OnePlus Nord 2 Review (vs Nord vs Nord CE) | Return of the Flagship Killer! By InsideTech

Okay, so this is the new OnePlus note 2. , it's the latest smartphone from OnePlus, a successor to the first word and in some ways to the recently announced word CE. All three of these mid-range phones offer something a bit different, though so in this video we'll be reviewing the word 2 in full, but also comparing the specs and features with the original word and the word CE. But let's start with the unboxing, because OnePlus delivered a complete unboxing experience, they're one of the few companies to actually include a case for the phones and quite a nice one at that. But we also still get the charger in the box and not just any old basic charger, but the optimum fast charger for the phone and, of course they include the classic red OnePlus charging cable. This isn't the most eco-friendly way to package your phone, so OnePlus haven't followed companies like Samsung and apple here, but at least no one can complain at the included accessories for the design, you'll notice.

This lighter blue finish for the blue haze model and a new camera module, which is very similar to the flagship OnePlus 9 pro. I personally think this is the best of these classic OnePlus blue colors so far and the design looks really nice, but you can also find the nor2 in a gray, sierra or green wood finish depending on your region. It's pleasing to see there are no obnoxiously thick camera bumps here, and I'd say the word 2 has the best and most modern design of these three. But let me know in the comments which phone you think looks best, so the appearance is one way to separate these phones. But, more importantly, the build quality is two.

You may remember. The word CE or core edition keeps the best elements of the original word, but as a lower price point and one of the sacrifices it makes to achieve. This is with a lower, build quality. So the Borden word 2 offer gorilla glass 5 on the front and back whilst the CE has a generic glass front and a polycarbonate or plastic back. So it's not going to be as durable.

The CE is also quite a bit lighter than the other two phones, so, along with the plastic back, it does feel a bit cheaper, but it's still a fairly premium plastic. It feels nice and doesn't seem nearly as cheap as the plastic n100 we reviewed earlier this year, the matte finish resists fingerprints, a bit better than the glossy Borden word 2. , though the glass phones in this blue finish at least do a pretty good job of this too. Unfortunately, we still don't have an official IP rating for these phones. So, although OnePlus claims there is some splash proofing here, and they will likely be fine in the rain, it's always more difficult, not being confident in their water resistance.

The CE has individual volume keys, which are easier to use, unlike the single volume button on the other nodes, but crucially, it misses out on the fantastic alert slider. So if, like me, you love having this handy switch you'll only find it on the word and word too exclusive to the CE, though, is a headphone jack, which I know is still a very popular feature, and it's a shame. OnePlus didn't bring. This back for the word 2. , if you're relying on the phone's speakers, though you'll definitely enjoy the word twos much more, since they have a better stereo speaker setup compared to the Borden CE's mono speakers.

These can easily be covered by your finger and really lacked in bass and could sound a bit tinny at higher volumes. The nor2 speakers still lack bass but sound much better in stereo, with the earpiece being used as well, and I think it's a quietly undervalued series, that's more worthwhile checking out than you might realize. So this video will be a review of the new galaxy a52 5g, not to be confused with the lower spec a52, which isn't available in the US and UK, and I want to see how this stacks up against Samsung's s-series phones and in particular, if it's really that different from the expensive s21 ultra. All three phones are very similar in size and the smooth and rounded edges makes them very comfortable to hold the CE takes the crown for most comfortable, though as the thinnest and lightest device. So that might be important to consider.

Reachability is pretty good on these phones since they're all fairly narrow, but I'd still say, they're all very much two-handed phones because of how tall they are. The haptics stood out to me as being much better on the word, and especially the word two. This also makes the word CE feel cheaper since they're, not as tactile, so that was a noticeable difference. The fingerprint sensor on these phones is positioned, really low on the display as well and not where you'd naturally go to use it. It's the same optical sensor on all three phones.

The only difference is you get some different animations for each phone and quite a lot more on the word too. It works fairly reliably, but isn't as fast as the ultrasonic scanners. You find in some flagship phones. You have got the option of faster face unlock here if you prefer, but it's not as secure as the fingerprint scanner. There's really nothing.

