- This is a Nothing Phone (2), You can tell because the glass on the back is rounded a bit. Otherwise, it looks pretty similar to the Phone (1). But don't let that fool you. (upbeat music) You know, humans are very visual creatures and when the Nothing Phone (2) design was revealed by this YouTuber, I was going through a lot of the comments and a lot of people were disappointed that it looked so similar to the Phone (1), Like, oh they barely changed anything. But I think that's missing the point. Like, don't get me wrong, I understand that people, of course, want an exciting new design, but think about it. If you're a brand-new company, like a two-year-old smartphone company and you're trying to establish your ID, your DNA From the way your phones are gonna look, You can't dramatically change things that much year to year. If your second phone looks wildly different From your first phone, it's kind of hard to establish that, you know? So yeah, the glass is a little more curved Display and the gray is lighter and there are some adjustments to the LED zones and we'll get to that in a second. But generally, it still looks like a Nothing phone and that's on purpose. Second of all the design, matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. And actually, a lot of the changes with this phone are more than skin-deep. So using this phone for the past two weeks, I do think overall, it feels more premium, I'll say. It doesn't necessarily show in the specs, but it's a collection of things that have all been bumped up. The display is now much brighter up to 1600 nits, so it's much more visible outdoors, still 1080p, 120Hz, but it's LTPO this time around and they moved the selfie camera hole punch from the corner to the middle. And the bezels are a little bit thinner all the way around, making room for a slightly larger display, just a little bit more refined. I also still wish the optical fingerprint reader was a little higher up on the screen and a little bit faster, but honestly still par For the course, as far as phones in this price range, along with the IP54 water and dust resistance. Overall, a similar phone is slightly better,
but most of the changes with this guy are under the hood. So let's go there. Performance First of all, they picked the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, essentially, a last-generation flagship chip. This means it's much better than the previous phone, but not quite up to date with some of the highest-end phones today, rocking the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. And then The base version has 8 gigs of RAM, but this version I've been testing has 12 And it's been excellent, very smooth all the way around. I mean, I've been leaving on the dynamic refresh rate setting and it feels like it's 120 hertz most of the time. It's very responsive, it's great. It did occasionally hang sometime and I've had some weird one-off bugs that are hard to replicate, including more thermal warnings then I'm used to seeing on a phone, especially while wireless charging. But overall, it's been pretty solid. And that brings me right to the software experience with this phone. This phone has a lot of character, like, there are a lot of little, like, tweaks and UI things and features, stuff that they've added, that made me go, Oh, like, that's nice. Home Screen Like, I like the fact that you can choose how large an icon is on your home screen. So if you wanna have a, you got a nice little grid array going on and you have an app you open a lot, You can make it double-sized and just kind of tucks into your grid like It's the size of, I guess, four icons. They redesigned how folders look on the home screen. I think it also looks really good. You can add any quick settings as a widget on your home screen, which is dope. I don't know why I never thought of that. And then even better is lock screen widgets. So for this, it's only, Nothing's widgets, but they have a pretty good variety of 'em, a lot of weather widgets, clocks, and things like that. And they stay visible all the time with this nice little dot matrix version on the always-on display. So I love having the weather up here. And then the quick shortcut to the flashlight, It would be cool if third-party apps could plug into this too,
but for now, it's already really neat. There's still the Nothing Dot fonts everywhere and the dot motif with the brightness slider and the volume slider, and things like that. And then of course on top of all of that, You've got all the glyph stuff. Some people are like, this is a total gimmick, some people are like, this is the greatest thing ever. I love it. I feel like I'm somewhere in between. So these LEDs are a little bit brighter LEDs and a little bit whiter compared to the Nothing Phone (1). There's a slightly different design too. So with the pair of LEDs around the cameras instead of one solid arc and then the large C in the middle gets split up into six different sections. But then as I mentioned in that Dope Tech unveiling video, There are more addressable zones for the LEDs on the back. So means instead of just lighting everything up at once, There are quite a few more software features now to take advantage of the more precise control. Stuff like the countdown timer and the progress indicator for third-party apps, starting with Uber and Zomato, I got it right that time. In