The OnePlus Nord's successor — and the first Nord to come to the U.S. — may have just leaked.
A listing on Geekbench 5 (via Slashleaks user Leakspinner) has been discovered for a previously unknown phone named the OnePlus Clover. While Clover is probably just a codename rather than the final device's name, this is at least a phone we've not seen evidence of before.
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Geekbench doesn't record every important spec of a phone, but it does tell us that the Clover has a Snapdragon 660 chipset and 4GB RAM. We'd imagine the actual chipset will be the more modern Snapdragon 665 though, since the 660 came out in 2017.
With that in mind, the phone sounds like a new competitor in the best cheap phones race, with an identical chipset to the TCL 10L, and the same chipset and RAM as the Moto G Power. Both of these phones cost around $250, which gives us a rough idea of how the Clover could fit into the OnePlus range.
Today's OnePlus Nord comes with a Snapdragon 765G chipset, 8GB or 12GB of RAM, and a price of roughly $500 when converted from pound sterling or euros. That makes it more of a rival for our favorite mid-range phones: the Google Pixel 4a, and the iPhone SE.
The headline benchmark scores for the Clover support this idea. With 336 points in the single core test and 1495 in the multicore test, this compares poorly to the performance of the Pixel 4a's Snapdragon 730 chip, which scored 1,647 on the multicore test. It's even worse compared to the iPhone SE's mighty A13 Bionic chip, which managed 3,226 on the same test. However the Clover is roughly in line with the 1,387 of the Moto G Power's multicore score, or the TCL 10L's 1,354.
The final noticeable point from the Geekbench listing is that the device was running Android 10. We might have expected OnePlus to test their new phone with Android 11. Nonetheless, OxygenOS 10.5 is still a great Android skin if that's what the Clover ends up with.
One thing we can pretty much guarantee is that this phone won't be the OnePlus 8T. This will be the refreshed version of the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro that launched earlier this year, and is expected to use the same Snapdragon 865 chipset, or the improved 865 Plus version, with either 8GB or 12GB RAM.
The OnePlus Nord, while a strong rival to the Pixel 4a and iPhone SE, particularly, isn't currently available in the U.S. There have been suggestions that OnePlus will bring the Nord, or at least a similar non-flagship device, to the American market, which is why we suspect that the Clover will turn out to be OnePlus' budget option for the U.S.
