Back in 2020, OnePlus’s strategy started to change, and the Chinese company is still moving around as it tries to figure out how to make its products more stable in Europe and North America. In the US, OnePlus sells its flagship phone, the 10 Pro, as well as the N200 5G and the new N20 5G.
The N20 5G costs $282 and is in a part of the US prepaid market that is very competitive. The Nord N20 5G is only sold by T-Mobile and Metro in North America. However, it is the same phone as the Oppo Reno7Z 5G, which is widely available in other markets. The Nord N20 has a brighter AMOLED screen with an in-screen scanner, a bigger battery, and a slimmer design than its predecessor. The N20 5G loses the 8MP ultrawide camera, but it keeps the 64MP main camera and the 2MP monochrome and macro shooters.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]It also changes the size of the battery and adds a scanner in the screen, which is now possible because the screen is now AMOLED. Good tools sell. If a phone feels good in your hand, it’s easy to forget how cheap it is. OnePlus is betting on a sleek, matte-coated design for the Nord N20, with flattened edges that make it look like an iPhone 14.
When I held the phone, I was surprised at how strong and smooth the plastic felt. Not only is it less slippery than handhelds with glossy backs, but the coating also hides fingerprints and smudges well. The fact that the device is only 7.5 mm thick also helps. This makes it one of the thinnest phones on the market.
Most of the ports and housings you’d expect to find on a cheap OnePlus are on the Nord N20’s edges. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack, a slot for a microSD card, a USB-C port, and some side buttons that are very fun to click. But, like the Nord N10 5G from last year, this device doesn’t have the well-known OnePlus alert slider.
The OnePlus N20 5G comes with Android 11/Oxygen OS 11.3, which is a “older” version compared to the newer Android 12. Usually, I’d say this is a weakness, but in the case of OnePlus, it might be a good thing, since recent changes to Oxygen OS have been controversial now that it shares a codebase with Oppo’s Color OS and has a similar feel.
Even just getting to the “app info” pane to fix problems is a pain on the most recent version of OnePlus’s software. OnePlus says that the N20 5G’s battery lasts “all day,” but that’s not true—it lasts more like three days. In the past few months, used the phone on and off, Even if you’re really hard on your phone, you should be able to break 6+ hours of screen-on time per day at the very least, and you’ll have to be doing a lot of power-intensive things to get that low.