On July 8th, OnePlus has introduced five new products: the midrange Nord 5 phone and a smaller variant of its Watch 3 wearable. The new products are the 43mm Watch 3 and the brand-new Buds 4 earbuds, which are launching in the US; the rest will be available in Europe and India.
The Watch 3 43mm is literally what it poses to be: a smaller size of the already available OnePlus smartwatch that was only available in the 47mm version. It was one of the “big design complaints” that my colleague Victoria Song had with the original Watch 3, so it is good to see that it is solved. The angular parts that surround the rotating crown and button are also abandoned in favor of a more simple, circular shape that is less attention catching, but something I like better.
The small size has a trade off on battery. OnePlus claims that the Watch 3 is 7 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the original one, yet it has only half the battery life. It may remain 60 hours on default settings, but is nothing like the 120 hours battery life that was amongst the selling points the first time. That is even though it has a significantly less bright screen, at 1,000 nits peak brightness, compared to 2,200 nits on the 47mm model.
Like in the previous version, it is based on Wear OS, and it has the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 as the main processor, but it also has a second low-power chip, which will assist in battery life. It has some new features as well, including reproductive cycle tracking, and an overhauled version of its so-called Wellness score, claiming to use the watch barometer to judge how tired you are and display an emoji to reflect that.
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Starting today, the Watch 3 43mm can be purchased on the OnePlus site at a price of $299.99, or 100 dollars lower than the more significant model, and will come to Amazon and Best Buy in August. In Europe it will cost you 299 / 269 Euro.
The other release of the US is the Buds 4, which are new cheap earbuds. These are available in green or gray and support Hi-Res and spatial audio and are powered by dual 11mm and 6mm drivers in each bud. The touch controls are a bit concave and I like having that so I can more easily sense where I should swipe and tap. In the US, they sell at a price of $129.99, whereas in Europe they go for a price of 119 euros / 119 pounds.
Among the other launches, the Nord 5 is its highlight, which will not arrive in the US. The phone is priced at 449 euros / 399 pounds and will be released across Europe as a midrange phone using the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3. It has an obvious focus on gaming, with a 144Hz OLED screen, and also a surprisingly competent 50-megapixel selfie camera. This one is supposed to be kids.
It is a large phone, at 6.83 inches it is quite big, but it is also relatively thin and light, so does not feel as bulky as it might otherwise be by spending some time testing the phone as of now. It is also the second model after the Asia-exclusive OnePlus 13S (the 13T in China) to do away with the company traditional Alert Slider and replace it with a Plus Key button. This may be as customized as you like, but by default it triggers (guess what?) AI stuff. I have the Nord 5 under review and we will have a full verdict of the phone soon.
It is accompanied by the Nord CE 5, a handset that costs 349 / 299 and also looks like the Nord but makes all sorts of trade-offs. It is slightly smaller, has a 6.77-inch display and is powered by a slower MediaTek Dimensity 8350 Apex chipset. It has worse resolution, refresh rate, and peak brightness, and the camera specs are less impressive as well, but at least it has the same 5,200mAh battery and 80W charging speed as the Nord 5, and an equally enticing four years of OS updates. I would spend slightly more money on Nord 5 in case you can afford it.
Lastly, the Pad Lite is an affordable version of the OnePlus tablets. I am disappointed by the fact that it sports the ugly circular camera design of the older Pads (which has since been changed on the recent Pad 3) but otherwise there is a lot to like at the price. It features an 11-inch, 2K screen (it is only 90Hz though), and a sufficiently large 9,340mah battery. It costs only 229 / 199, but an additional 30 / 30 euros will give you more RAM, twice the storage and LTE compatibility which sounds like a good deal.
Source: Verge
