OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: The budget 5G phone to get

Our Verdict

The OnePlus Nord N10 5G is a low-price fashion to go 5G connectivity besides as other premium features like a fast refresh display. Turn to the Pixel 4a 5G if you want the all-time cameras, just the OnePlus Nord N10 beats a lot of rivals on price.

For

90Hz display
Long battery life
5G device for less than $300
Solid functioning for a midrange device

Against

Monochrome and macro lenses don't impress
And so-so blueprint
Dim display
Only one guaranteed Android update

Tom's Guide Verdict

The OnePlus Nord N10 5G is a low-cost mode to get 5G connectivity as well as other premium features like a fast refresh display. Plough to the Pixel 4a 5G if you want the best cameras, merely the OnePlus Nord N10 beats a lot of rivals on price.

Pros

+
90Hz display
+
Long battery life
+
5G device for less than $300
+
Solid operation for a midrange device

Cons

-
Monochrome and macro lenses don't impress
-
So-so design
-
Dim display
-
Only 1 guaranteed Android update

The OnePlus Nord N10 5G is a good telephone for a proficient price. It'south just a pity that it struggles to stand out among some very well rounded competitors.

Normally, the release of a low-cost 5G phone like the OnePlus Nord N10 5G would be greeted with a lot of anticipation, particularly from the telephone maker'south dedicated fans. But this latest upkeep device has a hard act to follow, with the OnePlus Nord having made its debut in 2020 to enthusiastic reviews — and envious stares from the parts of the world where it wasn't launched.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G specs

Starting cost: $299/£329
Screen size: 6.49-inches (2400 x 1080; 90Hz refresh charge per unit)
CPU: Snapdragon 690
RAM: 6GB
Storage: 128GB
Rear cameras: 64MP main (f/ane.8); 8MP ultrawide (f/two.25); macro lens; monochrome lens
Front camera: 16MP (f/ii.05)
Battery size: four,300 mAh
Battery life (Hrs:Mins): 11:48
Size: 6.4 x 2.9 10 0.35 inches
Weight: 6.seven ounces

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The original Nord, and the OnePlus Nord two that followed information technology, have information technology all — a solid design, meliorate-than-expected specs like a fast-refresh display and 5G connectivity and a depression starting cost that you wouldn't wait to be attached to such a capable device. But the OnePlus Nord and Nord ii accept been limited to Europe and Bharat, leaving United states of america customers out in the cold.

The OnePlus Nord N10 5G changes that. Like the original Nord, the N10 5G marks OnePlus' return to its roots equally a low-price telephone maker, but this time, the trade-off is more pronounced. The processor inside the OnePlus Nord N10 5G isn't as powerful every bit the first OnePlus Nord, it uses dissimilar cameras, and at that place's only one storage option this fourth dimension around.

Exercise these concessions make a difference? Can this phone compete with the Google Pixel a-series or the iPhone SE? In our OnePlus Nord N10 5G review, we find a phone that may non reach the heights of the original OnePlus Nord but that still delivers a lot of value for a shockingly low price.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Toll and availability

The OnePlus Nord N10 5G has been available in the Uk since Nov. 14, where information technology debuted for £329 in a Midnight Ice Selection that features 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. It landed in North America on January. fifteen, where it costs $299.

That's a very low price for a 5G-capable telephone, considering that many of the all-time 5G phones approach $i,000. Up until the Nord N10 5G's arrival, the cheapest 5G device nosotros've seen has been the TCL 10 5G UW, a Verizon-exclusive that costs $399 — or $100 more than the N10 5G.

You can purchase the OnePlus Nord N10 5G from OnePlus itself or from Amazon, Best Buy and B&H. Significantly, T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile will offering the OnePlus Nord N10 5G (as well equally a cheaper phone, the $179 OnePlus Nord N100, which lacks 5G). If you want to buy the N10 5G in installments, you'll pay $12.50 a calendar month over 24 months at T-Mobile.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Design

The design of the OnePlus Nord N10 5G is the first hint that you're shopping in the bargain department for your next phone. It's non that the N10 is ugly, simply it doesn't expect very premium, and its plastic feel won't fool anyone into thinking you're carrying effectually a flagship handset.

That said, the Nord N10 5G follows the blueprint cues of recent OnePlus releases — a full-screen brandish on the front with a rectangular photographic camera assortment positioned in the upper left corner on the back of the phone. The backside of the OnePlus Nord N10 5G also includes a fingerprint sensor housed just above the OnePlus logo, while you'll find a headphone jack on the bottom of the device next to the USB-C charging port.

At 6.4 10 ii.nine ten 0.35 inches (163 x 74.vii x 8.95 mm), the OnePlus Nord N10 5G is a trivial flake taller, wider and thicker than the OnePlus Nord. It's also a quarter of an ounce heavier at six.seven ounces (190 grams).

