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- Gorgeous 144Hz display
- The best battery life we’ve ever recorded
- Exceptional performance
- More generic design
- No rear camera upgrades
- Rivals have better software support
The OnePlus Nord 5 is something of a course correction for the Chinese brand. It took a bold swing with its previous mid-range phone, cladding the OnePlus Nord 4 in a stylish and robust unibody metal design. That clearly didn’t pay off in the way that OnePlus had hoped, as it has reverted to a more conservative look for the Nord 5.
Don’t let the modest design fool you; this is far from a downgrade. From an epic performance increase to a brighter, smoother display, the Nord 5 offers several substantial improvements over its predecessor. Moreover, with the best battery life we’ve recorded on a phone thus far, it has the mettle to stand out in the phone market at large.
It feels mildly baffling that there’s still no wireless charging for a phone of this price, and I’d have liked to see some upgrades to the rear cameras – a telephoto camera would have been very welcome. Regardless, for sheer power and stamina, there are few phones in this price range that are better than the OnePlus Nord 5.
OnePlus Nord 5 review: What you need to know
The OnePlus Nord 5 doesn’t just look rather different from its predecessor; it also packs in several key hardware upgrades. Heading the list is the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, paired with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of onboard storage.
The display is a larger 6.83in AMOLED panel (compared to the Nord 4’s 6.74in screen) with a slightly sharper 2,800 x 1,272 resolution and a peak refresh rate of 144Hz. There’s also a layer of Gorilla Glass 7i sitting over the top for scratch protection.
At the top of the display is a new 50-megapixel selfie camera – a much higher resolution than the Nord 4’s 16-megapixel unit – but over on the rear, we’ve once again got a 50-megapixel main camera coupled with an 8-megapixel ultrawide shooter.
The only thing that feels like a downgrade over the Nord 4 is the battery, which has shrunk from 5,500mAh to 5,200mAh. Charging has also dipped slightly, from 100W to 80W wired, and wireless charging is once again not supported.
Price and competition
The OnePlus Nord 4 starts at £399 for the 256GB model, with the 512GB version set at £499. That’s £30 cheaper than the Nord 4 on both counts, keeping the Nord 5 fiercely competitive with the best mid-range phones around.
Chief among these is the Google Pixel 9a, our current favourite in this price range. The 128GB model is currently priced at £499, with the 256GB at £599. Key benefits here are the seven years of software support, first dibs on new Android features and Google’s excellent camera capabilities.
We’ve also got the Samsung Galaxy A56 around this price (£424) as well as the Honor 400 (£348) and the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro (£449). The latter is a particularly noteworthy threat as it includes a 3x telephoto camera, which none of the other options here have.
For all the strengths of these rivals, however, OnePlus may have shot itself in the foot by launching the Nord CE 5 at the same time. This model is slower and has an inferior selfie camera, but it has a much cheaper starting price of just £299.
Design and key features
After taking quite a big swing with last year’s Nord 4, OnePlus has quietly returned to a more conventional mid-range phone aesthetic. I wasn’t completely sold on the all-metal build, but it was at least unique – this feels more derivative, with an Apple-esque profile and a traffic-light camera module that feels directly ripped from the Galaxy A56.
The glass rear comes in three styles: Marbled Sands is beige and slightly grainy, emulating the look of a beach, the Dry Ice style I received for review is a cool blue that shimmers in the light, and Phantom Grey is our standard dark and matte design – albeit charcoal grey, rather than black.
Despite offloading the excess metal, the Nord 5 is bigger and heavier than its predecessor. It measures 77 x 8.1 x 163mm (WDH), which is a little wider than the Nord 4, and weighs 211g, compared to the Nord 4’s 200g.
There’s an in-display fingerprint sensor and face unlocking via the selfie camera, while around the edges, we’ve got the usual setup, with power and volume controls on the right edge and the charging port on the bottom – but there are a couple of more unique features to discuss.
Firstly, there’s an IR blaster on the top edge, allowing you to use the phone as a remote control for your TV, which is an increasingly rare inclusion that I’m always grateful to see. Secondly, the traditional OnePlus Alert Slider has been replaced by a small “Plus Key”. You can still programme this new button to switch between loud, vibrate and silent modes if you miss the alert slider, or you can set it to other functions like turning the torch on and off, capturing a screenshot or using a few of the AI features.
The latter feels dangerously close to OnePlus sneaking in an AI button but, unlike the Nothing Phone (3), whose AI button is awkwardly placed and can’t be reprogrammed, OnePlus has kept it in the same top-left spot the alert slider always sat in and given users the freedom to use it how they want. I, for one, am psyched to have a better alternative for operating the torch than the hit-and-miss lockscreen button.
The AI features are a grab bag of the usual suspects like translation, Google’s Circle to Search and a few camera editing features, but there’s also the new Mind Space function. This allows you to save screenshots and notes into a dedicated space with a tap of the Plus Key, exactly like Nothing’s Essential Space that debuted with the Phone (3a) series earlier this year.
