- 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 actually disappointed
that it looked so similar to the Phone (1),
like, oh they barely changed anything.
But I think that's actually 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
for 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
and the gray is lighter
and there's 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.
But second of all the design, it 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, similar phone slightly better,
but most of the changes with this guy are under the hood.
So let's go there.
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 sometimes
and I've had some weird one-off bugs
that are hard to replicate, including more thermal warnings
than I'm used to seeing in 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 really nice.
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 literally 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, 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 actually a little bit brighter
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 in 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 meaning 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 the torch
for the glyph flashlight, which is kind of sweet.
It's actually, 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 own notification sound.
Do I think it's a little bit gimmicky?
Yeah, for sure.
There's definitely 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 really 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.
So this is all part of Nothing's
self-titled Nothing OS 2,
but to be more specific, it's basically 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 own character version of Android
and this phone kind of also has its own 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 off 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 really 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 really 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 clean,
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 gonna be battery life and cameras.
Battery life on this new phone is much improved.
The cameras, not so much.
So the battery situation actually is awesome.
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 on,
a higher screen brightness and all sorts of new apps
like Threads coming out,
where I'm spending, like, hours of screen on time per day,
follow me over there I guess,
turns out this thing can keep it going
for 6, 7 hours of screen on 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 the 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
were a little bit more of a bummer, 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.
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 that a bug that they can fix.
And along with those other quirks and weird things
I've talked about, 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 actually 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, clearly, 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 turned 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 actually 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 actually get used to it,
you realize that the specs and the design
are both not the primary thing about this phone.
When you actually use it, it's really the software.
It's absolutely 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 the Nothing Phone (2).
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace.
(bright music)