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- Bright, colour-accurate display
- Fantastic battery life and fast charging
- Above-average performance
- No IP rating or Gorilla Glass
- Mediocre backup cameras
- Generic plastic design
OnePlus has a hit-and-miss record with phones in this price range but it may have finally found the right balance with the Nord CE 5. This budget phone isn’t particularly exciting to look at but beneath that bland exterior is a collection of components that are of a higher quality than we’re used to seeing from cheap phones.
Performance is some of the best in the price range, battery life is so extensive that it outlasts phones that cost more than three times as much, the display is bright and colour-accurate, charging is impressively fast and software support is a cut above, too.
At almost every turn, the Nord CE 5 decries its price tag and delivers an experience typical of mid-range handsets. The only thing holding it back is a cheap design that lacks the durability credentials of its rivals. If you can put up with that, however, the OnePlus Nord CE 5 excels in all other areas, and does so for a cutthroat price.
OnePlus Nord CE 5 review: What you need to know
Much like Google’s Pixel a series and Samsung’s Galaxy FE models, OnePlus’ Nord CE line is the Diet Coke to the standard Nord family’s full-fat version – offering a more affordable alternative to its mainline product that strips away some of the extra features to achieve a more tantalising price point.
In this case, the Nord CE 5 is the cheaper alternative to the OnePlus Nord 5. It features a slightly smaller 6.7in AMOLED display compared to its big sibling, with a lower resolution of 2,392 x 1,080 and a peak refresh rate of 120Hz, whereas the Nord 5 supports a higher refresh rate of up to 144Hz.
The processor is a 3.35GHz MediaTek Dimensity 8350 chipset, backed by 8GB of RAM and either 128GB or 256GB of storage. Both variants support microSD cards up to 1TB. Rounding out the internal specs is a 5,200mAh battery that supports 80W wired charging.
As for the cameras, there’s a 50-megapixel main shooter and an 8-megapixel ultrawide on the rear, with a 16-megapixel selfie camera set in a hole-punch notch at the top of the display completing the set.
Price and competition
The OnePlus Nord CE 5 starts at £299 for the model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with the 12/256GB model priced at £349. This puts it right on the border between what we consider to be a budget phone and what’s classed as mid-range.
We have a couple of particularly strong competitors in this price bracket, starting with the recently released Nothing Phone (3a). Priced at £329 for the 128GB model or £379 for the 256GB version, the Phone (3a) is appealing for its excellent battery life, 2x telephoto camera (near-enough unheard of at this price), and Nothing’s useful Essential Space AI.
The Google Pixel 8a is the other big threat here, discounted down to £349 for the 128GB model since the Pixel 9a launched. Its big draw is the excellent Pixel cameras, which continue to lead the class for quality, as well as software support that goes all the way to 2031, massively outlasting most rivals.
Finally, we have two overachievers coming in a little cheaper than the Nord CE 5: the CMF Phone 2 Pro is just £219 for the 128GB model and includes a 2x telephoto camera, while the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro delivers ridiculously powerful performance and is down to £256 for the 256GB model at the time of writing – or you can get a massive 512GB of storage for just £321.
Design and key features
The design of the OnePlus Nord CE 5 is so close to that of the Nord 5 that you could easily mistake them for one another. The Nord CE 5 measures 76 x 8.2 x 164 – almost identical to the Nord 5’s 77 x 8.1 x 163 measurements – though it weighs a fair bit less, at 199g, compared to 211g.
The flat edges and rear are dead ringers for the Nord 5, too, but the back is plastic, rather than glass. There are two colour options to choose from: the Black Infinity colour I received for review is a standard matte black affair, while the Marble Mist variant adds a little texture to the rear with a white marble look that catches the light.
We’ve again got a traffic light-style camera housing tucked in the top-left corner, but this one only includes the two camera lenses, with the flash set separately to the right of the main camera, as opposed to being the bottom “traffic light”, as it is on the Nord 5.
The overall look of the phone is quite generic and lacking protective features. The Nothing Phone (3a), for instance, has Panda Glass over the display for scratch resistance, a glass rear and an IP64 dust and water resistance rating. By comparison, the Nord CE 5’s plastic build feels cheap, and it doesn’t have an official dust and water resistance rating.
The features around the edges are mostly the same as on the Nord 5 – power and volume buttons on the right, IR blaster on the top, charging port on the bottom – but the Nord CE 5 doesn’t have the Nord 5’s Plus Key on its left edge. I often find additional buttons fiddly, so I’m not too disappointed that the Plus Key is absent.
The Nord CE 5 also doesn’t get the new Mind Space feature – a place to store screenshots and voice notes recorded with the Plus Key, similar to Nothing’s Essential Space – but there are still a couple of AI features. These include a smart search bar that can answer questions without you having to open a separate app, similar to Google’s Gemini, Circle to Search and a couple of photo editing tools.