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Display

OnePlus has fitted the Nord N10 5G with a half dozen.49-inch LCD display that runs interrupted from top to bottom with only a camera cutout in the upper left corner to interrupt your view. In that location's a noticeable bezel on the bottom of the screen, but otherwise, the front of the phone is all screen.

Ane area where the OnePlus Nord N10 5G stands out from the competition is its refresh rate. Like the original Nord, this new model refreshes at 90Hz. That'southward a feature Google reserves for the Pixel v, so scrolling is much smoother on the OnePlus phones than it is on the Pixel 4a 5G.

The lack of an OLED brandish makes for some less vivid colors when you're watching videos on the Nord N10 5G. Watching the No Time to Dice trailer via YouTube, Daniel Craig'southward James Bond never really stood out from the shadows, making the darker scenes a picayune bit more murky.

At least the Nord N10 5G handles colour well, as information technology managed to capture 124.eight% of the sRGB color spectrum. That's near what the OLED panel on the Pixel 4a 5G reproduced (128.3%) and it'south ahead of the 111.2% and 105.i% turned in by the iPhone SE and TCL 10 5G UW, respectively, which both have LCD screens. The OnePlus N10 5G falls betwixt those phones when information technology comes to accurately rendering colors with a Delta-Eastward rating of 0.22. The iPhone SE was tops at 0.ii while the TCL ten 5G and Pixel 4a 5G trailed at 0.28 and 0.3, respectively. (Numbers closer to zero are better.)

I institute the Nord N10 5G's screen a little hard to encounter when I was outside, and the telephone's maximum effulgence of 405.seven nits is probable to blame. That'due south well behind the Pixel 4a 5G (638 nits), iPhone SE (653 nits) and OnePlus Nord (700 nits). Only TCL'due south telephone is dimmer at 385 nits.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Cameras

Cheap equally the OnePlus Nord N10 5G may be, you still get a four-camera assortment on the back of the phone. Unfortunately, one of those lenses isn't a telephoto 1. Instead, OnePlus gives you a 64MP main camera with an 8MP ultrawide angle lens. Defended macro and monochrome lenses circular out the optics.

I the camera front, OnePlus phones have the reputation of offering good but not bully imaging — decent enough for what you're paying, simply not annihilation that challenges the best photographic camera phones on the market. To run across if that holds up with the Nord N10 5G, I tried out OnePlus' latest handset alongside a Pixel 4a 5G, which produces some of the best photos I've seen in a sub-$500 telephone. OnePlus holds its ain in many cases, but it still can't quite catch the top photographic camera phones.

Accept this photo of a persimmon tree. The OnePlus Nord N10 5G washes out some of the fall colors; y'all tin can see just how dramatically when y'all contrast information technology with the Pixel'southward shot. The reddening leaves aren't as dramatic equally they are in the Pixel 4a 5G photograph, and even the orangish skin of the persimmons looks muted and dull in OnePlus' photo.

The same thing happens when nosotros move indoors and take a picture of some baked sole fresh out of the oven. The fish looks pretty white in the OnePlus Nord N10's photo, missing the light brownish sear that the Pixel manages to capture. The green onions I've added for garnish are pretty washed out in the Nord'due south photo, and the capers dotting the fish on the tray in the groundwork lack sharpness and definition. I know which plate I find more appetizing, and it's not the OnePlus rendition.

I was impressed by the ultra wideangle lens on the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, though, when I tested it by photographing a local church building with ii distinctive towers. Using the main camera, the OnePlus N10 5G produced a shot that looks every bit equally adept every bit what the Pixel 4a comes upwardly with. The sky is a perfect shade of bluish, and if you lot zoom in on the tree leaves, you'll find that the OnePlus camera does a better task of keeping them in focus. Text on both the traffic signs and the church marquees is perfectly legible in both shots.

Pulling out to a wider angle with both cameras, I prefer the OnePlus Nord N10's endeavour. The darker shades of blue in the sky closest to the clouds draws my attention to where it should exist in the photo — at the clouds radiating behind the church building'due south twin towers. That said, the fish-middle effect at the border of the photo is less noticeable in the Pixel 4a 5G's rendition.U

When information technology came time to test the nighttime mode, the OnePlus Nord N10 5G simply doesn't measure up to what Google brings to its Pixel phones. My daughter'due south pink blimp animal is visible in this low-light shot captured past the OnePlus camera, just it's hard to make out the other stuffies that are clearly visible in the Pixel 4a 5G photograph. What'southward more than, yous tin can also see the basketball to the right of the stuffed animals in the Pixel's shot. That ball fades into the blackness of the OnePlus night mode photo.

