The OnePlus Nord N30 5G is a good $300 smartphone, but is it right for you?

The OnePlus Nord N30 5G is one of the latest budget smartphones from OnePlus, and I’ve spent the past few weeks deciding whether you should buy it.

Fun fact: this phone was already available in other markets as the “OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G” before making its way to the US, and now, OnePlus is shipping it as the successor to the surprisingly good Nord N20 from last year. It has a few upgrades — including a 108-megapixel camera, a rarity for budget phones — and some questionable changes, but it maintains the same $299 price point.

At just under $300, the Nord N30 is a solid smartphone that puts up a decent fight against other brands like Samsung, TCL and Motorola. However, it’s by no means perfect, and some of its shortcomings are pretty odd.

Let’s dive in and see just how good this OnePlus smartphone is.

What we liked about it

The 108-megapixel camera is actually pretty good

OnePlus includes a 108MP f/1.75 main camera on the Nord N30, which is a rarity in the budget smartphone market. We typically see sensors of this caliber on phones priced four times higher, but it seems that OnePlus wanted to experiment with bringing it to a sub-$300 phone.

And to be perfectly honest, I ain’t mad at it.

The camera kicks out 12MP photos by default using 9-in-1 pixel binning, which also means each photo can take advantage of extra details and sharpness that the added megapixels pick up. Resulting photos are surprisingly good; I found that well-lit environments like the Manhattan skyline looked really great coming from the Nord N30, as were photos of the plants outside my home.

At night, pictures were tough to get right since the 108MP sensor isn’t physically big, but I could still capture some decent low-light shots.

OnePlus includes a mode in the camera app that lets you take full 108MP photos with the Nord N30. I captured a lot of these during my review, and I found that they were very similar to the standard 12MP images it produced.

I say “very similar” because in some lighting conditions (most often those with cooler color temperatures), the image’s colors would skew slightly from the standard shooting mode. However, I didn’t find this to be a big deal, especially for a budget phone. I still enjoyed having all that extra resolution, which could be helpful if you ever take a photo you’d like to print out one day.

The sensor is also sharp enough to give you 3x lossless zoom without the need for a telephoto camera. It uses the megapixels in the middle of the 108MP camera to zoom in without a dramatic loss in quality. I found that photos looked equally as good as they did shooting in standard mode, so you won’t have to worry about being too far away from your subject to get a good picture.

A big 120Hz display with decent brightness

The display on the Nord N30 is solid for a budget smartphone. It stretches 6.72 inches from corner to corner, giving you plenty of real estate to enjoy movies, games and multitasking. Granted, the size won’t be for everyone (it’s 0.02 inches larger than my iPhone 14 Pro Max, and I already think that phone’s too big), but the extra room means you’ll almost never feel cramped.

It boasts a Full HD+ resolution, which is enough to keep everything from photos and videos to articles and ebooks looking sharp. There’s also a 120Hz refresh rate, which is my favorite part. It makes the phone feel much faster and more responsive than phones with normal 60Hz refresh rates — and yes, I’m talking about any phone with a 60Hz refresh rate, including the latest iPhone 14.

OnePlus has promised to ship as many phones as possible with fast refresh rates, and I’m glad to see them stick to that promise with the Nord N30.

In addition, the display reaches 680 nits of brightness. That’s not the brightest you’ll find on the market, but it’s very good for a budget smartphone. I had some trouble seeing the display in direct sunlight through my sunglasses, but it was generally easy to see in every other lighting condition I found myself in.

Solid performance thanks to an older processor

Inside the Nord N30 is a Snapdragon 695 processor. It’s by no means the latest and greatest from Qualcomm, with its initial announcement dating back to October of 2021. However, this chip is still plenty capable and, arguably, a better processor than most others in budget phones.

I was delighted to find that apps were quick to open, multitasking was effortless and I could keep a few things running at once thanks to the 8GB of RAM. My big test with budget phones is playing Spotify, switching between apps, then double-tapping the power button to take a quick photo and see if it hangs or crashes. The Nord N30 handled it with no issue.

As is tradition with a smartphone review, I also ran Geekbench 5 to see what kind of scores the Nord N30 would produce. It got 685 on the single-core test and 1,994 on the multi-core. For context, that’s much better than the Dimensity 930-equipped Moto G Power, but still well behind other mid-range phones like the Pixel 7a and iPhone SE.

There’s also a good amount of storage on the Nord N30. By default, it ships with 128GB of space onboard, but you can expand that thanks to a microSD card slot. It supports cards up to 1TB in size, so you’ll always have plenty of room.

Long story short, I don’t think anyone will have issues with performance on the Nord N30. Common tasks like checking social media, scanning your inbox, texting friends, taking pictures and even editing photos and videos all run nicely, which is stupendous for a phone under $300.

50W fast charging

OnePlus is famous for including blazing-fast charging on its smartphones, and the Nord N30 is no exception.

The device might have a big 5,000mAh battery, but it takes almost no time at all to recharge it. OnePlus includes 50W SuperVOOC wired charging which, in my testing, can get you from zero to 75% in under 30 minutes. It took about 45 minutes for it to reach 100%, which is a lot snappier than most other smartphones, let alone cheap ones.

There’s no wireless charging here, but that’s easy to forgive with just how quickly you can recharge with OnePlus’ included charging accessories.

Good build quality with a headphone jack bonus

Yes, this is a $300 Android phone, and its design will remind you of that with its unapologetic use of plastic. But the phone still has a nice craft to it, from the flat edges to its light 195-gram weight.

