This year is just three months old, and we have already seen some really good phones in the price segment of 25,000 rupees. For starters, we have the Poco X6 Pro, which launched in January and brings rock-solid performance. And then came the Nothingphone 2A in March, which brings standout design and a really premium user experience.
And now, the OnePlus Note CE4 is launching, and it’s going to take on the competition. Well, we have been testing the OnePlus Note CE4 for over two weeks now, and this is a full review. Apart from that, we’ll also be answering some of the questions that you guys asked us on X, so stick till the end and let’s get started. Starting off with the unboxing experience, you do feel pampered, as you get a lot of stuff here. The 100W SuperVOOC charging brick, red USB-A to USB-C cable, SIM ejector tool, pre-applied screen protector, a case, and of course, the phone itself. When I first took this phone out of the box, I absolutely loved the design. especially this marble looking back. Although it’s plastic, be it the back or the frame, the phone does look premium. It’s also not the thinnest, but it is quite light, even though it packs a 5500 mAh battery. Plus, it’s IP54-rated, so it can handle light splashes. Apart from that, you get an IR blaster on top along with all the usual stuff: a USB-C port, speaker grills, two microphones, volume and power buttons, and a dual SIM plus microSD slot. And if you’re looking for the alert slider, well, it’s not there. Even though it’s the most requested thing by OnePlus users, Okay, let’s talk about this display now. Note CE4 features a 6.7-inch 120Hz Full HD Plus AMOLED screen with HDR10 Plus support, an in-display fingerprint scanner that works quite fast and accurately, and twice-reinforced Pandaglass protection. The display has nice punchy colors thanks to the 10-bit panel, excellent contrast, and since it is HDR10 Plus certified, you can watch HDR content on YouTube and Netflix.
Now here’s a quick thing: the HDR support on Netflix was not showing earlier, but after an update, it got working. That said, the movie-watching experience on this phone is very good, with stereo speakers that can get quite loud and no distortion even at max volumes. There’s no Dolby Atmos support here, but you do get hollow audio for high-res surround sound. Also, the phone has an Aqua Touch display, which is something we have seen on OnePlus 12 series phones as well, and basically, this means that you can use the phone with wet fingers or in the rain. The screen is also pretty bright, and in our testing, we got a brightness rating of around 920 nits in HDR content, which is lower than the claimed 1100 nits, but it’s definitely bright enough for indoor and outdoor usage. The phone does automatically switch between 16, 90, and 120 Hz depending on the use case to save battery, but if you’re like me, you can just set it to always stay at 120 Hz and enjoy the buttery smooth experience, be it normal usage or heavy gaming.
Speaking of gaming, let’s talk about the performance as well. The Nord CE4 comes with a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, and this is paired with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and up to 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The performance here is quite good. In benchmarks, the Nord CE4 performs fairly well when compared with the Nothingphone 2A B18N2 or even in Geekbench, where the multi-core scores of the Nord CE4 are much higher than those of the Nothingphone 2A. However, the Poco X6 Pro with the Dimensity 8300 Ultra beats out both phones very easily in every single benchmark test. We also did a CPU throttling test, and in the 15-minute, 20-threaded test, the phone didn’t throttle much and maintained 89% peak performance capability. However, in the 60-minute, 100-threaded test, it did throttle down to 70%, which is also not bad enough. In terms of real-world usage, I did not encounter any issues, be it day-to-day usage, multitasking, browsing the internet, or doing all the things that you usually do. I also played a lot of games on this phone, and the performance is really good. In Genshin Impact, there were no lags or stutters in high plus 60 FPS, and the phone did not overheat even after an hour of gaming. I also tried BGMI with Ultra HDR and Ultra FPS settings, and the gameplay was smooth and nice without any issues. I also played COD Mobile, Honkai Starrail, and Asphalt 9, and there were absolutely no problems.