Similarly, it's no contest when it comes to the portrait fashion on either photographic camera, starting with the different approaches OnePlus and Google take to framing their shot. The OnePlus Nord N10 5G shows a lot of the background, adding a minimal mistiness that helps my daughter to stand out but doesn't really add together anything artistic to the mix. The photographic camera's software does a proficient job recognizing where she ends and the background begins, but it also keeps her face rather pale and smoothen, then that you can't actually see her freckles.

That'southward not an issue on the Pixel 4a 5G portrait, which cuts in closer and bathes my daughter in warmer colors. That non just highlights the redness of her pilus but the details of her face.

Possibly the OnePlus Nord N10 5G just has a trouble with skin tones because the 16-megapixel front camera struggles with sunlight and shadow in this self-portrait. The entire left side of my face is lost in shadow, a problem that the Pixel 4a 5G didn't suffer fifty-fifty though information technology had to fence with similar lighting. The glare on the correct side of my face in the OnePlus shot is also pretty harsh when compared confronting the Pixel 4a 5G's selfie. Google'due south software gets overly aggressive with face smoothing in its photos, but here it pays off with a better counterbalanced shot.

Equally for the other cameras on the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, I confess to remaining skeptical of what dedicated macro lenses bring to the table, and this up-close shot of some difficult-boiled eggs flaked with pepper show why. There's zero particularly wrong with the OnePlus shot. It makes the pepper flakes stand up out and you lot can see the creaminess of the yolk (just the way I like my eggs). But you tin also see those same details I shot with the Pixel 4a 5G, which doesn't have a macro lens.

Instead, I got Google's telephone equally close to the eggs equally possible before an on-screen warning flashed up that I needed to back up if I wanted something in focus. I don't remember the end result is all that different, which makes me wonder why in that location'south a macro lens other than to pump up the camera count.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G monochrome — (Image credit: Tom's Guide)

The monochrome photos taken by the Nord N10 5G are certainly decent — the details of this Victorian house still stand out fifty-fifty in black and white — merely I can't imagine making this camera a regular part of my shooting routine.

Plenty of photography buffs will tell you that a dedicated lens will produce better shots than a unproblematic filter, and they're certainly, right, especially when information technology comes to accurately reflecting things like shadows. Just having a dedicated monochrome lens seems like adding a photographic camera just so yous can say that you accept Ten number of lenses. As Google has proven time and once more with its Pixel phones, less is often more, particularly when you lot can nail the software.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Operation

Ane of the most middle-communicable changes between the OnePlus Nord and OnePlus Nord N10 5G is the footstep down from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G to the Snapdragon 690, one of the first chipsets from Qualcomm's 6 series to characteristic 5G connectivity. Information technology'due south also a piece of silicon aimed more squarely at phones in the lower midrange of the marketplace.

When it comes to both benchmarks and real-world employ, though, the modify in processors doesn't make that much of a difference. On Geekbench 5, which measures general operation, the OnePlus Nord N10 5G posted a single-cadre score of 606 and a multicore result of 1,843. That really beat the 602 single-cadre number posted past the original Nord, though that phone's 1,984 multicore score would propose that the more expensive Nord is better suited for apps that accept advantage of multiple cores.

As y'all might wait, the iPhone SE, with its superior A13 Bionic flake, dusts the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, with single- and multicore scores of 1,337 and 3,226, respectively. But the N10 actually tops the Snapdragon 765G-powered Pixel 4a 5G, which posted scores of 598 and i,614 in Geekbench. The Nord N10 5G trails the 1,932 multicore scored posted by the TCL 10 5G UW and its Snapdragon 765 chipset.

It's a unlike story in graphics, where the OnePlus Nord N10 5G lags backside the competition. Using 3DMark's new Wild Life benchmark, nosotros saw a score of 809 (four.8 frames per second) for the N10 5G. That's behind the score of the Pixel 4a 5G (1,199 or 7FPS), which is not exactly a graphics powerhouse; TCL's 5G telephone posted a one,670 (10FPS) result The OnePlus Nord N10 5G also trailed similar phones when it came to 3DMark'southward Sling Shot Extreme criterion, too.

Ultimately, though, this doesn't interpret to noticeable performance lags when y'all employ the OnePlus Nord N10 5G. Aye, I've seen sharper graphics when running PUBG Mobile on other phones, peculiarly those with beefier graphics support. But the multiperson shooter game runs without any hiccups on the new OnePlus phone — certainly nix that would impact game play. I imagine that unless you're in the habit of running graphically-demanding games on your mobile device, the OnePlus Nord N10 5G will suit y'all merely fine.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: 5G

As noted above, the OnePlus Nord N10 5G offers 5G compatibility and at a cost that's much lower than other phones like the $499 Pixel 4a 5G and $399 TCL 10 5G UW.

But in that location'southward a caveat to the Nord N10'southward 5G support. The embedded X51 modem on the Snapdragon 690 chipset doesn't work with loftier-speed mmWave-based 5G networks. That means the OnePlus Nord N10 volition only connect to sub-6GHz 5G networks, which are only marginally faster than LTE at this time. That's likely to better as wireless carriers build out their 5G coverage, but if you opt for the latest OnePlus Nord, don't look speeds that reach i Gbps. For that, you'd demand a telephone like the TCL 10 5G that'southward built to work with Verizon's loftier-speed 5G towers.

OnePlus as well tells me that the N10 5G only works on LTE at AT&T and not with that carrier's 5G network, so in essence, you should only consider the OnePlus Nord N10 5G if you're planning on getting wireless service from T-Mobile or a discount carrier that uses T-Mobile'south towers.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Bombardment life and charging

OnePlus may have dialed dorsum the processor on the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, but it hasn't sacrificed battery life for the telephone. The latest Nord features a iv,300 mAh battery, which helped power it ane of the all-time results on our battery test that we've seen from a 5G phone.

In our bombardment test, we have a telephone surf the web over cellular — T-Mobile'southward 5G network in this case — with its screen set up to 150 nits of brightness until it'southward out of power. The OnePlus Nord N10 5G held out for xi hours and 48 minutes on that test. Among the 5G phones on our best phone battery life listing, merely the LG V60 ThinQ 5G, Motorola Edge, and Milky way S20 Plus lasted longer (and that latter telephone's consequence was with its 120Hz refresh charge per unit turned off). All those phones are far more expensive than what OnePlus charges for the Nord N10.

Every bit for phones in the Nord N10 5G's expected price range, the OnePlus device handily out-performed them. The iPhone SE lasted a piffling more than 9 hours on our battery exam, while the Pixel 4a 5G ran out of battery just past the 8 hour marking.

The OnePlus Nord N10 5G charges quickly, also, thanks to OnePlus' Warp Accuse 30T applied science. That's not equally fast as what OnePlus 8T owners experience, but it's still plenty speedy for a lower cost phone. Our N10 5G was dorsum up to 68% of its battery capacity afterward 30 minutes of charging, the same result we got when we tested the OnePlus Nord. The Pixel 4a 5G and iPhone SE just got to 46% and 29% charges, respectively.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Software and special features

Similar all OnePlus phones, the Nord N10 5G uses the visitor'south OxygenOS software which is built on top of Android. In the case of the Nord N10 5G, that's Android 10.5 — an interesting decision when the OnePlus 8T was amongst the first Android phones outside of Google's own devices to send with the newer Android eleven installed. That's the cost you lot pay for going with a cheaper model, I gauge, only it ways new features found in Android 11 aren't available here.

It gets worse — later this review was published, OnePlus confirmed to Android Central that Android 11 will be the only guaranteed update for the Nord N10, other than ii years of security updates. OnePlus says that upgrade program "aligns with manufacture standards for smartphones in more than affordable price ranges," but that'southward non something yous want to encounter phone makers emulate — especially when they've previously positioned themselves as a fan-focused company.

You also don't get an in-display sensor like you'd find on pricier OnePlus handsets, a trade-off I suspect bargain hunters won't find. Information technology helps that OnePlus placed its sensor in an piece of cake-to-accomplish area, and that the sensor proved pretty responsive in my testing.

OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Verdict

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started my OnePlus Nord N10 5G review, as some of the stripped-down specs from the OnePlus Nord made me worry that U.S. users would be missing out on the value that the original Nord had brought to other parts of the world. As it turned out, I needn't take fretted.

The merchandise-offs you make with the N10 5G may be slightly more pronounced than they are with the standard Nord, but this is yet a very capable telephone for what OnePlus is ultimately charging U.Due south. customers. If you've been intrigued by 5G but put off past the high price of 5G phones, the N10 5G may exist what pushes y'all to upgrade.

It'southward undeniable that the cameras are amend on Google'south Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5a models, and that the iPhone SE offers a more compact pattern along with the whole iOS feel. But the main and ultrawide angle cameras on the OnePlus Nord N10 aren't bad (fifty-fifty if the macro and monochrome lenses feel superfluous) and the gap in performance from other midrange Android devices isn't that substantial.

Far more than noticeable than what you surrender is what the Nord N10 5G delivers — a fast-refresh screen, long battery life, fast charging and 5G operation at a lower cost than you'd otherwise pay for such welcome capabilities.

Philip Michaels is a senior editor at Tom'southward Guide. He has strong opinions about Apple, the Oakland Athletics and old movies. Follow him at @PhilipMichaels.

Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/oneplus-nord-n10-5g-review

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