OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: The best budget 5G phone

Our Verdict

At just $240, the OnePlus Nord N200 is the budget 5G telephone to crush. Functioning and cameras won't wow you, but for the coin, it'south an incredible telephone. Information technology also has a proficient display with a 90Hz refresh rate, something that'due south non as well mutual in this toll range.

For

First-class value
Nice display with a 90Hz refresh rate
Good battery life

Against

Mediocre operation
Subpar cameras
Bad software update policy

Tom's Guide Verdict

At just $240, the OnePlus Nord N200 is the upkeep 5G telephone to vanquish. Performance and cameras won't wow y'all, only for the coin, it's an incredible telephone. It as well has a good display with a 90Hz refresh rate, something that's not likewise mutual in this cost range.

Pros

+
Splendid value
+
Nice brandish with a 90Hz refresh rate
+
Good battery life

Cons

-
Mediocre performance
-
Subpar cameras
-
Bad software update policy

OnePlus Nord N200 5G: Specs

OS: Android 11 / OxygenOS eleven
Display: six.49-inch IPS LCD (2400 x 1080)
Refresh charge per unit: 90Hz
CPU: Snapdragon 480 5G
RAM: 4GB
Storage / Expandable: 64GB / Yes
Rear cameras: 13MP (f/ii.ii), 2MP (f/2.4) macro. 2MP (f/ii.4) depth
Front camera: 16MP (f/2.one)
Video: Up to 1080p at 30 fps
Battery: 5,000 mAh
Bombardment life (Hrs:mins): ten:28 (90Hz), 10:36 (60Hz)
Charging: 18W
Colors: Blue Quantum
Size: vi.42 10 ii.95 10 0.33 inches
Weight: 6.67 ounces

OnePlus decided to become into the budget telephone space concluding yr with the launch of the Nord series. We got the Nord N10 and the Nord N100 here in the United states of america, but OnePlus decided that 2021 required the Nord N200 5G. All around, this is the best phone for less than $300 and i of the best 5G phones nether $400.

Despite some shortcomings when it comes to both performance and photographic camera output, the Nord N200 is a good telephone. It features a nice IPS LCD with a 90Hz refresh rate, a headphone jack, a big 5,000 mAh bombardment, and the first-class OxygenOS based on Android 11. However, OnePlus has but promised a single OS upgrade for this phone, meaning that information technology'll just encounter Android 12 which comes out in a couple of months.

Upkeep-conscious customers will want to give the Nord N200 serious consideration for their side by side phone if updates don't matter to you. Seeing 5G and 90Hz on a phone this inexpensive is quite impressive, and information technology does nearly of what you'd desire a phone to practise. Still, you can go better cameras with the $349 Pixel 4a and much more powerful hardware in the $399 iPhone SE (2020).

Read on for our full review of the OnePlus Nord N200 5G.

Editor's note: Nosotros crowned our picks in the Tom's Guide Awards 2021 for phones. The OnePlus Nord N200 5G won a highly recommended honor.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Price and availability

The OnePlus Nord N200 5G comes in i variant, 64GB/4GB for $239.99. You lot can buy it unlocked from OnePlus. It will also exist available from T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile.

If you prefer a unlike retailer, Amazon, B&H, and Best Buy volition also stock the Nord N200 for the same starting price of $239.99.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Design

The Nord N200 looks and feels like a more expensive phone. It's got this soft-affect plastic back in a beautiful blue-ish, dark aquamarine color. The triple photographic camera array hangs out in the top left corner, looking a bit like the module from the OnePlus 9 series. It's nice to run into some design language parity between the two product lines.

Around forepart is the 6.49-inch LCD with the selfie cam in the summit left corner. The bezels on the OnePlus Nord N200 5G are incredibly slim. The whole telephone, in fact, feels quite svelte despite the big 5,000 mAh bombardment tucked inside.