addition to the charging progress indicator light at the bottom, There's also long pressing of the torch for the glyph flashlight, which is kind of sweet. It's, it's not as bright, but it's much softer. And there's also the essential notification light so you can assign that top-right stripe to light up and stay lit up anytime you get a notification from one specific app choice until you address that notification. And the glyph composer, of course, to build your notification sound. Do I think it's a little bit gimmicky? Yeah, for sure. There's some some weird novelty that you're probably not gonna use. But I think among all of that stuff, There's at least some pieces of it somewhere that some people will find useful. I guess I just don't understand how hard could it be to give people more full customization control of the lights? Like, you can, okay, if I have one app that I know I want to pay attention to, Then that's the one stripe up here. But what if I have three or four apps and I just wanna make sure I assign them to three or four different lights on the back? Like, is that some impossible engineering challenge
or do they just not want us to be able to do that for some reason? I don't know, but you can't. Either way, I wanna get back to what I said before, which is that this phone has character for real. Nothing OS So this is all part of Nothing's self-titled Nothing OS 2, but to be more specific, it's Nothing's skin on top of Android 13 right now. And I kind of feel the same way about it that I do about Google Pixel. Like, the Pixel has its character version of Android and This phone kind of also has its character version that's present throughout the experience. You know, it's a London-based company so it says things like aeroplane mode and color correction. And the trash in Google Photos is called The Bin. It has the monotone desktop icons by default, which always start so promising. And every time someone tries to do it I want it to work so bad, But then there's always just a few apps that are not supported and ruin the look, This is also true here. But I respect the clear-back thing. I've been pretty pumped about some other transparent gadgets lately. And somebody pointed out the uneven glue in the hinge of the Beats Studio Buds + case. And I haven't been able to unsee it since, but that made me appreciate more that Nothing is doing a ton of transparent-themed stuff and even added a transparent cable this year. Well, the ends of the cable, not the actual cable, but still, kind of cool. And you don't see other companies doing the cleaning, neat, transparent stuff this well. So then I guess let's just get to the meat of this. Two of the most important things with any new phone are battery life and cameras. Battery life on this new phone is much improved. The cameras, not so much. So the battery situation is awesome. Battery It went up from a 4,500 to 4,700 milliamp-hour battery. It also went to a more power-efficient newer chip and it's bumped up to 45W peak charging. So even with the higher refresh rate, a higher screen brightness and all sorts of new apps like Threads coming out, where I'm spending, like, hours of screen time per day, Follow me over there I guess, turns out this thing can keep it going
for 6, or 7 hours of screen time, no problem. And when you do plug into a fast charger, which is not included in the box, but when you do it's pretty quick. It can go from zero to full in an hour. And there's even 15-watt wireless charging like I mentioned earlier. It's a completely worry-free battery package even if it does overheat a few times on that wireless car charger. So then the cameras back here on the other hand It was a little bit more of a bummer, a bit inconsistent for me. So still dual cameras, still a primary camera and an ultra wide, no-telephoto and they've upgraded sensors now, so 50 megapixels each, but it's not the number of pixels that matters, It's the quality of them. So I think it's more helpful context to know this is the Sony IMX890 for the primary sensor, which is the same one that's in the OnePlus 11 and the OnePlus Nord 3. Camera This is a very average camera system in perfect lighting, like the aperture's wide enough and the sensor's big enough that you get some good-looking photos with shallow depth of field and when the subject is up close, they look good. Colors are solid and processing isn't too dramatic. So when you take landscape shots too things look sharp across the board. But two things I've noticed, One is in lower light it starts to fall apart more. You either get more noisy or more soft photos pretty quickly. Not a shocker, we've seen this before. And in the premium mid-range space That feels kind of, like, again par for the course, Right below the impressive Pixel 7s and the not-so-impressive OnePlus Nords of the world. But the other thing is it has this weird bug that I've seen just a few times, where a moving subject has this weird ghosting, which is not good. I'm guessing it's a weird laggy HDR processing where it's trying to combine frames And it has some sort of a weird lag while capturing those frames. Either way, I haven't seen this bug in any other phone camera in years. Hopefully, it's just a bug that they can fix. And along with those other quirks and weird things I've talked about, how they can iron that stuff out before shipping this phone to the world.