All the games ran fine without any frame drops or jitters. So yeah, the gaming experience on this phone is really good, but my only concern is that there’s no support for 90 FPS in games, which could have made things much better. Now that we have talked about performance, let’s check out the software. Well, you get OxygenOS 14 based on Android 14 here, which means a clean software experience without any ads or recommendations. There is almost no bloatware here other than Netflix and a few OnePlus apps, which you can uninstall if you don’t need them. The Nord CE4 also has the full version of Link to Windows, so you can even use your Android apps on your Windows PC. Plus, OnePlus has promised two OS updates and three years of security patches, while the competition provides three OS updates. So the software is pretty sorted, but what about the cameras? Let’s find out. The Nord CE4 has a dual rear camera setup with a 50-megapixel primary sensor with OIS and an 8-megapixel ultra-wide sensor. I took a lot of pictures with this phone, but the camera performance is sort of a mixed bag. In the daytime, the primary camera takes decent pictures with a good amount of detail. However, the colors are slightly faded out for some reason, as you can see. When it comes to photos of human subjects, the phone again takes decent photos, but there is some oversharpening here. I also took some portrait shots, and as you can see here, the blur kind of looks nice and the details are better.
But the edge detection is definitely not the best in the price range. In low light, the Nord CE4 isn’t as good as the Nothing Phone 2A, but it’s better than the Poco X6 Pro, which doesn’t seem to have very good low-light performance. In terms of video, the phone supports 4K 30fps videos with OIS, and the video quality here is good. On the front, you get a 16MP selfie camera, and selfies from Nord CE4 do look quite sharp and nice. You get good details, and the colors look nice too. You get portrait mode on the front camera as well, and yeah, in the daytime, these pictures look nice. However, in low light, the photos from the front camera are not as good as the other phones. In comparison with the phone 2A and the X6 Pro The Nord CE4 definitely lacks in the camera department, as you can see from these photos. Be it the daytime or low-light photos, both the phone 2a and the X6 usually perform better than the Nord CE4. However, we have seen similar things happen with the Oneplus Open LYT 808 sensor as well, which was quite bad initially but got better optimization with software updates. So I’m willing to give the Nord CE4 the benefit of the doubt here, and hopefully Oneplus will fix this too. If I have to put it in one sentence, I hope OnePlus fixes this with a software update.
Moving on, the Nord C E4 comes with a 5500mAh battery, and in my testing, I was getting a screen on time of around 6-7 hours while watching videos, movies, and playing games. With casual usage, this phone can easily last 1.5 days as the 100W Superbook charger takes the phone from 1 to 100% in just 30 minutes, which is quite impressive. There’s also WiFi 6 here, Bluetooth 5.4, and 7 5G bands. 7 5G bands is disappointing considering the Poco X6 Pro comes with 14 5G bands and the phone 2A comes with 13 5G bands. However, in my experience, the 5G connectivity is fine on this phone. In fact, I was getting good reception on Geo 5G even in places where I usually get the worst signal. Wi-Fi performance is also quite good. So before I conclude things, let me just answer the questions that you guys have asked us on Twitter. Unfortunately, like the Nord CE 3, the CE 4 does not have the alert slider. It is sad, but it is what it is. As for the HDR videos, I tried playing 1440p HDR videos. They worked perfectly well, but the 4K HDR videos were laggy and stuttery, so I really hope OnePlus fixes this with an update. We focused on the 5G reception for this video, but we also tested the 4G reception, and it was working really well. There were no call drops, no poor strength in the network, and everything was pretty smooth. And for the WiFi performance, as I mentioned earlier in the article, it was pretty solid. Well, we are working on a dedicated video comparing the Poco X6 Pro, the Note CE4, and the Nothingphone 2A. So subscribe if you haven’t already, because the results are quite surprising. The phone comes with UFS 3.1 storage and LPDDR4X RAM. As for the read-write speeds, here’s a screenshot of the read-write speeds that we got from Antutu. This is not a small phone. And if you have small hands like me, then finger gymnastics are required.
Okay, it’s time for the verdict. Should you buy the Nord C E4 for 25,000 rupees? Well, if you want good software experience, good processing power, a big battery, and a charger in the box, you can definitely consider this option. However, if cameras and a comparatively cleaner software experience are your biggest priorities and you’re okay with a not-so-powerful processor, you can go with the Nothing Phone 2A. Lastly, if performance and display matter most to you and you’re okay with HyperOS, then Poco X6 Pro is the one for you. Well, that was it from my side.
