OnePlus’ Summer Showcase event in Milan gave us a swathe of new hardware to be excited about, from smartphones to earbuds, a new watch, and a powerful new tablet, the OnePlus Pad 2. But I was most interested in spending some time testing out the new lead entry in the company’s Nord smartphone line.

Outside the US, the OnePlus Nord series has served as a great run of dependable and well-priced mid-range Android phones to date, with the numbered entries always heading up each generation’s line with the most aggressive price/performance balance. While the company kicked off this latest family of Nords with the OnePlus Nord CE 4 back in April and the Nord CE 4 Lite in June, July 16 served as the launch date for the debut of the most powerful entrant in 2024’s Nord lineup: the OnePlus Nord 4.

OnePlus says every Nord device needs to deliver in three key areas: design, cameras, and performance, but based on my initial encounter, the Nord 4 goes above and beyond, with notable battery and software offerings, too.

Outside of the odd ceramic-backed number, modern flagship-class phones all adopt a familiar layout: a metal frame sandwiched between a glass front and back. As you move down pricing tiers, the use of glass gives way to plastic before metal eventually does, too, so imagine my surprise when being presented with the OnePlus Nord 4.

The phone shuns convention, not only by maintaining a metal and glass construction but by actually reverting to a predominantly aluminum unibody punctuated by a glass “visor” along the top edge. The extra metalwork offers a pleasingly sturdy feel in the hand that reminds me of HTC’s once-great metal-bodied smartphones (pour one out for the HTC One series), while the glass visor adds a pleasant textural contrast that also feels reminiscent of Google’s Pixel 2 design language.

The Nord 4 is also the thinnest in the series to date, at 7.99mm, while the company had to rethink the motherboard and antenna construction to allow for 5G support in spite of the material choice (making this the only 5G-capable metal unibody smartphone, at the time of writing).

While dubbing the Nord 4’s colorways “Nordtones” does verge on the pretentious, the three finishes (Obsidian Midnight, Mercurial Silver, and Oasis Green) go beyond a flat color swap, with more interesting texture and tone, especially the silver option, which boasts a contoured finish, reminiscent of a rippled Tumi suitcase or a vintage Braun electric razor.

While AI is dotted throughout the Oxygen OS-based user experience, on the Nord 4, a focus has been placed on the photographic experience. Like the CE 4 and CE 4 Lite, the Nord 4’s camera system leads with a 50MP Sony LYT600 sensor, bolstered by OIS (optical image stabillization) and EIS (electronic image stabilization). It’s really post-capture where AI is added to the formula, though, with a suite of what look to be tailor-made AI tools designed to rival the Pixel line’s photographic smarts.

At launch, I was able to try AI Eraser, which isn’t that dissimilar from the feature found on OPPO’s phones, and even the Pixel’s own Magic Eraser, doing a passable job of hiding unwanted elements in a shot, with a tap, sketch or circle around them. AI Smart CutOut 2.0 works pretty reliably, too, letting you long-press on a subject in an image for it to be isolated, giving you the option to turn it into a standalone image in its own right or a sticker for use in messaging apps (just like Live Stickers on iOS).

More advanced AI-supported features, like AI Best Face (which can open a subject’s shut eyes in a group shot, for example) and AI ClearFace, are set to arrive on the Nord 4 via a software update in the near future.

The original Nord arrived with the then-excellent Qualcomm-made Snapdragon 765G, while the Nord 2 and 3 have both packed in chipsets from rival MediaTek. Although the Dimensity 1200 and 9000 proved to be competent pieces of silicon, the Taiwanese company’s hardware has often lagged behind equivalent offerings from Qualcomm, which is why OnePlus’ decision to return to the fold feels like the right call.

The Nord 4 is one of the only phones out there right now toting a Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3 SoC, with cursory benchmarks suggesting it approaches a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in terms of CPU, with superior GPU performance to a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1. It also packs a pleasing level of additional oomph over the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 found inside the OnePlus Nord CE4.

Paired with the phone’s 120Hz display, the phone feels rapid from the outset, plus OxygenOS includes tools like RAM Booster and the company’s Trinity Engine to keep storage, memory and compute in the best shape they can be over time.

As well as optimizations like the Trinity Engine, the Nord 4 goes the extra mile by upping its software support promise to four years of OS updates and six years of security patches. That’s an additional year over even the company’s current flagship — the OnePlus 12 — and narrows the gap with Android market leaders Google and Samsung, both of which top out at seven years of support (in the case of Samsung, that’s only for the Galaxy S24 series, lower-end devices get four and five years respectively, meaning they’re behind the Nord 4).

While the Nord 4 doesn’t come with a charger in-box in most markets, it does boast particularly strong battery chops. That unibody conceals a sizable 5,500mAh battery, backed up by 100W SuperVOOC fast wired charging, that the company promises means a full recharge in less than 30 minutes.

More than that, the Nord 4’s cell has reportedly been independently stress-tested (by TUV SUD) to last some 1,600 charge cycles, before retaining 80% of the battery’s original capacity. That’s equivalent to four years of repeated charging and way above anything you’ll see from rivals like Apple.

The OnePlus Nord 4 makes a strong first impression with its bold colorways and predominantly metal design. The underlying software experience is familiar to anyone who’s used an Oxygen OS phone of late, but that’s a good thing. Not to mention the suite of expanding AI tools that augment the experience and give the phone a more premium feel than its standing may suggest.

The software support promise is particularly impressive, while technical aspects of the phone, like its sizeable fast-charging battery and optimization features, instill further confidence in OnePlus’s value-for-money offering.

The biggest question mark I have is how well those cameras handle. The AI photography tools are useful, but OnePlus has only recently been able to rival its main competitors in the photography department in the flagship space. Now it’s a case of seeing whether that competency has made it to this newest Nord.

The OnePlus Nord 4 was made available for pre-order at launch on July 16, going on sale on August 8. It arrives in two memory/storage variants: a 12GB RAM/256GB model, priced at £429/€499 (~$556) and a 16GB RAM/512GB build, costing £529/€599 (~$686) in the UK and Europe. A release in other markets — including the US — is still to be confirmed, but based on previous Nord launches, we don’t expect this model to hit North America.