Nothing Phone 2A Review: Flashy Good Deal!

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- 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 for picking one for you, it's just a matter

of picking the one that makes the trade offs

that you're okay with.

Like maybe you love,

you gotta have good build quality and cameras.

Well then, iPhone SE is probably a good one for you.

And then you know you're not gonna get a great screen

or battery life or things like that.

Or maybe you gotta have a great big screen.

Samsung makes the Galaxy A54.

Ar maybe you gotta have good software and cameras.

Pixel 7A.

This phone is 350 bucks.

And this, this is the designer one.

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So, this phone is not going to win anyone over

with raw specs.

It's not gonna win by having the best camera

or the best battery life of any budget phone.

The performance isn't gonna blow you outta the water,

but you could definitely argue

that it's the prettiest $350 phone.

So Nothing has had this transparent aesthetic going

for a while with their phones,

and then also the earbuds.

This one definitely also has that.

There's also a white version of this.

I think it looks better, it also has like black buttons,

so it's kinda this nice contrast,

but, you know, dark version looks cool too.

And honestly if the 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 and near the top

is pretty unique.

Kinda like 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 kinda this split design,

the bottom half is like a PCB-inspired look,

apparently inspired by the New York City subway map.

And Nothing's already shown people this,

like 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 gonna lie.

But even if you don't like it, at least you can say

it's at least somewhat visually interesting.

You know, 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 performed 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 wanna 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, you know,

I'm sure Zach 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 would be,

so, 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 lotta 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,

'cause we have some crazy numbers these days,

but 1300 knits peak brightness

is very visible in bright indoor lighting,

and bezels are even

all the way around the front of the phone,

so, aesthetically, I have no complaints.

And then even at this price, it's AMOLED,

it has an optical fingerprint reader under the glass.

Its 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 to 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 5000-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 MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro.

So, this was my biggest question mark, actually,

going into testing this phone,

'cause, you know how Nothing

teases the specs and stuff ahead of time.

So we find out it's a MediaTek chip,

and I'm not sure if this one's going to perform

the way I've been used to some other phones,

like they're showcasing all these, you know,

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, 778G Plus from Qualcomm.

Now, I'm not expecting flagship stuff for 350 bucks,

but like, what's it gonna land at,

this feels like a make or break part of the phone.

And I've been pleasantly surprised.

Now, it's not gonna win any prizes with 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 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 Nothing OS 2.5,

on top of Android 14.

And you already have seen Nothing Phone software

with the dots and the aesthetic and all that stuff,

but, it's clean, there's no bloat wear,

and there is a solid focus on fast and smooth,

it kinda feels like a throwback

to the old OnePlus Magic back in the day.

But with regular use, this phone is quite smooth and snappy.

Sometimes a fingerprint reader shudders a little bit,

like when you're first unlocking,

but for the most part,

if you're just using the 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 1, with this 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 aesthetic and their identity

and what they really want a Nothing phone to be.

And I gotta 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 aesthetically they've got the dots everywhere.

So the stock apps have this dots aesthetic,

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 aesthetic.

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 that the flagship, than the phone two,

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 wanna 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, you know,

it still works with just white lights.

And it also does music visualizations

to sync up with any music coming out of the speaker,

so...

(phone plays electro-R&B music)

I don't know.

Sure.

Obviously some of this stuff is gimmicks.

Some of this you may find useful like once or twice,

I almost never use the countdown clock,

but the one time I use it, it's kinda 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 you know, on super closeup 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,

like, 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

kinda knowing, okay,

this isn't gonna have cameras that blow me away,

it's not gonna be as interesting to test these,

but, you gotta test 'em 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.

Alright, passable pictures.

I know 50 megapixels is a big number,

but, here's what I'll say:

at this level, even in great lighting,

the photos aren't particularly sharp.

The dynamic range or depth of field aren't amazing.

Like, you're not buying this phone

to take the greatest most artistic photos and videos

the world has ever seen.

But, what you do need is for it to be serviceable,

to be quick enough for autofocus to work,

for it to capture a moment, document scanning, video calls,

sharing photos with people.

And it does all that, and it's totally fine,

and I can't complain.

And really what's left a bigger imprint on me using this

is that, compared to their other flagship phones,

almost all of the features are still here.

Like the only one I'm not actually seeing

on this budget version of the phone is macro mode.

And that, that theme of keeping a lotta the stuff

from the more expensive phones

and not doing these artificial cuts,

that's what feels good about this phone as a budget phone,

to me, it actually feels like they're trying to give people

all of the Nothing phone experience for less money.

Now, we definitely can't say it's one-to-one,

there's obviously cuts, especially with hardware,

Like there's no wireless charging, like I said.

It's IP54 instead of IP68.

It's plastic instead of glass and aluminum.

But, I like that once you start to get to use the phone,

especially with the software features, experience wise,

I don't feel nearly as many artificial-feeling cuts

as we've seen on other phones.

Like there's no pro mode in the camera

that's missing from the budget phone.

All the same advanced settings, the experimental features,

all the home screen features with Nothing OS,

it's all here, on this cheaper phone.

And the crazy part to me is,

they obviously wanna compare this to a lower-end phone,

so they compare it to the Phone 1,

and my natural instinct is like, "I'm ignoring that,

"of course they're comparing it to the old phone."

But when, you actually look at that 2-year-old phone,

you kinda see how far they've come.

And you look at the things

that are actually better about this budget phone.

This Nothing Phone 2A has a bigger, brighter screen,

with thinner bezels.

It has a larger battery, with faster charging,

a higher-processor clock speed,

a higher-resolution front camera,

and a wider variety of refresh rates than the Phone 1.

Like, no wonder they wanna show us the Phone 1.

But, in general, if you're looking for the TLDW,

yes, this is a good, solid, all-around budget phone.

And the way Nothing has been tracking with software,

it appears, I mean they're promising

three years of Android updates with this phone.

I think this will be a good budget phone to own

for the next couple years.

Well done, Nothing.

Well done.

Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys in the next one.

Base.