OnePlus Nord N100 Review | How Good is the $179 OnePlus Phone? By InsideTech

We almost just accept now that phones cost a thousand dollars, and it's easy to forget that that's only for the flagship models, the very best on the market. There are plenty of cheaper mid-range and budget-priced options that even share some of the same flagship features as those top tier phones. But just how good is a budget priced smartphone in 2021 today, we'll be looking at one that I've been using this year. The OnePlus word n100 this recently released smartphone is the cheapest option in the OnePlus word family, retailing for just 179, so in this video I'll be covering all the specs and features how these compare to a flagship phone and what it's like using a budget priced smartphone in 2021. Let's take a look initially, there's nothing to suggest this is a budget phone based on the packaging. The n100 is very nicely presented and comes with all the accessories.

You'd expect like the paperwork, the sim ejector tool, the classic red, OnePlus charging, cable and even an accessory. You might not expect because, unlike flagships in 2021, we still get the power adapter as well, but as soon as you get hold of the phone itself, you can immediately feel that this is a distinctively budget priced phone. This has an all plastic design, aside from the relatively weak gorilla glass 3 display, and although you can get some really premium, feeling plastics like with the Galaxy Note 20, for instance, that's not what we have here. It's a plastic frame and a thin and cheap plastic back which you can actually depress fairly easily with a bit of pressure and with the speakers playing at a medium to loud volume. You can also feel the vibrations rattling through the back.

This does make me question the long term durability of a phone like this, especially since there's also no water resistance here, and it's easy to forget that, as with phones of the past, you'll need to be careful using this out in the rain. I do, however, really like this midnight frost color, which is the only finish the n100 comes in. I think this is a really nice looking phone overall with a very minimal camera bump, and this matte texture makes it comfortable and easy to grip. You definitely put this in the large phone category, but is noticeably lightweight compared to the metal and glass phones of this size, the power button and volume rocker each give a nice and distinctive click when pressed. But sadly we don't have the alert slider here, which is a shame, because OnePlus are one of the few companies to include this handy feature in their phones.

The hybrid sim card tray can house either dual sims or a sim and expandable storage up to 256 gigs and, incidentally, the n100 comes with 64 gigabytes of base storage as the only option. We also have a stereo sound system with the front and bottom firing speakers, the USB c charging port and another feature. You won't find in a 2021 flagship, a three and a half millimeter headphone jack. The speakers get plenty loud enough for phone calls or films and sound okay, but having a headphone jack again really is a welcome feature. Samsung are going toe-to-toe with apple's AirPods Pro, with the release of their new noise.

Cancelling true wireless earbuds' galaxy butts pro they're, very similar to air pods in both their premise and the feature set, offering exclusive features to Samsung devices and new additions, like 360 degree audio. As for the display, this is a bit of a mixed bag. We have a flat 6.52 inch, all-screen design with a corner placed hole, punch which isn't too far off a flagship design. It's just a relatively large chin that gives it away. You'll find no fancy under display fingerprint sensor here, as the phone instead has a rear-facing sensor, we're used to seeing in older phones it's not the fastest or the most reliable in the world, but it works reasonably well and is placed where my finger naturally rests.

The screen specs are obviously lacking far behind a flagship phone, but it's a surprisingly bright and colorful display, and the most surprising addition to me is the 90 hertz refresh rate. The biggest drawbacks are one that this is an LCD panel as opposed to OLED, so the contrast and HDR is lacking, but also that this is only a 720p panel which you can really notice on a screen of this size. It's mostly luxury quality of life, perks that are missing here, though, and this display is perfectly usable, it just struggles outdoors in bright sunlight. You can still change up the display's white balance, including with some customizable knight and reading modes, and there's an ambient display mode that activates when you lift the phone as opposed to a full always-on display. The 90hz refresh rate is really the most puzzling part of this display and though, initially a welcome surprise for a budget phone, it quickly becomes clear that the processor just isn't up to supporting it.

So this phone is packing a snapdragon 460 chips with the arena 610 GPU, an entry level processor that definitely makes this phone feel like a budget device. You get hints of that super smooth, 90 hertz, refresh rate swiping between home screens, using the control center and browsing your apps in the switcher, but you'll often see the screen stuttering here and when scrolling through web pages and social media apps. It seems the CPU just can't keep up with the high refresh rate, and it makes you question why a high refresh rate was added here at all. The four gigabytes of ram feels pretty restrictive too. You'll often need to wait for your apps to refresh if you're, holding a little open in the background, and you'll also be met with some lag opening, apps loading web pages, and if you try to multitask, if you are hoping for high refresh rate gaming, you can just forget it.

Graphically intensive apps will just completely throttle this phone and only a very basic gaming experience is an offer here at best. If we look at the benchmark results, this is, unsurprisingly, a very low performer, pushing out a laughable one and a half frames per second average in the 3d benchmark test. And if I show you what the latest snapdragon chip clocks in at this should give you some context, so this phone is clearly geared towards a light user data. Transfer speeds will be considerably slower than flagship standards too, with the older UFS, 2.1 storage, no Wi-Fi, 6 and perhaps, most importantly, no 5g support. This probably won't be a dealbreaker to someone looking for a budget phone, but there are still budget phones out there with 5g.

If that's important to you, including the more powerful OnePlus word, the n100 does have Bluetooth 5, though so it should be absolutely fine to use with your wireless headphones streaming movies or music if you've used a flagship device from the past few years, you'll find the n100 painfully slow and the speed and performance above all else is what separates this phone from. Even the mid-ranges, let alone the flagships. Obviously you can't expect superfast performance for a phone at this price point, but the somewhat sluggish speed is something you'll notice. Every day. The boot time is fairly long.