That's significant to separate these three displays: they're all flat 90 hertz and 1080p AMOLED panels, and they're all around 6.4 inches in size with very similar bezels. The standout difference is the double hole punch for the original word, so I think the other two look a bit more pleasing to the eye, but there's no difference in the resolution and the contrast and brightness seem very similar. I try to ask OnePlus the difference in brightness, but after five attempts and five different answers, I concluded that their customer facing staff simply haven't got a clue. What's important, though, is that all offer good visibility in bright sunlight and that the word 2 offers a lower minimum brightness and therefore is easier on the eyes at night, but also seems to show slightly richer colors if you're really looking for it? Ultimately, though, there's not enough here to make the display an important factor when deciding between these phones, it's a very similar experience with them all you're, not getting the ultra-thin bezels sharp, 1440p res or super high brightness of the best flagships. But these are all very good-looking displays, especially at this price point.

The smooth 90hz refresh rate in particular, makes these feel very close to flagships anyway. The 60-90 hertz jump is usually much more noticeable than the extra step up to 120 and these all support hdr10 for a very good movie. Viewing experience. What really makes this display so nice to use, though, is oxygen. Os 11.

There's a slightly newer version on the word too, though the other should be catching up to you shortly, so you may notice minor differences like the default text, size being a bit bigger on the word 2. You may also notice the overlap with OPPO's color OS, for instance, the word 2 uses OPPO's camera UI, which is different from the word and CE. So there are a few different tweaks here and there, but essentially you've got the same software and overall experience across these phones. Oxygen OS makes use of all the best parts of android 11, including a built-in dark mode, OnePlus zen mode for muting, those annoying distractions and a true always-on display with lots of customization options. The oxygen OS skin is a spotless version of android, that's free from bloatware, but it doesn't really compromise on the customization either you'll find a ton of features and personalizations here.

So this is at least in my view, the best version of android outside the stock OS. It feels superfast to navigate to thanks to the high refresh rate displays, and I noticed apps and web pages opening faster with the higher power word two you'll get two years worth of software support and three years of security updates. So there is some future proofing baked in as well for the word 2. This is all powered by the new MediaTek density 1200 AI, and if there are any doubts about OnePlus, moving away from snapdragon chips, well, you can definitely put your mind at ease. The step-up in performance is by far the biggest improvement for the word 2 and sets it apart from both the word and the word CE.

Looking at the geek bench scores, you can see a massive improvement and the MediaTek chip doesn't just annihilate most mid-ranges, like the galaxy a52 5g we saw recently, but is closing in on flagship performance too. Just look at the performance against Samsung's flagship s20 from last year. The original word and the CE only provide limited gaming capabilities, and you'll see some frame drops with the graphically demanding titles and won't be able to run them at the highest settings, but the word 2 breezed through games like Call of Duty mobile and offers a very capable gaming experience. Indeed, there isn't much to separate the word in the CE, the latter outperforms, the word in the geek bench test, but then loses out on the frame rate in the gaming test. Essentially, you can't just go by the numbers when looking at the 750 and 765g chipsets, the 750 is actually the newer chip, but is beaten by the 765 in certain areas.

So the takeaway message is that you're going to get very similar overall performance with the original word and the word CE, but with the word 2 you'll, see a noticeable step up in speed. Apps and web pages load faster and of course you can gain more edit with much higher performance. So this is a really important factor when deciding between the phones. I've been using the 8 gigs of ram versions of these phones, but you can step this up to 12 with a higher base storage, if you prefer, the word 2 is actually using the faster UFS 3.1 storage compared to 2.1 for the other phones. So there's another speed advantage here too.

As always, though, there's no expandable storage with a micro SD card for any of these phones, so 256 gigs is the maximum storage you can have. The node 2 also brings the latest Bluetooth, 5.2, faster, Wi-Fi, 6 and, of course all of these phones offer 5g support. So again, there's some more feature-proofing here too. So the word 2 is an all-round, faster phone than the original word, but it also provides a longer battery life. It has the same 4 500 million power capacity as the word CE compared to 4115, but it's able to charge a much faster speeds too.

They all have a variation of the warp charge technology. So you can get up to around 70 in just 30 minutes with the word and the word CE, but the node 2 can actually charge to 100 in the same time, which is just crazy. This is faster than most flagships and remember you get the fast chargers included in the box, so you don't need to pay extra for this. My one major gripe, though, is that none of these supports wireless charging. This is something that we're still not seeing much in mid-range phones, and I really hope, we'd at least see this with the word 2, but sadly not now.

As for the actual battery life you're, looking at around 10 hours of screen on time for the word 2 and the CE, which is one or two hours more than the word will give you, so these phones offer a solid two days of use and have noticeably better battery life than the word there's very little to separate the word two in the CE. But from my testing I do think the CE has a slight edge. If I had to pick one winner, if you're deciding between these phones, though then the important point is just that these will both last longer than the original word and the battery life is very good. I'm sure you want to know about the cameras, though, and we have a pretty interesting mix here. The word 2 has the same camera setup as the CE on paper, but with different sensors and image processing.

