OnePlus Nord CE 2 review: Good specs, headphone jack, bargain price

OnePlus has unleashed the latest device in its ‘Nord’ line-up and the result is a solid Android phone at seriously decent price.

The ‘CE’ in the name stands for ‘Core Edition’ and the idea is the Chinese company has packed in the core essentials you’t want in a phone with none of the bells and whistles.

This means you get a decent screen, solid performance, a good battery and servicable camera for a respectable £299.

When Samsung’s new phones are coming out with price tags well over the £1,000 mark – you can start to see the appeal.

The OnePlus Nord CE 2 has the necessary vital statistics your average phone user would care for: A 6.43-inch 1080p OLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate, a 4,500mAh battery with a 65W fast charger in the box and support for 5G.

It’s also got a proper, 3.5mm headphone jack right there on the bottom next to the USB-C charging port.

What it doesn’t have is an awesome camera – for that you’ll need to upgrade to the Hasselblad-toting OnePlus 9 Pro. Nor does it have loads of power under the hood.

OnePlus has opted for a MediaTek Dimensity 900 processor, rather than opt for a Qualcomm Snapdragon. It’s paired up with 8GB of RAM which makes it plenty good enough for the nuts and bolts of smartphone usage. By that, I mean you can be streaming music while playing Candy Crush or Wordle and stop to take the occasional picture all without troubling the phone.

Reams of multitasking and graphically-intensive games may start to trouble the Nord CE 2 but the 90Hz screen – at least in my usage – was pretty much equal to the task. And the colour reproduction on the Gorilla Glass 5 screen makes watching YouTube or Netflix a pleasant experience.

There’s a cutout selfie camera in the top left corner that you very quickly become used to.

You can see some of the budget nature in the phone’s construction: the back and frame are plastic rather than metal and there’s no official IP rating for water or dust resistance.

Similarly, there’s only a single downward-facing mono speaker – so for best audio results you’ll want a pair of headphones or a decent Bluetooth speaker.

It’s also a shame that OnePlus hasn’t included its customary mute slider on the side of the phone to quickly silence notifications.

The phone packs 128GB of built-in storage but you can add more with a microSD card.

As mentioned before, if there’s a main compromise to be made here, it’s with the camera.

The Nord CE 2 has a three-lens camera system on the back consisting of a main 64-megapixel sensor, an 8-megapixel ultrawide option, and a 2-megapixel macro. Meanwhile, there’s a 16-megapixel front-facing camera for selfies. All the cameras perform respectively enough in daylight, but I found they suffered a bit in low-light conditions.

Finally, the Nord CE 2 really comes into its own in the battery department. The 4,500mAh battery lasted me all day with pretty reasonable usage. That’s from about 6am through to 11 at night with no need for a charge-up.

But, should you hammer the phone even harder, you get fast charging in the box courtesy of the 65W bundled charging brick. In practice, it’ll juice up the phone by 20 per cent in just five minutes. If you want to go all the way from empty to full, you only need to be connected for about 40 minutes. Which is pretty remarkable.

Of course, being a budget device, there’s no wireless charging on offer but when the wired connection is this capable it doesn’t really matter.

The OnePlus Nord CE 2 ships with Android 11 – which is a touch out of date now there’s Android 12 – but its branded as OnePlus’ OxygenOS. It’s not stock Android and there are a few OnePlus apps that come pre-loaded but it’s minimal enough not to annoy your average user. The company has promised two years of Android updates, which will likely take you through to Android 13.

Is the OnePlus Nord CE 2 a good buy? Absoloutely – if all you need is literally an Android phone that does the basics well for a cheap price.

Hardcore phone geeks will want a lot more from their handsets but this would be a sensible option for an elderly relative or a child. Because, at just under £300, the OnePlus Nord CE 2 feels like an exceptionally good deal and reminiscant of the early days of OnePlus.

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