Otherwise, the OxygenOS 15 software is decent. It’s based on Android 15 and, aside from a few preinstalled apps that I could have done without, it’s easy enough to get along with. Better still, OnePlus is offering the Nord CE 5 the same four years of software support and six years of security patches that it’s giving the Nord 5. The Pixel 8a is still better for software support, with updates planned until 2031, but this is still very good for such a cheap phone.
Display
The 6.7in AMOLED display is a beautiful panel, with essentially perfect black and contrast levels and excellent brightness for such an affordable phone. On manual brightness, I recorded a peak of 756cd/m2, which is fantastic, but things got even better on adaptive brightness, with the screen hitting 1,128cd/m2 with a torch shining on the light sensor. That’s one of the brightest displays I’ve tested in this price range.
Colour accuracy is on the money, as well. There are four colour profiles to choose from, with the default Vivid setting and the Cinematic mode targeting the DCI-P3 colour space and the Brilliant profile expanding the gamut to cover 100% of both DCI-P3 and sRGB. Natural only targets sRGB, but it does so very well – the average Delta E colour variance score of 1.05 is essentially bang on our target of 1 or under, and speaks to excellent colour accuracy.
Performance and battery life
The 3.35GHz Mediatek Dimensity 8050 chipset doesn’t live up to the speeds promised by its unusually high peak clock speed, but it’s still a nippy enough performer. In the Geekbench 6 CPU tests, it beat the Nothing Phone (3a) by 12% in the single-core portion and 21% in the multi-core.
Even those impressive scores, however, can’t match up to the ridiculous speeds achieved by the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro. In the single-core benchmarks, the Poco outpaced the Nord by 20%, and that stretched to an even bigger lead of 56% in the multi-core test.
The Nord CE 5’s GFXBench onscreen results were capped to 60fps, so don’t reflect its overall capabilities. Look instead at the offscreen results, and you’ll see that the Nord CE 5 is one of the best gamers of this selection, hitting a fantastic 100fps. The Poco X7 Pro again does better, but this is still an excellent result for the Nord CE 5.
These results translate to smooth 3D gameplay, even with particularly graphics-intensive games. I ran Genshin: Impact on the default graphical settings to test this out, and the gameplay was fluid and responsive, with no hint of lag or stuttering.
The 5,200mAh battery feels small compared to the ridiculous 7,100mAh cell that is offered in certain territories, but it still does a fantastic job. In our looping video test, the Nord CE 5 lasted for 33 hours on the dot, which is phenomenal for this price and high on our best phone battery life rankings.
Once the battery is depleted, the Nord CE 5 supports charging up to 80W. Like we saw with the Nord 5, this charging standard didn’t play well with my 125W Motorola charger, so it only reached around 45W, but this still filled the battery in under an hour.
Cameras
The rear cameras used here are almost identical to those on the standard Nord 5, with a 50-megapixel main sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) support joined by an 8-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide lens, though the field of view is ever so slightly narrower than the Nord 5’s version, at 112°, compared to 116°.
Ultrawide shots are of similar quality to those produced by the Nord 5, which is to say they’re serviceable but not particularly good. The contrast is dialled up too high and several areas have been massively smoothed out, giving the whole image an overly processed look.
The main camera was much more impressive. Images are bright and packed with punchy colours, detail capture is decent throughout and the solid dynamic range adds plenty of depth to the shots.
It’s a good shooter after dark as well, keeping the sky relatively free from visual noise and plucking out natural colours from the shadows. It doesn’t manage bright light sources all that well but otherwise, the results are much better than we usually see from cheap phones.
The only major difference between this camera suite and the Nord 5 is the selfie camera. Where the latter gets a sharper 50-megapixel lens, the Nord CE 5 sticks with a 16-megapixel unit. This is still a reasonable shooter, delivering a solid amount of detail in portraits and landing accurately enough on skin tones. The difference certainly isn’t dramatic enough that I’d choose the Nord 5 over the CE on the basis of its selfie camera.
Finally, video shoots up to 4K at 60fps, with OIS support up to 1080p at 60fps. These are both great inclusions that are far from guaranteed in this price range – both the Nothing Phone (3a) and the CMF Phone 2 Pro, for instance, top out at 4k/30fps, and the latter only offers electronic stabilisation.
OnePlus Nord CE 5 review: Verdict
Several of its competitors outdo the Nord CE 5 in one area or another; the Poco X7 Pro is a more powerful performer, the Nothing Phone (3a) and CMF Phone 2 Pro include telephoto cameras and the Pixel 8a has better photographic chops and longer software support.
With that being said, few handsets perform as impressively across the board as the OnePlus Nord CE 5. Performance is excellent, battery life is outstanding, the display gets brilliantly bright and nails colour accuracy, software support is above average and the main camera is very competent.
The cheap design and lack of an IP rating or Gorilla Glass let it down a bit but even still, the OnePlus Nord CE 5 is a fantastic all-rounder available for a very tempting price.