The resulting photos are quite different with all of these phones. There are two lenses at the rear worth caring about the main and the ultra-wide, because the others are really just there to bump up the lens count. But let's start with the main lens on the word too, because photos from here are actually pretty impressive. They typically show good sharpness, they're well exposed and colors are usually pretty true to life as well, but they're, sometimes quite heavy, on the contrast which can give this pleasing but edited sort of look. The camera here will definitely be good enough for the average person and the quality in most situations, even with digital zoom, since there's no telephoto lens is really not that different from a flagship phone maxing out a 10x zoom for all three phones.

The ultra-wide is pretty decent too, but it's not always consistent with the main lens and the quality isn't quite as good, but it's still a really useful lens, and the only major drawback compared to a flagship is the lack of sharpness in the corners. The AI scene, enhancement mode is pretty interesting and can add some vibrancy to your images and a more stylized look which some people will really like, I'm sure, but I personally prefer the more natural colors you typically get with this turned off now. As for how this stacks up against the other phones, the main improvement, I noticed is with detail and sharpness. You'll see this compared to the original word, but especially against the word CE, which usually had the softest images. By far, and that's not a depth of field issue either.

That's the sensor, quality and image processing. So you might look at the c's, 64 megapixel main lens and assume it has the sharpest photos, but that's clearly not the case in the CE's defense, it did often show the most natural to life colors, and these shots here highlight the heavy contrast in the image processing on the word 2 and also the original word as well. But I would still say that the word 2 images is the best looking thanks to the detail and sharpness and its main lens is still superior overall in these tricky shots here with bright, sunlight outside, you can see how the word 2 has done a better job, with HDR, retaining more detail in the shadows, but also the color and vibrancy of this plant. So you can see how the new processor helps improve image quality as well. This was no more evident than with the night mode where again the CE struggled the most, but the word 2 is quite a way ahead when it comes too low light photos, images retain much more detail and don't struggle as much with noise, but I also found that the colors were much closer to the real life scene and the word 2 was less prone to cranking up the ISO to compensate for a low light situation.

I'd still say this is an area where flagships give you a big step up for camera performance, but for a mid-ranger, this phone is very good. There are still some software bugs to work out with the node 2, though, for instance, here with a human subject, the image processing has lifted the shadows too much and lost a lot of the contrast. If we compare this to both the word and the CE, you can see how these phones have kept much more contrast- and we know this is simply a software issue, because if we compare the nor2 photo mode to the portrait mode, suddenly you can see how the contrast we normally see has been brought back. As for the portrait effect, though, results are normally pretty good. You can see it's missing that natural taper for the background blur that some flagships or a prime lens would give you.

The phone has simply identified holly in the sofa as the subject and then evenly blur to the rest, but the edge detection was normally pretty good compared to the CE. The results are similar, but the edge detection is better on the node 2. Again, though, the colors were actually more lifelike with the CE, but I was more interested in comparing with the original word, since this has a dedicated depth lens, specifically for enhancing portraits. But honestly, if anything, I'd say it was actually worse than the word 2, and I don't think the depth lens is doing much at all for a fun experiment. I actually covered up the depth lens and took a second portrait shot here.

They are side by side, and this essentially confirmed to me that the word's depth lens is only there. So OnePlus can call this a quad camera setup. The other lens it has is a macro lens which OnePlus didn't give to the CE or the nord2. We've seen this kind of cheap macro lens in other phones before the images it spits out are very low quality. So it too is essentially a redundant lens on the left.

Here you can see the macro shot and on the right is the same image taken on the main lens and then zoomed in to match it. I certainly know which photo, I think, is better the useless lens on the word 2 and the CE is a monochrome lens which perhaps makes even less sense than a depth or macro lens on the word 2. This works with any one specific filter on portrait mode, but I just can't see why you'd ever want this, or at least, why didn't OnePlus just make this effect in software, which they easily could like. All the other filters for the force. The monochrome option is a filter on the photo mode, but it's the same deal here.

The photos have a look that you could easily achieve with a software filter, so the monochrome lenses are also redundant, and it's just an excuse to say that these phones have triple lens cameras on the back. Perhaps slightly less useless is the high-res mode, which uses the full 50 megapixels of the word 2's main lens, but as I've found with basically every other smartphone, the hi-res mode. Just isn't worth your time. Sure images are less noisy and more detailed if you zoom in extremely close to tell the difference, but you lose the more important benefit of HDR which you get with the normal mode. So it's not worth waiting longer to take a high-res photo.

