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The rear has four cameras. The main camera is 64MP and there is an 8MP wide angle lens. If you’ve ever seen cheap sports cars with fake hood covers or non-functional rear spoilers, that’s what OnePlus is looking for with the latter two cameras: a pair of purely decorative 2MP sensors, one supposedly for “Macro” photos. another labeled “Monochrome”. In this price range, OnePlus faces fierce camera competition in the form of the Pixel 4a, a phone that can outperform many flagship phones, and I suppose it is trying to make up for the lack of quality with quantity.
Unlike the European Nord, the phone ships with a rear capacitive fingerprint reader and a headphone jack. It is compatible with the OnePlus Warp 30T charge. The biggest disappointment is the operating system, which is shipping a crisp old copy of Android 10 instead of Android 11. Meanwhile, Android 11 is shipping on the OnePlus 8T and has been out for almost two months now.
Is it really going to cost more than a Pixel 4a?
It’s hard to see how this phone is going to fit the market here without a firm US price. It will have to fight the Pixel 4a, which costs $ 349 in the United States. Prices for OnePlus phones in the US are typically higher than a direct conversion from pounds to dollars would suggest (the OnePlus 8T, for example, costs £ 549 in the UK but $ 749 in the US) . So expect a US Nord 10 to be a bit more expensive than when sold in the UK, putting it at around $ 449.
Both the Nord N10 and Pixel 4a have 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, headphone jacks, and rear fingerprint readers. The Nord N10 has a larger and faster 90Hz screen, but it is an LCD screen compared to the OLED in the Pixel 4a. We still don’t know what the image quality of the LCD is like, but you will never get an always-on display feature on an LCD screen. The Nord has a bigger battery, but the Pixel 4a is basically guaranteed to have a better camera. The Pixel 4a will have much better software support, although it is frankly alarming that the Nord N10 doesn’t ship with the current version of Android (it won’t have monthly security updates, either).
If the Nord N10 is going to cost $ 100 more than the Pixel 4a, that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I’m not even sure it’s a good deal if it’s evenly priced with the Pixel 4a. We liked OnePlus products in the past because they were amazing deals that were often hundreds less than the competition, and while there is less room for that in the mid-range market, I don’t see much of a value argument here.
I start to worry about OnePlus. The company used to ship only one or two smartphones a year and seemed to put a lot of effort behind them, especially when it came to software updates. This year has seen six OnePlus phones: The OnePlus 8, 8 Pro, 8T, Nord, Nord N10, and Nord N100. If you’re a business wondering how many phones is too many phones, you’ve definitely hit “too many” if you can’t ship the current version of your operating system at all. As a customer, you also have to wonder if a phone like this will receive timely updates. OnePlus recently had its co-founder, Carl Pei, leave the company, and when that sort of thing happens, it’s time to be on the lookout for any strategy changes. We may be looking at one.
Image listing by OnePlus
