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

OnePlus is lastly bringing its new, cheaper “Nord” line to the US over the subsequent two weeks, full with precise US costs. Probably the most attention-grabbing is the OnePlus Nord N100, a $180 cellphone that comes with a 90Hz show, a fairly unimaginable worth level contemplating some firms nonetheless promote $1,100 smartphones that solely have 60Hz shows.

That 90Hz show for a super-low worth sounds neat however comes with a whole lot of caveats. To start with, it is a 720p 90Hz show. Second, it is an LCD as a substitute of the standard OLED. However hey, for $180, it’s a must to make some sacrifices within the title of velocity.

The complete N100 specs embrace a 6.52-inch, 1600×720 90Hz LCD, a Snapdragon 460 (that is an 11nm, eight-core SoC with 4 1.8GHz Cortex-A73 CPUs and 4 1.8GHz A53s), 4GB of RAM, 64GB of UFS 2.1 storage, and a nice-sized 5000mah battery. The cellphone has a rear capacitive fingerprint reader, a USB-C port, a headphone jack, a microSD slot, and stereo audio system. Sadly there is not any NFC, and with an LCD, you will not be getting an always-on show mode. Additionally at this worth level, you can too neglect about fancy extras like water resistance or wi-fi charging.

For actual cameras, there’s one 13MP rear digicam and one 8MP entrance digicam. There are additionally two different rear cameras we will file below “purely ornamental”: a 2MP “macro” digicam and a 2MP “bokeh” digicam. Simply as there are cars with faux exhausts, faux spoilers, faux home windows, and pretend vents, there at the moment are telephones with primarily ineffective cameras for the sake of seems to be and advertising and marketing.

The large draw back is the replace plan, which is a brand new low for OnePlus: the corporate introduced the N100 won’t get updated past the present Android 11 OS. The telephones are launching with Android 10, they’re going to be introduced up-to-date with Android 11, after which OnePlus is finished with main updates. For a cellphone that ought to be launching with the three-month-old Android 11 out of the field, that is principally zero years of main updates. The cellphone additionally will not get month-to-month safety updates as they’re launched, as a substitute OnePlus is promising two years of safety updates at a semi-regular, not-monthly tempo.

This can be a cheaper cellphone, however OnePlus’ new replace coverage appears like a significant pivot for a corporation that beforehand was the fastest third-party OEM when it got here to delivery main Android updates. HMD gives two years of main updates and three years of month-to-month safety updates, even on the $100 Nokia 1.3. For $80 extra, it appears like OnePlus ought to be capable of do the identical.

Itemizing picture by OnePlus