OnePlus Nord 3 Review: Flagship performance for half the price

Let me start with the battery. The Nord 3 comes equipped with the same 5,000 mAh battery as its flagship cousin, and it is exceptional. I recently had eye surgery, and while I wait for my eyes to recover completely, I need all my devices at full brightness in order to be able to see what's on screen. So I turned off auto brightness and, with heavy usage all day, the phone still had about 30 percent in the tank before I plugged it in to charge overnight.

Also, I cranked up the refresh rate to the maximum of 120 Hz, which can't have been easy on the battery, but the way it held up was impressive. Plus, should you drain your battery the included 80W SUPERVOOC charger will charge your phone from 0-100% in about 30 minutes.

This brings us to perhaps the most crucial component in a smartphone — the screen. The Nord 3 boasts a 6.74-inch AMOLED display that supports an adaptive refresh rate from 40-120 Hz, and HDR 10+ support. The screen is bright, the colours are punch — with options for your to tweak it to suit your preferred colour profile — and it is generally a pleasure to look at. With a 93.5 percent screen-to-body ratio, the Nord 3 is nearly all-screen, with uniformly slim bezels all around and a hole-punch selfie camera cutout.

The Nord 3 is equipped with a 50-megapixel primary lens, an 8 MP ultrawide shooter, and a 2 MP macro camera. On the front is a 16 MP selfie camera. The cameras do a commendable job, especially with Auto HDR turned on. Sample the photo below — on an overcast day, the Nord 3 captures sufficient detail in the shadows and brightness, without over- or underexposing any image — too much. There's plenty of detail, too.

(Image: Vijay Anand)

The Nord 3 is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 chipset — the same as on the OnePlus Pad — and my review unit came equipped with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of non-expandable storage. You have the option of allocating an additional 12 GB from your storage as Virtual RAM, which in effect gives you 28 GB of RAM and about 240 GB on onboard storage. That makes for a buttery smooth experience. In my roughly two weeks using this phone, I have yet to experience a single lag, judder, or app crash.

The Nord 3 comes with Oxygen OS 13.1 — OnePlus' version of Android 13 — out of the box, and has several nifty features, such as omoji (similar to Apple's memoji), floating windows — which are basically fully interactable apps that open in a small window while you're using another app — and more. All these combined make for a fresh, fun experience; perhaps even on par with OneUI 5.1 or the Pixel's stock Android.

For its price, the OnePlus Nord 3 is a compelling choice — it has flagship-level performance without compromising on too many features. Until another phone comes along to dethrone it, the Nord 3 will be my go-to recommendation for anyone looking to buy a phone in the mid-range price bracket.