OnePlus Nord N10 5G review: Retro surprises and an affordable price

With the Nord N10 5G and N100, OnePlus expanded its more low-cost Nord family of phones after launching its first OnePlus Nord in 2020. available in Europe and North America, the presently costs $ 300. This is cheaper than the UK-only OnePlus Nord ( which you can presently find ) along with the company ‘s 2020 flagship ( $ 449 ) and 2021 ‘s flagship ( $ 729 ). Read more: hera ‘s our review of the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 9 phones. The Nord N10 5G does cut a few corners. For exemplify, it has an LCD display alternatively of OLED, lacks an in-screen fingerprint detector, is powered by a slower central processing unit than any 2020 OnePlus call, is n’t IP rated for water resistance and it runs the older Android 10 OS. But it distillery has some premium features such as 5G, a 90Hz display and a full-bodied 4,300-mAh battery, a well as a few ex post facto surprises that early OnePlus phones do n’t have, like expandable memory and a earphone jack.

8.3

OnePlus Nord N10 5G

Like

• 90Hz display
• Headphone jack
• 5G-enabled
• low-cost price

Don’t Like

• Macro and low-light photography is unimpressive

OnePlus ‘s price makes the Nord N10 5G one of the more low-cost 5G phones, particularly now. For comparison, Samsung ‘s Galaxy A32 5G launched earlier in 2021 with a $ 280 price tag, and the Motorola One 5G is. Though I do think the Pixel 4A 5G and One 5G are worth the excess bit of money — the $ 500 Pixel, for exemplify, will get the latest software subscribe from Google, has an excellent television camera and a durable battery life ) — the N10 5G is a top choice if you ‘re a fan of OnePlus and want 5G at an low-cost price .

N10 5G’s familiar design touches

The N10 5G has a dark aristocratic, slick design that looks polished and slick. From afar it does n’t look like a “ budget ” telephone. But when I first picked it up, I could tell it was n’t as high-end. It ‘s heavier and slurred, and its bezels, specially the bed chin bezel, is wider than all of the phones OnePlus released last year. It besides does n’t have the commodious toggle switch for silence/vibrate that OnePlus phones are known for. Nonetheless, it ‘s still a relatively attractive device, and its round edges on the side are comfortable to hold. The N10 5G besides has an LCD display, whereas OnePlus phones normally have AMOLED screens. When viewed side-by-side with the Nord, the AMOLED screen is a bite bright and vibrant, with more contrast. I besides noticed that when viewing the N10 5G from respective angles, the color shift was more obtrusive. But these details are only discernible following to another telephone. By itself, there is no real consequence with the N10 5G ‘s screen, and watching videos and photos looked sharp and clear. Its 90Hz freshen rate makes scrolling through feeds and apps spirit alert and fluent. last, unlike many of OnePlus ‘ new phones, the N10 5G has two things that are companion but have been missing from many bounty devices : a earphone jack and a visible fingerprint detector on the back of the earphone that works cursorily . James Martin/CNET

N10 5G’s has four rear cameras, but only needs two

similar to many OnePlus phones, the N10 5G has four rear cameras, and exchangeable to those phones, it actually entirely needs two. The standard and ultra-wide cameras are big and are the ones I used the most, but the black and white television camera is only utilitarian when you want to take black and ashen photos, which I hardly do. And the 2-megapixel macro television camera for closeup shots takes photos that look like, well, they were taken with a 2-megapixel camera. While it did allow me to focus in on an object and get super close to it, pictures ultimately looked washed out and dirty. But again, the standard and ultrawide cameras are quite excellent. Photos were astute with rich line, and the television camera ‘s HDR effect is vibrant. The standard camera defaults to 16-megapixel, but you can shoot at the entire 64-megapixel resolution. The television camera ‘s 10x digital zoom is besides decent, and was able to capture details of faraway objects despite being a tad blurrier. The N10 5G ‘s low-light mode, Nightscape, was n’t identical impressive. While taking a photograph of a black bookshelf in near darkness, I was able to see a few more details and book titles, but the picture remained relatively dark. When I compared the like scenery on the OnePlus Nord, the One Plus 8T and the Pixel 5 ‘s Night Mode, all three phones brightened up the picture a lot more . blow up persona Lynn La/CNET blow up image Lynn La/CNET enlarge trope Lynn La/CNET

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N10 5G’s battery and performance

The earphone is equipped with a Snapdragon 690 processor. Though on newspaper that ‘s not as fast or angstrom powerful as the OnePlus Nord, Motorola One 5G and the Pixel 4A 5G ‘s Snapdragon 765 chipset, the N10 5G tracked closely with the phones when it came to benchmarks. I besides did n’t notice any amphetamine issues or laggy behavior during my time with the telephone .

Geekbench v.5.0 single-core

OnePlus Nord N10 5G

604
Google Pixel 4A 5G

573
Motorola One 5G

587
OnePlus Nord

618

Note:

Longer bars indicate better performance

The N10 5G has a beefy 4,300-mAh barrage, which is the like capacity as the more expensive OnePlus 8. ( The OnePlus 9 has a slenderly beefier 4,500-mAh barrage. ) Anecdotally, the phone can easily final a day or two without a bang with mild use. At the end of one particular night, the battery was merely at 70 % after I took the call out during the day to take a bunch together of photos and browse the internet. battery tests for continuous video playback on Airplane mode averaged 16 hours and 27 minutes. For comparison, the OnePlus 8 lasted about 19 hours .

N10 5G’s software and interface

When OnePlus launched its 8T last October, it besides updated the company ‘s OxygenOS interface, refreshing menus and notifications so that they looked more streamline, modern and clean. I was a fan of it, so it was disappointing not to see it on the N10 5G. This is likely because the phone runs the previous version of Android, Android 10, but even if the N10 5G does n’t run android 11 out of the box, it ‘s still potential for OnePlus to tweak some parts of the N10 5G ‘s interface with the most late OxygenOS expression. But the N10 5G is expected to receive one OS update ( from Android 10 to Android 11 ) and a total of two years of security updates according to OnePlus.

The N10 5G does still have utilitarian software features, including a native screen recorder, Dark Mode and ZenMode, which is OnePlus ‘ digital wellbeing app that limits earphone functionality when you want to focus .

OnePlus Nord N10 5G specification comparison