And also one other quick random thing That didn't quite fit in the rest of this review, The haptics for the keyboard are very strong, which is fine, but I can't adjust them. And they're so strong that you can hear them, if you can. (phone beeping) That's not the sound of my hand hitting the phone. That's, like, the sound of the vibration motor being too strong. I just wanna be able to adjust that. I can't find it in the settings. Please, Nothing, let me adjust the haptic strength of the keyboard. But anyway, the last big pillar is the new price. So the previous Nothing phone started firmly in I would say mid-range territory. It was 399 Euro and this phone starts at $599 U. S. So it's bumped up and that's actually for the starting one, So that's 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage. Did I just turn the torch on? Of course, I did. But I think once you bump up to the 12, 256, you quickly get into $700 phone territory. So is that worth it? It's a much more expensive phone. And I think the answer is if you think worth it is purely a specs question, then you probably won't see this phone as worth it. It doesn't have the most amazing specs in the world. Matter of fact, I can kind of already see the two sides of how people will embrace this phone. Like you, you'll have the R-Android community on Reddit saying, okay, yeah, this is basically just an average mid-range phone, nothing too special, quirky design, whatever. And then you'll see, you'll have, like, the Nothing investor club being, like, this is the greatest design ever in a phone. It's the coolest thing ever made. The truth, per usual, falls somewhere in between. Matter of fact I think the funny thing is both those groups probably have in common that they probably haven't used the phone yet. And I think once you do and you get used to it, you realize that the specs and the design are both not the primary thing about this phone. When you use it, it's the software. It's defined by this character-filled software. And that part, even if it's a little buggy, is really fun. It's really solid. So that's what makes it This is a Nothing Phone (2), You can tell because the glass on the back is rounded a bit.
Otherwise, it looks pretty similar to the Phone (1). But don't let that fool you. (upbeat music) You know, humans are very visual creatures and when the Nothing Phone (2) design was revealed by this YouTuber, I was going through a lot of the comments and a lot of people were disappointed that it looked so similar to the Phone (1), Like, oh they barely changed anything. But I think that's missing the point. Like, don't get me wrong, I understand that people, of course, want an exciting new design, but think about it. If you're a brand-new company, like a two-year-old smartphone company and you're trying to establish your ID, your DNA From the way your phones are gonna look, You can't dramatically change things that much year to year. If your second phone looks wildly different From your first phone, it's kind of hard to establish that, you know? So yeah, the glass is a little more curved Display and the gray is lighter and there are some adjustments to the LED zones and we'll get to that in a second. But generally, it still looks like a Nothing phone and that's on purpose. Second of all the design, matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. And actually, a lot of the changes with this phone are more than skin-deep. So using this phone for the past two weeks, I do think overall, it feels more premium, I'll say. It doesn't necessarily show in the specs, but it's a collection of things that have all been bumped up. The display is now much brighter up to 1600 nits, so it's much more visible outdoors, still 1080p, 120Hz, but it's LTPO this time around and they moved the selfie camera hole punch from the corner to the middle. And the bezels are a little bit thinner all the way around, making room for a slightly larger display, just a little bit more refined. I also still wish the optical fingerprint reader was a little higher up on the screen and a little bit faster, but honestly still par For the course, as far as phones in this price range, along with the IP54 water and dust resistance. Overall, a similar phone is slightly better, but most of the changes with this guy are under the hood. So let's go there.