AI aside, the software is OnePlus’ latest OxygenOS 15 launcher, based on Android 15. This is a fairly well-refined experience at this point, aside from a few gaudy icons and too much bloatware upon boot. OnePlus is committing to four years of OS updates and six years of security patches for the Nord 5, which is reasonable enough, but rivals like the Google Pixel 9a and the Honor 400 Pro are still out ahead, with seven and six years of both, respectively.
Display
The 6.83in AMOLED display is as crisp as ever with that 2,800 x 1,272 resolution, and the 144Hz refresh rate is wonderfully smooth, though a lot of people won’t notice the difference between this and the 120Hz refresh rate most rivals offer.
Brightness was said to be improved here, and my testing confirmed that: on manual mode, I recorded a peak of 754cd/m2, which surpasses the Nord 4’s top brightness of 683cd/m2 – it was even better when displaying HDR content, hitting 848cd/m2. Best of all was adaptive brightness, which topped out at 904cd/m2 with a torch shining on the ambient light sensor.
I was particularly impressed with the colour accuracy of the Nord 4’s display, and its predecessor doesn’t disappoint in this area. There are four colour profiles, with the default Vivid profile and the Cinematic setting both targeting DCI-P3 colours and the Brilliant profile broadening the gamut, reproducing 100% of both the DCI-P3 and sRGB colour spaces. Natural was best for authentic representation, however, delivering an average Delta E colour variance score of 1.1, a fraction above our target of 1 or under.
Performance and battery life
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 isn’t the newest chipset around – we saw it used on several more expensive phones last year, including the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra and the Honor 200 Pro. However, don’t discount it for its age; this is very much still a relevant processor.
Not only does the 3.0GHz chipset deliver a massive boost over last year’s model in the Geekbench 6 tests – 63% faster in the single-core results and 25% in the multi-core – it also blows away every other phone in this price range. Even the mighty Google Pixel 9a can’t keep up with the Nord 5.
It’s a similar story over on the GFXBench GPU tests. The Nord 5 is neck-and-neck with the Pixel 9a in the onscreen tests but pulls ahead in the offscreen, broadly matching its predecessor’s framerates with a solid 104fps. In short, this is an excellent mid-range phone for gaming.
In the battery life department, the Nord 5 not only outlasted its predecessor in our standard stamina test but surpassed every other smartphone we’ve ever tested. It achieved a result of 35hrs 25mins – a result so high I did a double-take. But running the test two more times confirmed battery life in the same ballpark.
I was particularly surprised to see such numbers as last year’s Honor 200 Pro used the same processor, same battery size, a similar display size and resolution, yet fell around nine hours short of the Nord 5 in our test.
Where OnePlus has squeezed out this extra juice is anyone’s guess, but based on my time testing it, I’m happy to say that at the very least, the OnePlus Nord 5 will see you through a couple of days’ moderate use without any trouble.
OnePlus’ super-fast charging doesn’t always play ball with other brands’ chargers – case in point, I didn’t get the full 80W using my 125W Motorola charger, topping out at around 45W, instead. That was still decent, getting the phone from empty to 100% in under an hour, but if you want to take full advantage of nippier speeds, you’ll need a OnePlus charger.
Cameras
As mentioned up top, the rear cameras are identical to the lenses we saw on the Nord 4, and unsurprisingly, they perform around the same. The 50-megapixel main lens is still a decent shooter in good lighting, with bold colours and strong contrast plucking out the finer details.
There’s no telephoto to speak of, which is a real shame, but you do get a relatively decent 2x digital zoom with that main lens. Detail is retained well, and the exposure feels nice and even.
After dark, this camera continues to be competent, with natural colours and a solid level of detail. Light sources have a habit of overblooming if you shoot too close to them, but otherwise, this is a perfectly decent night camera.
Unsurprisingly, the 8-megapixel ultrawide camera is still rather mediocre on the detail front. The final image is heavily processed to try and compensate for the lacklustre resolution, but it looks far too artificial, with lots of unnatural smoothing and overblown contrast.
The 50-megapixel selfie shooter is touted as the sharpest front camera ever from OnePlus, and it certainly lived up to that title in my testing. Portrait shots are wonderfully detailed, with natural skin tones and a crisp outline around the focus point.
Both the selfie camera and the main rear lens can shoot video up to 4K/60fps, though the stabilisation only supports up to 1080p. Shooting 1080p at 60fps on the rear camera is reasonably steady, with the OIS keeping the worst of the sway out of the recording.
OnePlus Nord 5 review: Verdict
In some areas, the OnePlus Nord 5 blows the competition out of the water: the 144Hz display, outstanding performance and battery life that outpaces phones that cost more than twice its price are all very impressive, and the main reasons why you’d want to choose the Nord 5.
On the other hand, there are some areas in which it feels like it’s lagging. The rear cameras getting no major improvements over the previous generation is a shame, especially when rivals like the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro are including telephoto cameras now, and software support is fairly middling, too.
Choose the OnePlus Nord 5 if you care about blistering performance and epic battery life above all else. Otherwise, the Google Pixel 9a remains the best mid-range phone overall, as it offers a more balanced experience that performs well in all areas, rather than excelling in a couple and falling a little behind in the rest.
