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 one, but don't let that fool you. 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 one.

like oh, they barely. 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 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, 120 Hertz, but it's Ltpo this time around and they move 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 that 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 want to 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 them.

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 wider compared to the nothing fun one.

Uh, 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 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 going to use, but I think among all 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 want to make sure I assign them to three or four different lights on the back. like because that's an 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 want to 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 Os2 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 kinda 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 airplane 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 plus 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 to the most important things with any new phone are going to be battery life and cameras And 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 4500 to 4700 milliamp hour battery. It also went to a more power efficient newer chip and it's bumped up to 45 watt Peak charging. So even with the higher fresh 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 uh? Turns out this thing can keep it going for six seven 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 camera's back here. On the other hand, we're a little bit more of a bummer. a bit inconsistent for me. So still, dual camera is still a primary camera and an ultra wide no telephoto.

and they've upgraded sensors now so 50 megapixels each. but it's not. It's not the no 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 IMX 890 for the primary sensor which is the same one that's in the OnePlus 11 and the OnePlus Nord3. This is a very average camera system in perfect lighting. Like the aperture is wide enough and the sensor is 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 Norris 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 it 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 you can actually hear them if you can.

It's not the sound of my hand hitting the phone that's like the sound of the vibration motor being too strong. I Just want to 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 eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage that I just turned the torch on.

Of course I did. um, 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.

Uh, matter of fact I can kind of already see the two sides of how people will Embrace this phone like you'll have the our Android community on Reddit Saying okay, 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 the Nothing investor Club Being like this is, 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 we 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 too. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys the next one.

Peace, Foreign.