On the bottom of the phone is the USB-C port, speaker, and headphone jack. If you're still rocking 3.5mm wired headphones or aux cables for your machine, yous're in luck here. The Nord N200 comes with dual-SIM functionality, plus a micro SD card on top. I'one thousand glad to run across expandable storage hither, since this telephone only comes with 64GB of on-lath capacity.

The power push button along the right side of the N200 likewise houses the fingerprint sensor, which is quite responsive in my experience. Some of you might adopt this to an in-display sensor found on more expensive phones since yous won't have to affect your screen to unlock your phone.

For $240, I expected much less of the Nord N200, but the build quality is top-notch.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Brandish

The Nord N200 sports an IPS LCD console with FHD+ resolution. It's definitely a nice display, especially for the price, and it's piece of cake to apply in a dark room or out in the sun. While the N200's LCD screen lacks the true blacks of an OLED console, most people will enjoy it when they're looking at photos, watching videos, or playing games.

One of the standout features of the Nord N200 has to be the 90Hz refresh rate on the display. There are phones that cost quite a chip more than the Nord and are stuck at 60Hz. That's quite impressive and in real life, it makes Android buttery smoothen. Scrolling on webpages or in Google Discover is a breeze and you tin savor content at higher framerates where supported and applicative.

Genshin Impact looked great on the Nord N200's brandish, and other games that back up high refresh rates (like Dead Cells) played well, too. The FHD+ resolution helps make text super crisp and wide colour reproduction helped make some of my films pop — most notably the heavy orange scenes toward the end of Blade Runner 2049.

We tested the Nord N200'due south display and found that it reproduced 160.7% of the sRGB spectrum. That's extremely good, peculiarly with a Delta-Due east colour accuracy rating of 0.26 (where 0 is perfect). Compare that to the $349 Pixel 4a's OLED screen, which managed 105.8% of the sRGB spectrum with a Delta-East of 0.29.

For a $240 phone, the Nord N200's display is excellent. You lot lose out on some of the finer intricacies of an OLED panel, but I doubt many people volition intendance.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Cameras

The Nord N200 features a triple camera setup, with a 13MP main shooter leading the charge. Along with that photographic camera comes a 2MP macro and a 2MP depth sensor, neither of which proved useful in testing. Around front, you get a 16MP selfie cam.

Although OnePlus has upped its photography game for its flagship phones, particularly the OnePlus 9 Pro, here at the depression cease, it's not pretty. Compared to the Pixel 4a, which uses a single lens, the Nord N200 flounders in practically every setting. From outdoors to portrait mode, the camera performance here did not impress.

Starting off outside, this photo of a bush tested both phones' use of depth and foreground focus. They each had to capture the details of the bush while keeping everything in perspective without flattening out over overexposing the image. The Nord N200 struggled with overexposure, blowing out the final prototype. The Pixel 4a kept things reined in. The low-cal levels are more than fifty-fifty in the Pixel's shot, and the bush-league is clearly in focus. At to the lowest degree the Nord N200 handled that part well, too.

In this second outdoor epitome, the Nord N200 once again struggled with controlling for the bright sunlight. The flag looks washed out compared to the Pixel 4a's more controlled tone. The flag's colors are richer on the Pixel's shot, and the flowers in the groundwork pop. Looking at the Nord N200'due south photo practically sears the eyes.

Inside, both phones performed more alike ane another. The only noticeable divergence is that the Nord N200's image is slightly warmer, giving a very slight xanthous tint. The Pixel 4a's shot of Merida is plenty bright enough, despite it feeling subdued. The Nord N200 kept upwardly quite well in this paradigm.

Immediately, you can see a big divergence in the portrait shots from either telephone. The Pixel 4a takes a zoomed-in, creative arroyo to portraits and it oft works well. The Nord N200 does the opposite and I think the terminate result suffers overall. Not only is the blur radius weak, but the epitome is too warm and the focus on me is too soft. I don't similar the Pixel'southward much better, but it has the qualities of a decent portrait. Besides, the Nord N200 seems to accept done some kind of smoothing to my face, whereas the Pixel captured more facial details.

