The OnePlus Nord 5 does exactly what the company’s Nord phones have always done: deliver strong specs at a relatively low price. It’s one of the more powerful phones at this price point and should easily outstrip Samsung and Google’s more expensive alternatives.

This is a function-over-form phone, one where the key selling points are a powerful processor and long battery life, which are the boring mainstays that tend to matter the most in midrange models like this. The problem for the Nord 5 is that other midrange phones in the markets where it’s available — including Europe and India, but not the US — offer even faster chipsets and bigger batteries, leaving the new OnePlus phone a little stranded and reliant on an above-average selfie camera to help it stand out.

Performance sits at the heart of the Nord 5 sales pitch. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 chipset was designed for more expensive phones than this, albeit when it launched a little over a year ago. Combined with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage in the base £399 / €449 (around $530) model, and 12GB RAM and 512GB storage for £100 / €100 (around $125) more, it offers potent specs for the price.

That lends itself well to gaming, which explains why OnePlus has opted for a display that’s big, bright, and fast: a 6.81-inch OLED panel with a 144Hz refresh rate. I’m still skeptical about such high refresh rates in phones — few games are ever going to break past 120fps anyway. OnePlus says it’s repositioned the antennae to perform better when the phone’s held in landscape mode for gaming, though manufacturers have been touting that sort of work for years.

Battery is the other half of the performance equation, and the 5,200mAh capacity here is good, too. I spent my first week with the phone traveling (which is how I discovered one annoyance: there’s no eSIM support), which is always demanding on power, and never felt much battery anxiety. It’ll last a day comfortably, and about halfway into a second, but I think you’d struggle to make a full two days without a top-up. The 80W wired charging delivers a full charge in 45 minutes, including bypass charging that powers the phone directly, without overcharging the battery, if you wanted to keep it plugged in during long gaming sessions. The major concession to price is that there’s no wireless charging.

The problem is that for all that power, this isn’t the most capable phone at this price point. The Poco F7 is slightly cheaper than the Nord 5 and comes with a better chipset, bigger battery, and faster charging. The OnePlus phone wins on refresh rate, but that’s hardly enough to make up for being comfortably less powerful elsewhere, meaning the F7 is still likely to hit higher frame rates during demanding games. Anyone looking for gaming performance first and foremost will likely be drawn to the F7, so what can the Nord 5 offer elsewhere to make up the difference?

The most unique element of the hardware is the Plus Key, a new button that replaces OnePlus’ traditional Alert Slider. This is a customizable key that, by default, does the same thing the Alert Slider did — it lets you cycle between ring, vibrate, and silent modes. But it can also be set to open the camera, turn on the flashlight, take a screenshot, and more. It’s not fully customizable, though, so you can’t set it to open any app or trigger custom functions.

The Plus Key can also be used to take a screenshot and add it to Mind Space, an AI tool that analyzes images to summarize them, create reminders, or generate calendar events. It’s remarkably similar to Nothing’s Essential Space, which does almost the same thing — also using a dedicated hardware key — but unlike Nothing’s version, you can’t add voice notes to give the AI more information, get summaries of longer audio recordings, or even open Mind Space itself using the Plus Key, so OnePlus’ take on the software is more basic.

There’s little else to complain about on the software side. The Nord 5 ships running OxygenOS 15, based on Android 15, and will get a respectable (but certainly not category-leading) four years of major OS updates and six years of security support. One extra bonus is easy wireless file-sharing between the phone and a Windows PC, Mac, iPad, or iPhone, though you’ll need to install the O Plus Connect software on the other device — and sadly, there’s no support for the full Mac remote control found on the OnePlus Pad 3.

OnePlus has made an unusual choice by prioritizing the phone’s selfie camera, which features a 50-megapixel sensor that’s larger than the average selfie cam. I’m not a natural selfie-taker, but the results are good and packed with detail. They’re not markedly better than rivals in normal lighting, but that’s because most phone cameras now handle daylight comfortably. The portrait mode is the only small weak point, struggling to separate the strands of my hair most of the time. But this camera comes into its own at night: the large sensor and fast f/2.0 aperture helping the Nord 5 to capture impressive detail in the dark, when most other selfie cameras fall apart. If you need a phone to capture you and your crew on nights out and at dimly lit dinners, this might be the one.

The main 50-megapixel rear camera is good but not great. It struggles with fast-moving subjects like pets and kids, and you’ll need a steady hand to get great shots at night, but that’s all typical for phones at this price. Colors tend to be a little oversaturated and artificial from this lens; the 8-megapixel ultrawide is more subdued but loses much more detail in shadowy spots.

The Nord 5 faces stiff competition on both sides. You could spend less for more power with the Poco F7 or spend £100 / €100 (around $125) more for Google’s Pixel 9A for comfortably better cameras, tougher water resistance, and more years of software support.

The Nord 5 isn’t a bad phone. But it’s unclear what its unique selling point is. OnePlus has leaned into power and performance, but it has been outplayed by Poco. The Pixel 9A, while more expensive, beats it on camera and design. Even its dedicated AI button is done better elsewhere, for less, in the Nothing Phone 3A. The Nord 5’s best hope for finding an audience is its selfie camera, which is better than any other phone around it, at least in low light. But as selling points go, that feels like a minor one.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge