the score is comparable to measurements made with Antutu 9 is unconfirmed.