The Nord N30 ships in one color: Chromatic Gray. It’s a lot less fun than the green color the Nord CE 3 Lite ships in overseas, but I dig its minimalist aesthetic. The back panel has a glossy finish that attracts fingerprints like a magnet, but it adds enough grip so you can shimmy the phone down your hand to reach the top of the screen.

OnePlus includes decent-sounding dual stereo speakers, a USB-C port on the bottom, and — surprise, surprise — a headphone jack. If you refuse to give up your 3.5mm headphones, the Nord N30 has got your back.

What we didn’t like about it

Display is downgraded from OLED to LCD

When I played with the Nord N20 last year, I loved the fact that it shipped with an OLED display. It made the device seem far more premium than it was thanks to its inky blacks, vibrant colors and pin-sharp contrasts. I was hoping that device would spark a trend in OnePlus’ Nord series and switch it to OLED full-time, but alas, the N30 seems to have squashed that possibility.

It uses an inferior LCD panel for the display which, compared to the N20’s OLED, is far less appealing to look at. Colors are pretty washed out, viewing angles don’t hold up for very long and every dark photo or video you look at tends to look gray.

Granted, the LCD panel allows the Nord N30 to get brighter than the N20 at 680 nits versus 450 nits, but that doesn’t make up for all its other shortcomings.

No ultra-wide camera, a useless depth sensor and poor video quality

While the 108MP camera itself is pretty good, the rest of the Nord N30’s camera setup is lackluster.

For one, there’s no ultra-wide camera. In this day and age where every phone worth caring about comes with one, I’m surprised that OnePlus decided to leave it on the cutting room floor. I imagine that’s the case because the company spent all its money on the 108MP main camera, but still — it couldn’t find a cheap ultra-wide sensor to throw in?

Which brings me to my next point: Instead of a cheap ultra-wide camera, OnePlus decided to include two super-cheap 2MP cameras, one for depth and one for macro photography. Given the tone of this paragraph, I don’t think I have to tell you that these cameras are totally useless, but I will tell you anyway that they are, in fact, useless.

The macro camera is particularly atrocious since every photo I take with it comes out lifeless. Colors are washed out, it blows out highlights like crazy and it’s dead in the water the second the sun starts setting. Meanwhile, the depth camera doesn’t add any exceptional image data to the portraits I’ve taken when compared to phones lacking depth sensors.

I also wasn’t very impressed with video quality. It’s a sub-$300 Android phone, so you can’t expect much anyway. It supports 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and footage tends to look choppy and unflatteringly lit. For short clips, it’s good enough, but you won’t want to shoot your next YouTube video with it.

Battery life is disappointing

The Nord N30’s battery might be 5,000mAh in size, but it doesn’t feel like it in real-world usage.

During my time with the device, I noticed that the battery would drain far faster than I was expecting. Typically, with a 5,000mAh battery, I can get through a full 16-hour day with lots of social media scrolling, email sending, photo taking and Spotify streaming with around 40 percent in the tank. With the Nord N30, I was regularly down to 10% to 15% at the end of the day.

In our battery test where we loop a 4K video at 50% screen brightness with airplane mode on, the Nord N30 died in just under 10 hours. That’s the same amount of time the Moto G Power lasted, which also has a 5,000mAh battery, but the difference here is Motorola’s phone could last all day and then some in normal usage; the Nord N30 simply can’t.

OxygenOS isn’t as clean or responsive as other phones

OnePlus has been underwhelming as of late in the software department, and OxygenOS 13.1 doesn’t make any meaningful improvements. Based on Android 13, the skin feels really clunky and poorly optimized, even on more expensive phones like the OnePlus 11. You can feel the jagged edges even more with the Nord N30’s slower specs, like the occasional hang when trying to bring down the quick settings panel or unresponsive app switcher.

It all feels like too much. Samsung’s One UI is, admittedly, also a little too feature-rich, but it does a better job at optimizations to feel snappy and fluid regardless of the hardware it’s loaded on. Google’s Pixel experience is also a lot smoother, as is Motorola’s nearly stock Android interface.

OxygenOS continues to let me down, and I hope OnePlus changes things up in the future.

Software support is also underwhelming. OnePlus is only promising a single major OS upgrade for the Nord N30 and three years of bi-monthly security updates, so if you plan on using the phone for years down the road, don’t expect to have the latest features for very long.

The fingerprint scanner is pretty spotty

The side-mounted fingerprint reader on the Nord N30 is effortless to reach since it’s integrated into the power button, but it’s not always reliable. I’ve noticed that it can take two to three scans to unlock my phone much more often than on other devices I’ve tried. OnePlus seems to be using a lower-quality fingerprint scanner here, which is understandable given the phone’s price, but it’s worth pointing out nonetheless.

Bottom line

OnePlus has a good phone on its hands with the Nord N30. It’s far from the worst budget phone I’ve used, and I think it’s worth looking at if you’re shopping on a strict budget.

Compared to similarly priced phones like the Moto G Power, it manages to stand out with a big 120Hz display, 108MP camera and solid performance. However, it can be a really tough sell since nowadays, you can get a Google Pixel 6a for the same $299. Sure, the display isn’t as big and is locked to 60Hz, but you’ll get a better camera, a visually-rich OLED panel, better performance, Google’s Pixel software and all-day battery life.

If any of that sounds appealing to you, you might want to wait for the 6a to go on sale and scoop one up. But if you have your heart set on a big screen, sharp camera and something other than a Google Pixel, the Nord N30 is a decent pickup, even with all of its quirks.