OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite

Mobile phone design in 2023 and 2024 can best be summarised in a single word: predictable. There are few product segments where there is a similar amount of familiarity and less variation, and with the newly released OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite, OnePlus has also fallen into this trap. I usually like their ability to stand out a little with small simple innovations, but the look of this phone is not delivering that. It's not ugly, quite the opposite actually. It's minimalist and stylish, but also designed is such a dull manner that I fall asleep just trying to describe it. The OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite looks pretty much exactly like the iPhone 11, and while it can be argued that function always trumps form, this design style in general has made me relatively tired of the mobile market.

That said, there is no doubt that OnePlus has released another sensible budget solution for those who do not want to spend over £1,200 on an iPhone 15 Pro Max or even more for Samsung's latest effort. For £300 you get a quality phone through and through, and as usual, OnePlus has saved where they should save to be able to reduce price without skimping on necessary features. Of course this means you don't get the best screen, a better camera, an interesting form factor, or the best processor, but you do get a consistently good phone that easily tops its predecessor.

The heart here is the nearly three-year-old Snapdragon 695 processor, where there's no doubt in my mind that this chip still does an adequate job, to say the least. This phone feels fast and responsive and considering how dirt cheap the chip should be to manufacture these days, this is a clever choice. The screen, unlike its predecessor's LCD variant, has been replaced by OnePlus's clearly better OLED model that runs at 120Hz. This is very luxurious for a budget mobile phone. The fact that it is also perceived by me as extra bright for an OLED display in a mobile phone hardly makes matters worse. OnePlus claims it operates at 1,200 nits and it shows. At maximum brightness, this screen is more punchy than the screen in my much more expensive iPhone 14 Pro Max, which says a lot.

On the camera side, it's more frugal but still never bad. The main camera is 50 megapixels and the secondary lens is a monochrome variant that works with depth of field only. Does it produce incredible images that can compete with the best in the product segment? No. Will they be useable photos that represent the price of the mobile phone in the right way? Absolutely. In poor light, the picture and video becomes grainy and there is a lack of sharpness in everything, but I honestly think that is also the case with my considerably more expensive iPhone. It's probably more about the amount of light that these tiny sensors can pick up, rather than anything else.

The OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite can be fast-charged via OnePlus or rather Oppo's brilliant Supervooc technology but there is no charger included in the package, unfortunately. You'll need to buy an 80 Watt or 100 Watt charger to be able to cram full charge into the battery (which sits at 5110 mAh) in a flash.

Is it easy to like this phone? Yes, it is. I have no problem recommending it again this year to anyone who wants a quality gadget for a fraction of the price. I would have liked to see a new processor in this one though with support for Wi-Fi 6 and the new Bluetooth standard, but those are minor complaints about what is ultimately a great and competitively priced product.