OnePlus brings a 90Hz smartphone to the US for $ 180

OnePlus will finally bring its new, cheaper “Nord” line to the US over the next two weeks, complete with real US prices. The most interesting is the OnePlus Nord N100, a $ 180 phone with a 90Hz screen, considering a reasonable price point. some companies still sells $ 1100 smartphones that only have 60Hz screens.

The 90Hz screen for a very low price sounds neat, but has many caveats. In the first place, it is a 720p 90Hz screen. Second, it’s an LCD instead of the usual OLED. But hey, for $ 180, you have to make sacrifices in the name of speed.

The full N100 specs include a 6.52-inch, 1600 × 720 90Hz LCD, a Snapdragon 460 (this is an 11 nm, eight-core SoC with four 1.8 GHz Cortex-A73 processors and four 1, 8 GHz A53s), 4 GB RAM, 64 GB UV 2.1 storage, and a nice size 5000mah battery. The phone has a rear capacitive fingerprint reader, a USB-C port, a headphone jack, a microSD slot and stereo speakers. Unfortunately, there is no NFC, and with an LCD screen you do not get an always-on-screen mode. At this price point, you can also forget about fine extras like water resistance or wireless charging.

For real cameras, there is one 13MP rear camera and one 8MP front camera. There are also two other rear cameras that we are going to install under ‘purely decorative’: a 2MP “macro” camera and a 2MP “bokeh” camera. Just as there are cars with fake outlets, fake spoilers, fake windows and fake vents, there are also phones with virtually useless cameras for the sake of appearance and marketing.

The biggest downside is the update plan, which is a new low for OnePlus: the company has announced that the N100 will not update further than the current Android 11 operating system. The phones are launched with Android 10, they are notified of Android 11 and then OnePlus is done with major updates. For a phone that should launch automatically with the three-month-old Android 11, it’s basically zero years of major updates. The phone also does not get monthly security updates as it is released, but OnePlus promises two years of security updates at a semi-regular, non-monthly rate.

It’s a cheaper phone, but OnePlus’ new update policy feels like a major pivot for a company that was previously the fastest third-party OEM when it shipped major Android updates. HMD offers two years of major updates and three years of monthly security updates, even on the $ 1.3 Nokia. For $ 80 more, it feels like OnePlus should be able to do the same.

List by OnePlus