OnePlus is showing off the new OnePlus Nord N300 5G budget smartphone. It’s a $228 phone that you can get from T-Mobile starting November 3rd. Highlights include a surprisingly beautiful design for this price point, 33W charging, and a 90Hz display.
First: features. The SoC is a MediaTek Dimensity 810. This means a 6nm chip with two 2.4GHz Cortex A76 cores, six 2GHz Cortex A55 cores, and an ARM Mali-G57 MP2 GPU. There is 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of internal memory and a 5000 mAh battery. The display is a 6.56-inch 1612×720 90Hz “HD+”display. A 90Hz display on such a cheap phone sounds impressive, but this phone’s predecessor, the Nord N200, couldn’t reliably render 90fps to a 1080p display, making it a bit of a waste of time. Downgrading to 720p (and possibly a slightly faster SoC) means OnePlus could actually hit 90fps this year, but it’s not clear if the drop in resolution will be worth it.
Budget smartphones are usually made as simple and forgettable as possible, but the N300 looks surprisingly good. The entire phone is square like the iPhone 4, with straight sides and bevelled edges. The camera block is beautiful too, with more beveled edges, square sides, and a two-tone color scheme. That’s a lot more design work than you usually get at this price point. We’re still not big fans of the waterdrop front camera, but this is a budget phone.
Elsewhere in the world, this phone is called the Oppo A77 5G.