Nothing Phone 2A Review ! Did They Lie

Budget phones are fun because pretty much with all of them, if you poke around hard enough, you will find the thing that they had to cut corners on. You'll find the thing that they trimmed back to get it to be a budget phone. And so if we're picking one for you, it's just a matter of picking the one that makes the trade offs that you're okay with. Maybe you love, you got to have good build quality and cameras. Well, then iPhone SE is probably a good one for you. And then you know you're not going to get a great screen or battery life or things like that. Or maybe you got to have a great big big screen. Samsung makes a Galaxy A54, or maybe you got to have good software and cameras, Pixel 7A. This phone is 350 bucks, and this is the designer one. So this phone is not It's not going to win anyone over with raw specs. It's not going to win by having the best camera or the best battery life of any budget phone. The performance isn't going to blow you out of the water, but you could definitely argue that it's the prettiest $350 phone.

So nothing has had this transparent esthetic going for a while with their phones and then also the aear buds. This one definitely also has that. There's also a white version of this. I think it looks better. It also has black buttons, so it's this nice contrast, but dark version looks cool, too. And honestly, if the Mission Mission is to look like a nothing phone and not be mistaken for anything else, then, yeah, mission definitely accomplished. The dual cameras in the middle near the top is pretty unique, a pair of eyes, maybe. And the NFC coil actually surrounds the cameras. Then there are three bars of LEDs making a glyph design around the camera circle again. Then it's this split design. The bottom half is a PCB-inspired look, apparently inspired by the New York City subway map. And nothing's already shown people this. There's been some reactions to the design already. Some people love it, some people actually hate it. I don't know, it's a bit asymmetrical, so it's unconventional for sure. But I think it's nice, not going to lie. But even if you don't like it, at least you can say it's at least somewhat visually interesting.


There's some textures, there's some exposed screws and some text, and That little red square, it's not functional. It's just purely to look cool. So I appreciate that. And if you do like this look but have maybe a more boring phone that you're not willing to give up, then channel sponsor, Dbrand, has you covered with their Something Skins. So if you haven't heard of it already, Dbrand has We've formed some, and these are their words, not mine, creative plagiarism on nothing's whole design language, both in light mode and dark mode. So I'll leave a link below if you want to check those out. But guess what? It's an extremely competitive price bracket. So you get a good-looking phone, But you still will have to make some sacrifices to get it. So first of all, it's clear plastic, not glass at the back, which I'm sure Zack will get to this phone at some point, but I think it'll be easier to scuff and scratch, but harder to shatter like glass. Glass would be. But I think it's a reasonable trade-off. It's also a textured plastic frame as well. So it looks like aluminum, but it's this plastic all the way around the phone, to the point where this phone actually ends up feeling surprisingly light in the hand for how big it is.


But we should just get to that. This is a huge, it's a jumbo-sized phone. It's gigantic. Some people might not love that, but I think a lot of people like really big screens, and you get the natural advantages that come with a big phone, which is a big battery and a big screen. So this is a relatively giant 6.7-inch display, corner to corner. It's literally ultra-phone size, and it gets pretty bright, too. So definitely not flagship bright because we have some crazy numbers these days, but 1,300 nits peak brightness is very visible in bright indoor lighting, and bezels are even all the way around the front of the phone. So esthetically, I have no complaints. And then even at this price, it's AMO lead. It has an optical fingerprint reader under the glass. It's variable refresh rate up to 120 hertz, and it even has 2160 hertz PWM dimming. So if you don't like the back of this phone, at least the front of it that you're actually looking at all the time is pretty impressive for 350 bucks. But I'd say an even bigger strength of this phone is battery life. So battery always comes from three main things, basically, obviously, having a huge physical battery, also good software and an efficient chip.