Perhaps the nigh damning comparing yet, the Nord N200 didn't even attempt to shoot a proper night time photo. The Pixel 4a's Nighttime Sight created a clear picture show where you can make out the details of the smoker and it bluntly looks similar in that location's a lot more lighting in the backyard than at that place actually was. The Nord N200, meanwhile, couldn't fifty-fifty muster an attempt. Information technology's like OnePlus forgot to include a proper night style, though even Nightscape on its higher end phones struggles to match Google'southward Nighttime Sight. Yet, this photo comparison startled me with the stark difference between the two phones.

So the rear cameras on the Nord N200 are a chip of a bust, only what about the forepart camera? Again, the differences stand out immediately.

I may be a pale individual, simply the Nord N200'due south photo makes me look similar a ghost. There is very little detail in my confront, my natural ruddiness is just obliterated by the aggressive face up smoothing, and the image is, one time once more, too vivid. The Pixel 4a, meanwhile, captured my skin tone and fine details, even showing off the green of my shirt better. In my opinion, there's no competition here — the Pixel 4a wins hands-down.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Video

The OnePlus Nord N200 5G supports upwardly to 1080p video recording at 30 frames per 2d. Those aren't exactly stellar specs, but at least you can record FHD video on a $240 phone.

In practice, the video quality produced by the N200 is only alright. The stabilization needs some work, since the final footage shows noticeable bouncing while I'grand walking. The Pixel 4a, which I used in the other hand simultaneously, produced a much more stable video.

Mic quality on the Nord N200 is okay, though non great. The phone'southward two mics seemed to struggle to selection up my natural vox book at half an arm's length away. The Pixel 4a did much better and it balanced out the surrounding noises like cars and cicadas better, likewise.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Performance

While we don't look mind-boggling photographic camera performance from a $240 phone, the OnePlus Nord N200's truthful disappointment comes down to its overall performance. The Snapdragon 480 5G that powers this new Nord is a expert chip for its affordability, just it struggles to keep up with more than intensive tasks, like gaming. And with 4GB of RAM, I constitute that several apps got kicked from retentivity, like Spotify while I was actively listening to music.

This isn't the beginning phone with the Snapdragon 480 5G. I just reviewed the Moto 1000 Stylus 5G, which was similarly disappointing in terms of functioning, just it costs $160 more than the Nord N200. That said, Motorola'southward midrange 5G phone also has that extra 2GB of RAM, which can brand a small-scale difference in twenty-four hour period-to-day, real-world apply.

Gaming on the Nord N200 requires you to drop many settings down to depression or medium at best. Genshin Bear on, one of the most taxing games on the Play Shop, struggled to hit a reasonable frame rate. It's not the end of the world, simply don't wait the Nord N200 to be a mobile gaming powerhouse. It's not congenital for that.

Of course, when it comes to performance in the sub-$500 category, we can't forget virtually the iPhone SE (2020). It packs the A13 Bionic processor which admittedly stomps whatsoever Snapdragon in this toll range — hell, information technology can go toe-to-toe with Qualcomm's all-time system-on-chips. If you're platform-agnostic, then the iPhone SE is the best option if y'all want the best performance for the least amount of money.

In benchmarks, the Nord N200 scored one,602 in multicore in Geekbench 5. The pricier Pixel 4a with its Snapdragon 730G scored 1,647 in multicore, while the iPhone SE managed a whopping iii,226. The SE besides handily trounce the Nord N200 in the 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited examination, where the Nord N200 managed but 5.eight frames per second. Compare that to the iPhone SE's 47.9 fps.

It'south the same story we've been telling since Apple surprised everyone with the iPhone SE concluding twelvemonth. While at that place are comparable experiences at or beneath $400 in Android land, people wanting the most out of their phones ought to expect to the SE. That said, phones like the Nord N200 handle most daily tasks. Other than games, the phone only actually struggled with rapid photography, where I noticed lag when clicking the shutter button multiple times in quick succession.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Battery life and charging

With a v,000 mAh battery, the OnePlus Nord N200 ought to last for a long time on a charge. That's true, though it falls brusque of the devices on our all-time phone bombardment life listing. The 90Hz display impacts the longevity a little bit, though not as much as you might think.

