The OnePlus Nord 4 has one incredible retro design feature
The latest OnePlus phone is designed to take on the very top mid-range phones around
The OnePlus Nord 4 is an extremely smart-looking mid-range smartphone – but it has a fancy design trick up its sleeve. The body of the phone is all-metal, something we haven’t seen for a while on a phone. It has a full metal unibody. All its specs and details are now official.
The Nord 4 is availabke from £429/€499 for the 12GB RAM/256GB storage version and £529/€599 for 16GB RAM/512GB storage. Pre-orders are available now, with full availability from 8 August.
Although you wouldn’t necessarily expect it at this price point, the metal unibody means no wireless charging – partly responsible for the move to glass backs on phones in recent times. There is some glass on the back of this phone though – surrounding the camera lenses.
Another reason phones have increasingly been backed by glass is for antenna performance and OnePlus says it has had to come up with a unique design for the antenna in this device. And in turn that has had a knock-on effect on the horizontal camera arrangement.
The phone runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3 platform (the first phone to launch with it) and boasts a 6.74in 1.5K 120Hz AMOLED display. The camera setup is a little limited but what you’d expect from a mid-range phone with 50+8MP rear snappers and a 16MP unit on the front. There’s a 5500mAh battery so longevity should be good – 100W charging is also on board.
The 7.9mm-thick phone is available in silver, black and a now-traditional OnePlus green colour, here known as Oasis Green. The different colours feature different finishing treatments. The midnight colour is brushed metal, whereas the silver is laser-etched,
The Nord 4 was officially launched alongside the upscale OnePlus Pad 2, lighter OnePlus Watch 2R and Nord Buds 3 Pro at an event in Milan today.
The company also revealed that OnePlus Nord 4 and Pad 2 will come with various AI tools including the new AI Best Face for fixing group selfies where someone has their eyes shut, for example. There are also AI enhanced writing tools and the ability to summarise info from various apps.
As with other recent OnePlus devices, the Nord 4 features OnePlus’ Trinity Engine for long-term day-to-day performance and Battery Health Engine to maximise short and long-term battery life. There’s also Aqua Touch from the OnePlus 12, enabling you to more easily use your phone in the rain (it’s IP65 rated, too)
OnePlus has also improved its update guarantee – you now get four years of full Android updates and six years of security updates. That’s the most the company has ever offered but it still doesn’t match Google’s seven years of updates for new Pixel phones.
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief 
