OnePlus surprises as it reveals key details of its upcoming cheap Nord phone
The OnePlus Nord CE5 has a big battery (even bigger in India), a premium camera and much more besides
OnePlus has been drip-feeding details of its upcoming phones for a little while now. However, it’s now unexpectedly revealed most details about its cheap Nord CE5 – aside from the price.
Given the predecessor device hit the £199/€229/₹22,999 price point, we’d expect the new model to do the same. We’ll find out during the OnePlus Summer Launch Event at 9.30am BST/2pm IST on July 8th.
We’d suggest that OnePlus won’t be launching its cheapest phone in the US since the Summer Launch Event is not publicised on its US website. Also both the Nord 4 and Nord CE4 Lite did not make it to the US.
Firstly, the Nord CE5 is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 8350 Apex which should mean it is rather fast. Featuring latest-gen Armv9 architecture, there are four high-performance cores clocked at 3.35GHz alonside four more cores for power efficiency. OnePlus says the chipset offeres a “60% increase in peak GPU performance and a 55% drop in power usage” compared to the predecessor.
The OnePlus India site also says there’s 12GB of fast LPDDR5X RAM on board, too, normally found in flagship devices, though we’re not yet sure if this memory capacity will come to every version of the Nord CE5.
As we’re increasingly seeing from some phones, the CE5 will have a hugely increased size battery in India – 7100mAh (supposedly akin to 2.5 days of normal use, billed as OnePlus’ biggest-ever battery) as opposed to 5,200 mAh (billed as “more than a day”) available elsewhere. 80W fast charging is salso supported so you can juice up in under an hour. The device boasts OnePlus’ Battery Health Engine tech to manage charging to extend battery life as much as possible.
On the camera front things are pretty decent for such a well-priced phone, too. There’s a 50MP Sony LYT-600 (1/1.95in) main sensor with Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS). This is a pretty impressive lens for such a cheap phone and it incorporates the same advanced HDR algorithm and Real Tone exposure tech from the OnePlus 13. The Nord CE5 also supports up to 4K 60fps HDR video recording, too.
The also soon-to-be announced OnePlus Nord 5 will have an even better LYT-700 sensor – the same one used in the OnePlus 13 series.
OnePlus has also officialy announced its OnePlus Buds 4 earbuds which have a real-time AI translation function as well as 45 hours of playback including the charging case and 11 hours on the buds (a 10 minute fast charge will get you an additional 11 hours).
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief 