In the Tom'southward Guide battery test, where a phone is left to reload spider web pages endlessly over a cellular connection until it runs out of ability, the Nord N200 managed 10 hours and 28 minutes in its default 90 Hz way. Setting the display to 60Hz improved that time to 10 hours and 36 minutes. With that in mind, y'all'll get more enjoyment out of the phone if you leave information technology at 90Hz since it makes a negligible divergence in overall battery life.

Being a upkeep-friendly device, the Nord N200 does non feature OnePlus' hallmark Warp Charge technology, which charges your phone blazingly fast. Instead, yous get support for 18W wired charging, which got a drained N200 back to 32% after xxx minutes of charging.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Software

The Nord N200 comes with Android 11 out of the box, with OnePlus' popular OxygenOS eleven software on pinnacle of Google'southward OS. With OxygenOS, you get access to several customization options, a peachy default launcher, and an indescribable level of refinement. Information technology's basically the same software feel as the much more expensive OnePlus nine Pro.

OnePlus has said that the Nord N200 volition receive a single OS upgrade, which means that this phone won't see Android 13 and beyond. I railed against Motorola for this in the Moto G Stylus 5G review and I won't give OnePlus a pass, either. But put, limited software support for cheaper Android phones is bad and these companies should be ashamed.

While the Nord N200 is an excellent value overall, the Pixel 4a or iPhone SE enjoy longer support (especially in the iPhone'south case). Considering that the Nord N200 will simply see Android 12 afterward this twelvemonth (plus iii years of security patches, apparently), I struggle to restrain my distaste for seeing what is otherwise an excellent telephone go less than a yr of platform back up.

OnePlus hasn't fifty-fifty committed to three years of platform and iv years of security updates for the flagship nine series, unlike like Google and Samsung. I suppose that I can't that I'k surprised that OnePlus has called such a lazy update policy for the Nord N200.

OnePlus Nord N200 5G review: Verdict

For $240, the OnePlus Nord N200 delivers a lot of phone — it's likewise the all-time 5G value available in the US. That said, OnePlus' latest has noticeable flaws, especially with its cameras. The secondary and third lenses are deadline useless and the Nord N200'southward main shooter struggles to not blow its photos out. The selfie cam is too just not good and video recording quality is mediocre.

Operation is underwhelming and OnePlus has decided on a shoddy update schedule. Still, for $240, this telephone exceeded many of my expectations going in. It looks nice, information technology'southward congenital well, and it has a good display. You get sub-6GHz 5G, as well.

Plainly, the N200 won't perform to the same level every bit more expensive phones, so I would strongly encourage you to save up the extra cash for a Pixel 4a or iPhone SE (or a Pixel 5a if that phone arrives in a few months every bit expected). Both phones are superior in virtually ways, especially the cameras, and they'll both be supported for a while, far longer than the Nord N200 will be. The merely things they lack are 5G and a 90Hz display, neither of which seem like compelling advantages for the Nord N200 in comparing.

Then once again, those phones toll at least $110 more than the Nord N200, so if upkeep is your primary business concern, the Nord N200 5G is your best bet. Information technology delivers a lot of college-class features for less than $300 and we should applaud OnePlus for that accomplishment.

Jordan is the Phones Editor for Tom'southward Guide, covering all things phone-related. He'south written about phones for over 5 years and plans to proceed for a long while to come up. He loves nothing more than relaxing in his home with a book, game, or his latest personal writing project. Hashemite kingdom of jordan likes finding new things to dive into, from books and games to new mechanical keyboard switches and fun keycap sets. Jordan tends to lurk on social media, but you lot can best reach him on Twitter.

Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/oneplus-nord-n200-5g

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