Best OnePlus phone 2024: Affordable, high-class smartphones for you

OnePlus has come a long way since its humble word-of-mouth beginnings. We crunched the numbers and you’ll find that grabbing one of the best OnePlus smartphones makes a whole heap of sense considering everything that’s on offer.

We’ve tested hundreds of handsets over the years, from cheap and cheerful handsets to the most expensive titanium and carbon super-phones you can buy. So believe us when we say OnePlus has some unique value propositions to offer. If you’ve never considered the company’s offerings before, it’s time to sit up and listen.

You’ll find our favourite phones from OnePlus just a little further down but first, let’s talk about how we put these plucky phones through their paces. If you’d rather just skip to the products, you can click here to jump straight to our recommendations.

Best OnePlus phone: At a glance

How we test OnePlus smartphones

When testing OnePlus smartphones, we use a variety of different benchmarks. We usually start with the Geekbench and GFXBench applications, available on the Google Play store. These tests provide us with gaming and CPU processing scores that we can use to directly compare against the competition.

Next up is our display testing. For this, we use a display colorimeter and DisplayCal software to assess how well the screen reproduces colours, as well as the contrast ratio and maximum brightness.

For battery life, we set the screen brightness to the standard luminance of 170cd/m2, engage aeroplane mode and play a looped video until the phone dies. We then note down the timestamp when we restart the phone.

We always test smartphone cameras against a competitor, and this involves a variety of shooting scenarios including low-light and night-time photography, still life, portraits and scenic shots. We also ensure that every shooting feature is fully tested before making our conclusions, including evaluating the various frame rate, resolution and stabilisation settings for video recording.

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The best OnePlus smartphones you can buy in 2024

1. OnePlus 11: The best OnePlus flagship

Price when reviewed: £885 | Check price at Amazon

• Great for… battery life, performance and videos
• Not so great for… natural-looking photos, handling liquids

Like the OnePlus 11 before it, we found that the OnePlus 12 offers almost all of the modern flagship phone experience for a lower price than the competition. It’s not exactly cheap, but the sacrifices are minor and we think the advantages are many.

In our testing the battery life was superb, the specs and performance are top-tier, and the results from the cameras are more than pleasing. We think photos look a little over-processed, but that won’t bother everyone.

The bottom line is that this is a flagship phone for a lower-than-flagship price. Not cheap enough to be mid-range, mind you, but it’s the difference between giving up on flagship specs or not. For the money, and for the flagship aficionado on a reduced budget, it’s hard to think of a phone we can recommend more.

Read our full OnePlus 11 review for more details

Key specs – Processor: Octa-core 3.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2; Screen: 6.7in, 3,216 x 1,440; Camera: 50MP, 32MP (portrait) 48MP (ultrawide); Storage: 128GB, 256GB; Operating system: Android 13

2. OnePlus Nord 2T 5G: The best mid-range OnePlus

Price when reviewed: £340 | Check price at Amazon

• Great for… strong performance and great battery life
• Not so great for… stabilised 4K video and portrait photography

If you like the price and specs of the Nord CE 2 5G but would prefer a more lavish design and a handful of incremental improvements, then the Nord 2T is just the ticket. It’s the fastest phone in its price bracket (albeit a little long in the tooth), producing improved multicore performance via its MediaTek Dimensity 1300 chipset compared to the CE 2 5G. Tough Gorilla Glass 5 covers the front and back – instead of the plastic on the CE 2 5G – while retaining an equally strong battery life of almost 24 hours in our tests.

We awarded it five stars and a Best Buy award in our full-length review and we reckon it’s worth paying the extra £70 over the Nord CE 2 if you can afford it. With £400 to spend, you can’t do any better.

Read our full OnePlus Nord 2T 5G review for more details

Key specs – Processor: Octa-core 3GHz MediaTek Dimensity 1300; Screen: 6.43in, 2,400 x 1,080; Camera: 50MP, 8MP (ultrawide) 2MP (depth); Storage: 128GB, 256GB; Operating system: Android 12

3. OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G: The best budget OnePlus

Price when reviewed: £191 | Check price at Amazon

• Great for… photography and fast charging
• Not so great for… display colour accuracy and night photography

The CE 3 Lite 5G is the cheapest OnePlus phone we recommend, but its low cost – and the ‘Lite’ tag – isn’t to the detriment of quality. The 5,000mAh battery is solid for the cost, clocking over 22 hours before needing a charge. Performance is also very competitive, keeping pace with other similarly priced rivals in both our CPU and GPU benchmark tests.

There are some things you have to forgive, not least of which is that the display is neither as crisp nor as colour accurate as the previous generation’s Nord CE 2 Lite. Night photography also wasn’t particularly impressive in our testing – though in fairness, few phones at this price do well once the sun goes down. Still, in terms of sheer affordability, there’s no better option from OnePlus than the Nord CE 3 Lite 5G.

Read our full OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G review for more details

Key specs – Processor: Octa-core 2.2GHz Snapdragon 695 5G; Screen: 6.59in, 2,412 x 1,080; Camera: 64MP, 2MP (depth) and 2MP (macro); Storage: 128GB; Operating system: Android 12

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