OnePlus decided it is a big enough brand to do what every other Android seller does: sell as many phones as possible. With the announcement of the first OnePlus NORD, they moved away from being that single-device-a-cycle company. And today, that move has been cemented with the announcement of two new budget smartphones – weirdly named, yes – but quite exciting for the Europe and North American markets where they will be launching.

The new devices are:

OnePlus NORD N10 5G for £329 and the
OnePlus NORD N100 for £179.

Ideally, many of the staunch OnePlus supporters in Africa would think these budget devices would be launched locally, marking the company’s official entry to the continent. That’s not the case here. As it stands, it seems OnePlus will not even be bringing these new NORD devices to the Indian market, a market where they launched the original more expensive OnePlus NORD.

The specifications of the new OnePlus N10 5G and N100 are as such:

	OnePlus Nord N10 5G	OnePlus Nord N100
Price	£329	£179
Display	6.49-inch with 90Hz refresh rate	6.52-inch
SoC	Snapdragon 690	Snapdragon 460
RAM & Storage	6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage (microSD expandable to 512GB)	4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage
Battery & Charging	4,300mAh Warp Charge 30T	5,000mAh with 18W charging
Rear Camera(s)	64MP main lens, 8MP ultra-wide, 2MP macro, 2MP monochrome	13MP main lens, 2MP bokeh, 2MP macro
Front Camera	16MP	8MP
Port(s)	USB-C 3.5mm audio jack	USB-C 3.5mm audio jack
Software	Oxygen OS 10.5	Oxygen OS 10.5
Other Features	Rear fingerprint sensor	Rear fingerprint sensor

Of course, either of these devices would sell pretty well in many of the well-established smartphone markets across Africa. However, perhaps Africa is a hard market to enter for the company, or they’re currently only set on properly establishing themselves in Europe and N. America first because those markets are more familiar with the brand.

This means that everyone who would want either of the new devices would have to import them, or buy them from local resellers who slap huge markups. The other option is to wait for a similarly spec’d OPPO, realme, or Vivo device and buy it. Because being part of one company, we’ll be seeing the re-branding of devices to target them at different markets. The main thing you’ll be losing is that clean* OxygenOS experience which is very different from the skins we get on OPPO, Vivo and realme devices.

In Kenya currently, of all the BBK Electronics companies, only OnePlus and iQOO aren’t available. realme was the latest entrant, and we’ve already had OPPO and Vivo here. So, sooner or later, we will definitely see replicas of the new NORDs in the market.