Performance First of all, they picked the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, essentially, a last-generation flagship chip. This means it's much better than the previous phone, but not quite up to date with some of the highest-end phones today, rocking the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. And then The base version has 8 gigs of RAM, but this version I've been testing has 12 And it's been excellent, very smooth all the way around. I mean, I've been leaving on the dynamic refresh rate setting and it feels like it's 120 hertz most of the time. It's very responsive, it's great. It did occasionally hang sometime and I've had some weird one-off bugs that are hard to replicate, including more thermal warnings then I'm used to seeing on a phone, especially while wireless charging. But overall, it's been pretty solid. And that brings me right to the software experience with this phone. This phone has a lot of character, like, there are a lot of little, like, tweaks and UI things and features, stuff that they've added, that made me go, Oh, like, that's nice. Home Screen Like, I like the fact that you can choose how large an icon is on your home screen. So if you wanna have a, you got a nice little grid array going on and you have an app you open a lot, You can make it double-sized and just kind of tucks into your grid like It's the size of, I guess, four icons. They redesigned how folders look on the home screen. I think it also looks really good. You can add any quick settings as a widget on your home screen, which is dope. I don't know why I never thought of that. And then even better is lock screen widgets. So for this, it's only, Nothing's widgets, but they have a pretty good variety of 'em, a lot of weather widgets, clocks, and things like that. And they stay visible all the time with this nice little dot matrix version on the always-on display. So I love having the weather up here. And then the quick shortcut to the flashlight, It would be cool if third-party apps could plug into this too, but for now, it's already really neat. There's still the Nothing Dot fonts everywhere
and the dot motif with the brightness slider and the volume slider, and things like that. And then of course on top of all of that, You've got all the glyph stuff. Some people are like, this is a total gimmick, some people are like, this is the greatest thing ever. I love it. I feel like I'm somewhere in between. So these LEDs are a little bit brighter LEDs and a little bit whiter compared to the Nothing Phone (1). There's a slightly different design too. So with the pair of LEDs around the cameras instead of one solid arc and then the large C in the middle gets split up into six different sections. But then as I mentioned in that Dope Tech unveiling video, There are more addressable zones for the LEDs on the back. So means instead of just lighting everything up at once, There are quite a few more software features now to take advantage of the more precise control. Stuff like the countdown timer and the progress indicator for third-party apps, starting with Uber and Zomato, I got it right that time. In addition to the charging progress indicator light at the bottom, There's also long pressing of the torch for the glyph flashlight, which is kind of sweet. It's, it's not as bright, but it's much softer. And there's also the essential notification light so you can assign that top-right stripe to light up and stay lit up anytime you get a notification from one specific app choice until you address that notification. And the glyph composer, of course, to build your notification sound. Do I think it's a little bit gimmicky? Yeah, for sure. There's some some weird novelty that you're probably not gonna use. But I think among all of that stuff, There's at least some pieces of it somewhere that some people will find useful. I guess I just don't understand how hard could it be to give people more full customization control of the lights? Like, you can, okay, if I have one app that I know I want to pay attention to, Then that's the one stripe up here. But what if I have three or four apps and I just wanna make sure I assign them to three or four different lights on the back? Like, is that some impossible engineering challenge or do they just not want us to be able to do that for some reason?