We'll get to the software. But this phone has a 5,000 milliamp hour battery. That's literally bigger than their flagship phones from nothing. So really big battery. It doesn't have wireless charging, but it does have 45-watt wire charging, which is pretty good. That's zero to full in an hour. And the chip it's running is this little thing called the Mediatech Dimensity 7200 Pro. So this was my biggest question mark, actually, going into testing this phone because nothing teases the specs and stuff ahead of time. So we find out it's a Mediatech chip, and I'm not sure if this one's going to perform the way I've been used to some other phones. They're showcasing all these specifically handpicked benchmarks results. Of course, they will. But conveniently, they only compare it to a two-year-old nothing phone 1, which had that mid-range 778 G plus from Qualcomm. Now, I'm not expecting flagship stuff for 350 bucks, but what's it going to land at? This feels like a make or break part of the phone, and I've been pleasantly surprised. Now, it's not going to win any prizes with the raw specs, and I definitely don't think it'll earn anybody's money with the benchmark scores alone.


You look at those numbers, you're like, okay, not a total shock here. But But as far as actual performance, when you use the phone, the way I'd put it is it's respectable, and I really feel like that is a testament to the software and how well it's working together. So at this point, we're on nothingOS 2.5 on top of Android 14. And you already have seen nothing phone software with the dots and the esthetic and all that stuff. But it's clean, there's no bloat wear, and there is a solid focus on fast and smooth. It feels like a throwback to the old one plus magic back in the day. But with regular use, this phone is quite smooth and snappy. Sometimes the fingerprint reader shutters a little bit like when you're first unlocking. But for the most part, if you're just using a phone doing stuff like messaging or flipping through a couple apps, email, web browsing, taking your pictures. This is a smooth phone. It's pretty similar to what they did with the nothing phone one with the 778. It's very solid with everyday use. And the second you try to do super high-end stuff like gaming, then you'll see where the benchmarks come up short, where you start dropping frames and all that.


But again, this is a $350 phone, and I am definitely not complaining about that. Now, nothing has had some time now to build up their esthetic and their identity and what they really want a nothing phone to be. And I got to say, they have a lot of unique, really identifiable things going on here that you may like or dislike, but they're all here. So esthetically, they've got the dots everywhere. So the stock apps have this dots esthetic and the thin font to go with it. The back arrow in Android is made of these dots, and they have this extensive built-out selection of nothing widgets now, most of them with the dots theme as well. So you can have this very consistent home screen esthetic. And then there's other little stuff, like you can enlarge a single app icon to fill up four spots on your home screen for a unique home screen grid. I don't know, you might be into that. There's also this nice little animation with the folders on the home screen. Also, this new thing, which lets you add a glass effect to your wallpaper. So it's blurred behind your home screen for better visibility.


I actually really like that. There's also AI wallpapers now, so you can jump into the Wallpaper Studio and create the most soulless combo art the world has ever seen in just a few taps. There's also third-party icon pack support on the home screen with instant one-touch previews. And then, of course, the glyphs. So this phone still has some lights on the back. It's less lights in the flagship than the phone, too, but about the same amount of functionality. So there's one vertical light on the right and a small one down here on the bottom left, and then the big top one arcing around the top left. This is the one that works with the glyph countdown Timer. Maybe you'll find that useful. The blinking notification glyph when your phone is down. I still wish I could just customize it a little bit more. I know they don't want to do RGB, but if this was RGB, I would totally have different colors light up for different app notifications, and I would go to town with that. But it still works with just white lights. And it also does music visualizations to sync up with any music coming out of the speaker.

I don't know. Sure. Obviously, some of this stuff is gimmicks. Some of this you may find useful once or twice. I almost never use the countdown clock, but the one time I use it, it's cool. Side note, I couldn't get the glyph composer to work at all on this phone. The UI worked, but it didn't light up the lights on the back. But on super close up photos, maybe the glyph fill flash is decently useful, sometimes useless other times. But hey, while we're on the subject, the camera. The cameras on the back here are serviceable. It's just practical to have cameras on the back of your phone. And these, they're not good, but They're fine. I always feel like we go into budget phone reviews knowing, Okay, this isn't going to have cameras that blow me away. It's not going to be as interesting to test these, but you got to test them anyway and see what they're made of. So this has a different new 50 megapixel primary camera on the back, and then it has the same ultra-wide camera as the nothing phone, too, and actually also the same selfie camera. And look, it can take okay pictures, passable pictures.