Smartphone prices have been going up, similar to many other industries, thanks to the memory and storage cost increases. At the same time, we have been doing battery tech improvements with bigger sizes fitting in slim profiles. The new OnePlus Nord CE6 also follows these points—during my usage of the device, its price went up from ₹29,999 and ₹32,999 to ₹31,999 and ₹34,999 (before offers) for the base and higher-end models, respectively.
The phone follows a familiar OnePlus design with curved edges, a squarish camera setup at the back and a polycarbonate body with a brushed aluminium look back (it's still polycarbonate) that feels decent in the hand. The display has a 19.6:9 aspect ratio, with the right side featuring the volume buttons and power/lock key at the top half; while the bottom houses the one outlet for loudspeakers, primary mic, USB type C port and dual SIM card tray slot. The device weighs about 215grams while measuring around 0.34 inches in thickness.
The 6.78-inch FHD+ (2772x1272) AMOLED supports up to 144Hz refresh rates. This is a quality display that's bright, usable outdoors under sunlight and gives decent viewing angles. It handles high-resolution videos well, retaining sharpness and not struggling with colours.
The phone is running on Android 16-based OxygenOS 16.0.5 with the March security patch installed. It is equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7S Gen 4 chipset (up to 2.7 GHz octa-core processor, Adreno 810 GPU) along with 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB or 256GB UFS3.1 internal storage.
In terms of day-to-day handling of tasks, scrolling through social media apps, watching YouTube videos, messaging, video calling or Zoom calls, the phone handled it without any hiccups. I also didn't notice frame rates dropping while switching between apps or while watching YouTube videos in PiP mode while having another app open in the background.
In terms of gaming, you can expect to play CoD: Mobile at 90FPS smoothly, but playing more graphics-intensive games, such as Wuthering Waves, shows the ceiling of the device as it starts to drop frames with jittery gameplay, giving out mostly 40-45FPS, which isn't unexpected. But it can handle less intensive games such as Asphalt or CoD, as mentioned earlier.
For its camera performance, this was by far the most disappointing thing about the Nord CE6 during my usage. The rear features a 50MP (f/1.8) main camera and a 2MP (f/2.4) secondary camera. The phone is okay at taking stills for subjects in decent light, but most of the time, it struggles to capture colours and even contrast for the subject.
Though the last update helped with the sharpness and skin tones, it still oddly struggles to give colour reproduction and that richness that you might be looking for in a device at this price point these days. The front-facing 32MP (f/2.0) is quite good in terms of taking detailed selfies with very little shutter lag. It also does a good job for video calls indoors, keeping colours intact.
The Nord CE6 has really good stereo speakers with decent depth and sufficient loudness for watching videos or playing games indoors. 5G network reception in the device is satisfactory, though not quite the best I have seen from a Nord CE device, but still good enough most of the time. Call quality is also good with clear audio on the other end.
Last, but certainly not least, the 8,000mAh battery. This is, unsurprisingly, a big selling point of the device that does work, too. In general, you can expect the phone to last two days on a single full charge. Very rarely did I find it requiring charging by around the middle of the second day. The 80watts SuperVooc charger can charge it from 1 per cent to full in a little under 2 hours with no major heating issues.
Wrapping this up, the Nord CE6 is quite clearly a device for those who value battery life and display with a simple design in place. On the other hand, if you value your cameras more, you might want to look somewhere else.