The latest budget phone from OnePlus packs a few semi-premium features including a display with a 90 Hz refresh rate and support for 33W fast charging. But the OnePlus Nord N300 5G will have a starting price of $228 when it goes on sale as a T-Mobile exclusive starting November 23rd… and it has some specs to match that budget price.
For example, while the display may have a high screen refresh rate, it’s described as a 6.56 inch HD+ display rather than FHD+. And the phone is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 810 processor, which is designed for mid-range phones rather than flagships.
That processor is an 8-core chip featuring two ARM Cortex-A76 CPU cores that can hit speeds up to 2.4 GHz and six ARM Cortex-A55 cores that top out at 2 GHz, along with Mali-G57 graphics.
The OnePlus Nord N300 5G ships standard with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and features a microSD card reader with support for cards up to 1TB.
Other features include a 48MP primary camera, a 2MP depth-sensing camera, an 8MP front-facing camera, and a 5,000 mAh battery. The phone comes with a 33W SuperVOOC charger, has a fingerprint sensor in the power button, and ships with Android 13 and the Oxygen OS user interface.
I have a Nord N100 and would never buy another product from One Plus. The phones are fine, but the company’s software update policies leave much to be desired. The Nord N series will receive one Android update and two years of security updates every two months. This means that the phone will offer little protection against malware or zero day exploits when it reaches two years of age. This is unacceptable and pales in comparison to the update policies of Google Pixel or Samsung. Right now you can buy the Pixel 6a for almost the same price as the Nord N300.
Makes me sorry I bought an N200. I despair of OnePlus ever fixing the battery indicator and shade on the N200; if I display the battery’s charge in the status bar, it’s always wrong (it does not correspond with the level indicated in Settings). When I pull the shade down, the time displayed is wrong; now, the clock app and widget says it’s 9:52; but the shade shows 21:48.