Once you factor in the few minutes, the phone needs to fully wake up and reach full speed, and there is a slight keyboard lag. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice. As long as you can accept, you need to be a little patient with this phone. You should be absolutely fine, but otherwise you'll quickly find the n100 a frustrating device to use. As for the software, the phone is running oxygen, OS on android 10 and actually gives a pretty nice experience.

First, there is absolutely no bloatware here at all and oxygen. Os is certainly one of my favorite skins for having a very clean interface, there's quite a lot of customization offered here too, including dark themes, custom icons and also the popular navigation gestures from android 10. I personally find these a bit slow on this phone, so switch back to the classic buttons instead, but there's not really anything to complain about in terms of software. It is a shame not to have android 11 straight out of the box. I suppose, but this is going to be coming in the future, though.

Sadly, we won't be getting any more updates beyond this, so with limited software support and without features like ultra-wideband, Wi-Fi 6 and 5g, there isn't much feature-proofing with the n100 something else oxygen OS 10 brings is great battery optimization and paired with the huge 5000mah battery the n100 offers fantastic battery life. This is easily a two-day used phone and I could pretty comfortably reach a 10-hour screen on time. As long as I kept the screen brightness at a reasonable level. So this is one feature that not only competes with but exceeds the performance of many flagships. The fact that the processor essentially prevents you from using demanding battery intensive apps means you should get some perfect usage out of this phone and the battery life is perhaps the greatest strength of this phone overall there's no wireless charging here, which is a convenient feature I do miss and the 18 watt USB c charging is now slow compared to flagship standards.

But it's still plenty fast enough for most people and, as I said, the charger and cable do both come included in the box, despite being billed as having a triple lens camera setup. The n100s camera is probably not what you're expecting, and I'm sure many of you are wondering what the photos taken on a 180 smartphone. Actually look like the 13 megapixel main lens is the only one you need to worry about, because the 2 megapixel macro and the unusual both lens designed to enhance portraits, are both pretty redundant. Photos have an overly saturated and high contrast, look which makes for very colorful if not realistic, photos, autofocus isn't especially fast or accurate and there's a distinct lack of sharpness here too. But the defining characteristic is completely crushed black levels, a feat we saw glimpses of with the flagship OnePlus 8 last year.

The overly dark shadows create this high contrast, very processed look, and if we compare this to something like the galaxy s21 ultra, you can really see the difference in quality. Galaxy phones are by no means the king of true to live photos, but the difference in sharpness and dynamic range is pretty clear. Dynamic range, especially, is lacking from the n100 photos, but there is still a HDR mode which does a reasonable job of bringing down overexposed highlights and in these photos here you can see how HDR mode reveals the blue sky in the background, as you might expect, there's no night mode in this budget phone and since the main lens isn't especially wide in the first place. The camera does struggle in low light situations. So no surprises here.

The macro lens for me is almost pointless, and we've seen before how these cheap macro lenses are essentially only added to these phones, so that companies can claim stats like triple lens camera, but image quality is pretty poor. Photos are dark and noisy, and you're much better off, just taking shots on the main lens and then cropping in for a better effect. The s21 ultra doesn't even have a dedicated macro lens, but the software macro mode still gives much better quality results than the n100. And, finally, the portrait mode struggles as well, and the extra sensor, that's supposed to enhance portrait mode doesn't seem to have much of an effect. The phone just applies a blanket blur around the subject, regardless of the distance.

This does mean that the camera doesn't miss tricky areas like between my arms, but it's not a very natural look, and if we zoom in closer, you can see that it's actually really noisy and the colors are pretty poor as well, even in good lighting conditions. The video quality suffers quite a lot too, not just for the fact. It's capped at 1080p and 30 frames per second, but mainly because there's no optical image stabilization, so handheld video quickly becomes very shaky and unstable. There's a lack of sharpness again here, even factoring in the lower resolution, so don't expect any great results for video. The processor accounts for a lot of the camera's issues as well, not just with image processing, but also things like shutter lag, which overall mean this isn't a great camera.

But I don't think this is underperforming for a phone at this price and if you stick to the main camera and good lighting, you can still get some decent enough results. Comparisons to flagship cameras are only to give you a sense of context. No one is expecting a phone, almost a tenth of the prize to be competing here, but if you're looking for a relatively cheap phone but still want a decent camera, you're going to need to look into some mid-range options. Instead, the OnePlus word n100 is retailing for 179.99, placing it firmly in the budget price range it's less than 130 pounds in the UK, so it literally cost less than a pair of AirPods, and I think it's important to contextualize things before evaluating this phone. It gets a bad wrap for the relatively slow processor to which I can attest as well.

Having used so many faster phones this year, it does feel pretty slow, but I think the best alternatives are found in the next price category up you'll want to look in that three to four hundred dollar area for a noticeable step up in quality, with phones like the Pixel 4a, iPhone SE, and even the OnePlus word. The n100 is for those truly on a tight budget or who just need a day-to-day phone with a good-looking display who won't need to stress the performance. The OnePlus name lends not only some reassurance with reliability but means the phone is running a great version of android in oxygen OS and combining this with the fantastic battery life. I actually think there's pretty good value on offer here. But what do you think about the OnePlus word n100? Would you buy a phone costing 180, or do you think the specs just don't cut it in 2021 either way? Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you all in the next one.

You.

Source : InsideTech