OnePlus hopes US customers will settle for the OnePlus Nord N10

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  The OnePlus Nord N10. [credit: OnePlus ]

After the Europe-only launch of the midrange OnePlus Nord earlier this year, OnePlus is finally bringing a cheaper phone to the United States with the OnePlus Nord N10 5G. It doesn't quite look like the slam dunk the original Nord was, though, and for a company that has "never settle" emblazoned across its press images, it kinda feels like we're settling here.

OnePlus says the phone is coming to the US, but it only provided a UK price tag of 329 pounds ($427). For that, you get a 90Hz, 6.49-inch, 2400×1080 LCD—yes, an LCD and not an OLED display—a Snapdragon 690 SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of UFS 2.1 storage, and a 4300mAh battery.

The Snapdragon 690 is a fairly new eight-core Qualcomm SoC with two Cortex A77 cores, six Cortex A55 cores, and an Adreno 619 built on an 8nm process. Qualcomm's midrange chip lineup is kind of a mess right now, and you'd have to really break out the calipers to find significant differences between the Snapdragon 690 and the Snapdragon 765G on the European Nord. The 690 has a newer A77 main CPU core compared to the A76 on the 765G, but the 690 has a 200mHz lower clock. In benchmarks, the CPU and GPU numbers are basically a wash, but the 7nm 765G should be a bit lighter on your battery. Qualcomm docks the 690 a bunch of Qualcomm Model Number Points because it does not support mmWave 5G, but that seems irrelevant when most 765G phones opt to not support mmWave either. "The Snapdragon 765G with mmWave support sliced off" sounds like a close-enough shorthand description for this chip.

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