I don't know, but you can't. Either way, I wanna get back to what I said before, which is that this phone has character for real. Nothing OS So this is all part of Nothing's self-titled Nothing OS 2, but to be more specific, it's Nothing's skin on top of Android 13 right now. And I kind of feel the same way about it that I do about Google Pixel. Like, the Pixel has its character version of Android and This phone kind of also has its character version that's present throughout the experience. You know, it's a London-based company so it says things like aeroplane mode and color correction. And the trash in Google Photos is called The Bin. It has the monotone desktop icons by default, which always start so promising. And every time someone tries to do it I want it to work so bad, But then there's always just a few apps that are not supported and ruin the look, This is also true here. But I respect the clear-back thing. I've been pretty pumped about some other transparent gadgets lately. And somebody pointed out the uneven glue in the hinge of the Beats Studio Buds + case. And I haven't been able to unsee it since, but that made me appreciate more that Nothing is doing a ton of transparent-themed stuff and even added a transparent cable this year. Well, the ends of the cable, not the actual cable, but still, kind of cool. And you don't see other companies doing the cleaning, neat, transparent stuff this well. So then I guess let's just get to the meat of this. Two of the most important things with any new phone are battery life and cameras. Battery life on this new phone is much improved. The cameras, not so much. So the battery situation is awesome. Battery It went up from a 4,500 to 4,700 milliamp-hour battery. It also went to a more power-efficient newer chip and it's bumped up to 45W peak charging. So even with the higher refresh rate, a higher screen brightness and all sorts of new apps like Threads coming out, where I'm spending, like, hours of screen time per day, Follow me over there I guess, turns out this thing can keep it going for 6, or 7 hours of screen time, no problem. And when you do plug into a fast charger,
which is not included in the box, but when you do it's pretty quick. It can go from zero to full in an hour. And there's even 15-watt wireless charging like I mentioned earlier. It's a completely worry-free battery package even if it does overheat a few times on that wireless car charger. So then the cameras back here on the other hand It was a little bit more of a bummer, a bit inconsistent for me. So still dual cameras, still a primary camera and an ultra wide, no-telephoto and they've upgraded sensors now, so 50 megapixels each, but it's not the number of pixels that matters, It's the quality of them. So I think it's more helpful context to know this is the Sony IMX890 for the primary sensor, which is the same one that's in the OnePlus 11 and the OnePlus Nord 3. Camera This is a very average camera system in perfect lighting, like the aperture's wide enough and the sensor's big enough that you get some good-looking photos with shallow depth of field and when the subject is up close, they look good. Colors are solid and processing isn't too dramatic. So when you take landscape shots too things look sharp across the board. But two things I've noticed, One is in lower light it starts to fall apart more. You either get more noisy or more soft photos pretty quickly. Not a shocker, we've seen this before. And in the premium mid-range space That feels kind of, like, again par for the course, Right below the impressive Pixel 7s and the not-so-impressive OnePlus Nords of the world. But the other thing is it has this weird bug that I've seen just a few times, where a moving subject has this weird ghosting, which is not good. I'm guessing it's a weird laggy HDR processing where it's trying to combine frames And it has some sort of a weird lag while capturing those frames. Either way, I haven't seen this bug in any other phone camera in years. Hopefully, it's just a bug that they can fix. And along with those other quirks and weird things I've talked about, how they can iron that stuff out before shipping this phone to the world. And also one other quick random thing That didn't quite fit in the rest of this review,
The haptics for the keyboard are very strong, which is fine, but I can't adjust them. And they're so strong that you can hear them, if you can. (phone beeping) That's not the sound of my hand hitting the phone. That's, like, the sound of the vibration motor being too strong. I just wanna be able to adjust that. I can't find it in the settings. Please, Nothing, let me adjust the haptic strength of the keyboard. But anyway, the last big pillar is the new price. So the previous Nothing phone started firmly in I would say mid-range territory. It was 399 Euro and this phone starts at $599 U. S. So it's bumped up and that's actually for the starting one, So that's 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage. Did I just turn the torch on? Of course, I did. But I think once you bump up to the 12, 256, you quickly get into $700 phone territory. So is that worth it? It's a much more expensive phone. And I think the answer is if you think worth it is purely a specs question, then you probably won't see this phone as worth it. It doesn't have the most amazing specs in the world. Matter of fact, I can kind of already see the two sides of how people will embrace this phone. Like you, you'll have the R-Android community on Reddit saying, okay, yeah, this is basically just an average mid-range phone, nothing too special, quirky design, whatever. And then you'll see, you'll have, like, the Nothing investor club being, like, this is the greatest design ever in a phone. It's the coolest thing ever made. The truth, per usual, falls somewhere in between. Matter of fact I think the funny thing is both those groups probably have in common that they probably haven't used the phone yet. And I think once you do and you get used to it, you realize that the specs and the design are both not the primary thing about this phone. When you use it, it's the software. It's defined by this character-filled software. And that part, even if it's a little buggy, is really fun. It's really solid. So that' the Nothing Phone (2).