So, this is the Nothing phone 2A. This is nothing’s most best-selling smartphone and one of the best selling smartphone at this price range and my first nothing branded phone.
Here’s the 2 months review of the Nothing Phone 2A where i found out one issue in this phone.
Design & Display
Before that this phone has two major highlights when you just look at it, one is the design-build and the second is actually the display.
The design is so damn unique. When I bought it I was like oh yeah, this is kind of weird with all the lights and design but i also found out it to be a beautiful of a phone. But it’s a quirky design for sure not everyone gonna like the glyph lights focused design. But who will, will love it.
I mean, I surely appreciate te glyph lights. They look cool, but I rarely have seen them but I appreciate having them, because no one else doing it so why not.
At the end of the day, you can turn it off if you don’t like it they are in on your face all the time.
But this unique design has one cool thing to flex, temperature management. In the summer season when the outside temperature is 41deg to 43deg, with mostly 70% to 100% brightness this phone stays amazingly cool. Even if this phone gets hot because of the plastic back with a design where there’s a gap in between the components and the plastic back, you will never feel the heat at all.
There are new colors in the markets but the white is still the best one. and its a bright white color unlike most phones in the market. And no the plastic back doesn’t become yellow though😄.
Galaxy S10e seems like a design inspiration for the Nothing Phone 2a. But its a massive phone in the hand. Just see it right beside iPhone 15 Plus.
It’s a 6.7 inch panel, I have a screen protector on so the bezels might look a little bit odd but it does have thin symmetrical bezels. It’s not the most thinest bezels but it is not a flagship phone either. So its almost unbelievable to me when i first grabbed it. In addition to that the display quality even though it may not be 100% color accurate, but it is almost close to the flagship level displays and I don’t feel that the colors are off in any sense.
Plus it’s very usable outside with 1300nits of peak brightness and 1100nits of manual high brightness. Fairly good but I’m more used to to the 2000nits of the iPhones so you might feel its enough. It also excels in PWM frequency as well with over 2100Hz rating much better than most Samsung and Apple flagships.
And the cherry on top 1 to 120 hertz Adaptive refresh rate at this price. Really an awesome experience at this price. Bonus tip any third party tempered glass for this phones forms bubbles for no reasons. Doesn’t matter how perfectly you do it.
3 Pillars – battery life, software, processor
Well, All of these experiences are only good because of few things, one, the battery life. second, the software experience and third the processor.
Now the weakest point out of these three is actually the processor. It’s not the most powerful one, but it does the job pretty much fine. I don’t see lags or frame drops but slower comparatively for sure.
But the software experience has been great. It’s smooth. everything just works well. I’m kind of against updates nowadays so I don’t care but for people who wants to update it will get 3 years of Major nothingOS updates and 4 years of security updates.
NothingOS has so many unique and useful features. it also does allow you to hide the apps. lock any application, clone any application. Shows apple airpods battery percentages. You can have quick tiles as widget on home screen and lockscreen and works flawlessly. Like this recorder widget works when on call so that you can record the calls too. Always on display is a clone of the lockscreen, cool idea but wish there were more clock faces. But the AOD stays on always. No way to stop.
For more of the review watch the video. Click here
I would say this is probably one of the best software expenses after one UI because its very stable and cool while being customizable.
UFS 2.2 storage is new thing in most phones coming in this budget. In Day to day I have never felt any slowdown in it even in installation of apps. Maybe if I transfer gigabytes of file from my computer it might be slower. so just don’t worry about this kind of things.
The haptics are undoubtedly good in this price. I’ve never seen any good haptics in this price range. it’s just freaking good to see it integrated well in the software.
Now the third thing, the battery, the experience is just insanely good. I have done a battery test of this phone versus my iPhone 15 plus which has the one of the best battery life in the market as of yet. This one beats that phone even though I can say that phone has more powerful processors so in certain games and stuffs that will consume more power than this but overall this is nowhere nowhere bad at all, it can give you an insane battery life.
It does support 45 watt fast charging and it charges really fast. I usually charge it to 75% to have a better battery health in the long term. It doesn’t have Samsung ONEUI like battery charging lock at 85%. It doesn’t come with a charging brick, do keep that in mind. That’s another $25 bucks.
Just like the insane battery life with the 5000mAh battery, the phone performs equally good in 5G speeds and coverage. Even where my 2 years old Samsung ultra can’t find 5G , this one does. Same way call quality is amazing with great cell receptions with great speaker and mic quality.
Talking about speakers, they sound good, with good loudness but misses out on the depth and clarity.. kinda feels treble heavy. You might totally enjoy it, and i have heard better ones. Here’s a your example.
Same thing about the fingerprint scanner, it’s optical which uses bright light flash to scan your fingertips unlike the ultrasonic ones. So it’s slow by nature like every other brands one. But at least they didn’t cut corners in it.
So everything is good in this phone, whether it’s the peak brightness, the display bezels, the IP54 rating, well distributed 190 grams weight, 8.6 mm thickness, great battery life and charging, or the build quality and design. But in one place it kinda falls apart is in the camera department.
It cannot switch between the 50MP main and the 50MP UW sensor or 32MP selfie sensor while shooting a 4k video. Even though both rear cameras are capable to take 4K 30fps videos. The video quality though is surprisingly good on this phone at least from the main 50MP sensor even in lower light scenarios. Same thing about microphone and stabilization.
But the photos aren’t that satisfactory to me. Selfie camera doesn’t perform well. Makes the human faces bright in some cases and dark in some cases. Main camera photos are really good and saturated and very contrast heavy. I do like that but some might not. You can see it compared to my iPhone 15 plus.
I do love the fact it can focus on a closer subject than the iPhone. But I don’t turn on HDR at all. That makes every photos ugly. I don’t know why it struggles with human faces in difficult situations.
Night time photos are okay at its best,
For more of the pictures and videos watch the video. Click here
So overall this phone is my dad’s most favorite phone he owned. He isn’t amazed by the camera though as much. Rather he likes my Galaxy S10e photos more. So if you can compromise just a bit on the selfie camera or normal human photos and you’re fine with good performing processor but not the fastest one, then the overall phone is a crazy good deal and a fantastic phone. But you have to buy the charging brick separately.
What is your experience let me know in the comment section below
Or are you looking forward to buy this phone not for me from nothing?
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