It has a display of 6.43-inch AMOLED screen, looks good as well. Some of Samsung’s Galaxy A series phones already have them. The 60Hz refresh rate of the N20 5G makes me miss the 90Hz panels that OnePlus has used on most of its phones in recent years.
This is especially true when scrolling through websites with lots of text or even when opening the app tray. Even phones that cost less than $200, like the TCL XE 30 5G, have displays that move at 90Hz. TikTok or YouTube, on the other hand, worked fine on the OnePlus even when the battery was low.
The OnePlus N20 5G’s design is inspired by a lot of different things, but it doesn’t look or feel like a OnePlus phone. It’s almost completely different from the OnePlus N10 5G that came before it, except for the blue colorway. Parts of the design, like the accent strip on the bottom back and the flat, rounded frame, remind of the iPhone 5.
One of the best things about the N20 is that it has a good fingerprint sensor built right into the screen. It works quickly and reliably, even when your hands are wet or you’re outside in the bright sun. Having to deal with a broken fingerprint reader a hundred times a day is annoying, and a good in-display sensor in a phone that costs less than $300 is very rare.
The Nord N20 5G has a midrange Snapdragon 695 5G chipset, which is a step up from the budget-level Snapdragon 400-series and MediaTek 700-series chips that are usually found in this class. It also comes with 6GB of RAM, which is more than the 4GB that most cheap phones have.
With its 4500mAh battery, the Nord N20 can easily last two days, with about 50% charge left at the end of the first day if we started out with a full charge. When the battery gets too low to be comfortable, the fast-charging tech will save the day. The charger that came with the phone will give it about 20% more power in 15 minutes.
The phone is also a little let down by its average camera system, which looks great but doesn’t do much else. Photos look very different in the viewfinder than they do after being processed by the phone.
This makes it hard to tell if a shot will get much better or much worse after you press the shutter button, and we could have done without the gimmicky macro camera. OnePlus could have made photography a lot better if it had put all of its attention on one 64MP camera, but the way it is now leaves a lot to be desired.
The OnePlus Nord N20 is a great budget 5G phone that costs less than $300. Even though the camera isn’t very good, the smooth performance and bright, punchy OLED screen make up for it. There are three cameras on the back. The Nord N20 offers a lot for a very low price.