Just in case you've been living under a rock these past few days, the OnePlus Nord is finally here. The Snapdragon 765G laden smartphone features a 90Hz AMOLED display panel with an in-display fingerprint scanner, 30W fast Warp Charge technology, 5G support - basically a bunch of good attributes under a very attractive price tag. At launch, the company decided to offer the Nord only in two color variants, namely "Blue Marble" and "Gray Onyx". As it turns out, OnePlus may have another color in the works, although we are not sure whether they have any plan to release it soon or reserve it for a special occasion.
XDA Senior Member and our trusted OnePlus tipster Some_Random_Username has discovered the hint about a third color variant of the OnePlus Nord while analyzing the Engineering Mode app. For those not familiar with this particular app, it’s pre-installed on every OnePlus phone running OxygenOS. The Qualcomm-made app got massive attention from the Android community back in 2017 due to a privilege escalation backdoor, albeit the sole purpose of it is to assist OEM engineers in hardware testing.
Hands-on with the OnePlus Nord: The true OnePlus X successor
Upon dissecting the latest version of the Engineering Mode app present in the newer OxygenOS builds, Some_Random_Username has spotted the following strings:
<string name="str_sm7250_color0_title">Gray Onyx</string>
<string name="str_sm7250_color1_title">Blue Marble</string>
<string name="str_sm7250_color2_title">Gray Ash</string>
The sm7250 portion corresponds to the model name for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765/765G/768 SoCs, but we are more interested in the color names. As we mentioned earlier, the first 2 colors in this list have been released, but the “Gray Ash” one has certainly not. What's more interesting is that the existence of the third color does line up with details from a leaked slide that notable leaker Evan Blass published before the Nord's launch.
Unlike the flagship OnePlus 8 series, the OnePlus Nord has no carrier-exclusive model as of now. It’s possible that “Gray Ash” may be the exclusive color for an upcoming carrier launch, but that's just our speculation at this moment.
What do you think about the new color variant of the OnePlus Nord? Let us know in the comments below!