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

OnePlus is finally bringing its new, cheaper “Nord” line to the US in the next two weeks, complete with real US prices. The most interesting is the OnePlus Nord N100, a $ 180 phone that comes with a 90 Hz screen, an incredible price, considering some companies still sell $ 1,100 smartphones that only have 60Hz screens.

That 90 Hz screen for an extremely low price looks cool, but it comes with a number of caveats. First, this is a 720p 90Hz display. Second, it is an LCD instead of the normal OLED. But hey, for $ 180, you have to make some sacrifices in the name of speed.

The full specifications of the N100 include a 6.52-inch, 1600 × 720 90Hz LCD, a Snapdragon 460 (which is an 11nm eight-core SoC with four 1.8 GHz Cortex-A73 CPUs and four 1-A53s, 8 GHz), 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of UFS 2.1 storage and a good size 5000mAh battery. The phone has a capacitive rear fingerprint reader, a USB-C port, a headphone connector, a microSD slot and stereo speakers. Unfortunately there is no NFC and, with an LCD, you won’t have an always-on display. Also in this price range, you can also forget about sophisticated extras like water resistance or wireless charging.

For real cameras, there is a 13 MP rear camera and an 8 MP front camera. There are also two other rear cameras that we will file as “purely decorative”: a 2 MP “macro” camera and a 2 MP “bokeh” camera. Just as there are cars with fake exhausts, fake spoilers, fake windows and fake openings, now there are phones with cameras that are essentially useless because of their appearance and marketing.

The big drawback is the upgrade plan, which is a new low point for OnePlus: the company announced that the N100 will not be upgraded beyond the current Android 11 operating system. The phones are being released with Android 10, they will be updated with Android 11 and OnePlus will be ready with major updates. For a phone that was supposed to ship with Android 11 three months ready to use, it’s basically zero years of major updates. The phone will also not receive monthly security updates as they are released; instead, OnePlus is promising two years of security updates at a semi-regular, not monthly, pace.

This is a cheaper phone, but the new OnePlus update policy seems like a big pivot for a company that was previously the fastest third-party OEM when it came to sending important Android updates. HMD offers two years of major updates and three years of monthly security updates, even on the $ 1.3 Nokia 1.3. For $ 80 more, it looks like OnePlus should be able to do the same.

List image by OnePlus