That's just going to take up more pressure, storage on your phone, and that applies to all three word phones. The high-res mode, along with those extra lenses, is just something you can ignore and finally, with video, the results are pretty decent on the word too. The image is nice and sharp, and actually the stability was particularly impressive. Unfortunately, the phone maxes out at 4k and 30 frames per second just like the other two phones, even though really the processor could handle 60fps as well. You'll see a huge upgrade over the word CE, where the colors are quite washed out, but mainly because the CE doesn't have is, so video is much more shaky and unstable.

Also, if I freeze-frame here, you can see a pretty severe ghosting effect with the word CE, because it struggles to process, motion and fast moving subjects compared to the original word there's much less of a difference, though, I would still say that the colors are a bit better with the nord2, so perhaps a small improvement there. So that's the rear cameras, but there's quite a difference with the selfie cameras too, including the fact that the original word has two front-facing cameras, comparing the selfie mode side by side. The most obvious difference to me is that the word CE doesn't have the same quality as the other two phones and that's not so much a case of the lower megapixel count. It's just a combination of a lower quality sensor and image processing, so there's less detail and poorer colors. The north 2 is similar to the first word, but I do think it has an edge when it comes to more natural colors, and I can see some over sharpening with the word as well.

My main criticism with the OnePlus selfie cameras, though, is that they're placed in the corner- and you can tell this when you take selfies, because you always look as though you're leaning into the shot. So that's where the centered selfie cameras have an advantage. I should also mention another software bug with the word 2, which can sometimes result in blurry photos with a selfie mode. So that's perhaps an autofocus issue that I hope is addressed in a future update. Of course, the first node has two selfie lenses and the second has a wider angle intended for group selfies.

Obviously this gives you an angle that the other two phones can't, but you can see that the image quality does drop with the second lens, and I think overall, the cleaner, aesthetic of the single hole punch on the front is a better trade-off. As for the portrait mode, the phones do a reasonable, but not amazing, job with the edge detection, but I usually found this was best with the word 2. Despite having two front lenses, the original word has struggled more with the cutout and the word CE is suffering from the same resolution and color issues that affect the selfie mode. So there's another small victory for the word too. When it comes to selfie video, though things get a little strange, because the newer word 2 actually has the lowest quality video on paper, just 1080p at 30 frames per second, this is beaten by 60fps on the force and with the original word.

This phone can actually do 4k60, so, yes, that means it has more powerful selfie video than on the rear camera, which is just bizarre. The original word does have the best selfie video by some margin, but frame rate and resolution. Aren't everything and actually the nor2 does beat the CE when it comes to color, saturation and HDR. So you can see that each phone has its own strengths when it comes to the cameras. The original word has the most versatile setup.

The CE offers, the most natural colors and the word 2 has the best HDR and night mode. Overall, I think the word 2 has the best camera setup and a very good setup for a phone at this price point. I wouldn't say it's a dealbreaker if you're considering the first word, but with the word CE there is a much more substantial drop in the overall camera quality. So that's the one to avoid. If the camera is really important to you, the word 2 is available from 399 pounds for the baseline model, so it keeps the low price tag of the original word.

Despite the significant improvements as you'd expect, the word CE is the cheapest of these phones, but since the original word has been around for a while now you may find it at a discounted price. I think the simplest way to sum up, the node 2 is to say that it offers the best value for money of these three phones. The processor improvements are really what makes this such a great device, and there are a few phones, perhaps only the iPhone SE that can match this kind of power to price ratio. So, if you're thinking about picking one of these phones up I'd highly recommend you go for the new word, too I'd say. The word CE is only worth considering if you're on a very tight budget, because the improvements with the word 2 are very well justified.

The c's battery improvement over the original word makes it a better buy than that, though, so I'd perhaps now avoid the first node unless you find it at a crazy discount. I told you a few weeks ago that you'd struggle to find a better mid-range phone than Samsung's galaxy, a52 5g, but then OnePlus said hold my beer and gave us the word too. This is a phone that marks the return of a true flagship killer. For instance, it's better value than the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus marketing that this phone is everything you could ask for is kind of. True flagships will give you think like wireless charging, a better build quality and maybe slightly brighter displays or better image quality, but at double or even triple.

The price is clear to me that the word 2 offers much better value for money, and I look forward to seeing if any other mid-range phones this year can beat it. Let me know in the comment section what you think about this phone, though thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you all in the next one. You.

Source : InsideTech