Disillusioned with Nothing Phone 2: Features, Feedback, and Future

thalapathy

I’ve been a Nothing Phone 2 user for the past 7 months, and while initially excited, my experience has fallen short of expectations. Here are some key concerns:

Value Proposition: The phone’s price seems higher than the features justify. Compared to the market, it feels overpriced. And now the prices are inflated too much.
Limited Functionality: The software lacks a user-friendly design. It’s cluttered and basic, missing features many consider essential (e.g., disabling navigation bar, sound customization, internet access controls). This is especially disappointing considering the promises made about Nothing OS.
Ineffective Feedback Loop: Despite submitting feedback over 10 times, I haven’t seen significant improvements.
Community Engagement Discouraged: The fear of moderator intervention or bans for tagging them or expressing strong opinions stifles open communication.

Overall, my trust in Nothing as a brand is waning. The experience feels impersonal, with generic responses and unreliable updates. The Phone 2 feels neglected compared to its potential.

For Indian Users:

If anyone has insights on filing a formal complaint against Nothing in India, your suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

thalapathy

Camera Performance:

Instability: The camera app experiences frequent crashes, making it unreliable for capturing important moments.

HDR Limitations: The HDR feature seems ineffective, resulting in washed-out highlights and underexposed shadows.

Night Photography: Photo processing appears significantly worse in low-light conditions, producing images with an unnatural, “painting-like” texture. Additionally, the camera occasionally displays a complete blackout, requiring a phone reboot. The reboot time has noticeably increased to around 30 seconds since the Android 14 update.

Haptic Feedback:

Subpar Haptics: The haptic feedback remains sluggish and unrefined, lacking the crispness expected in a premium smartphone.

Overall Value:

While the phone boasts a clean and fast UI without intrusive ads and receives (somewhat) bi-monthly updates and security patches, these features fail to compensate for the significant camera and haptic issues. The current price point does not reflect the phone’s overall functionality, making it feel overpriced and underwhelming.

thalapathy

I’m writing to express my concerns about several critical issues affecting Nothing Phone 2 users in India, including myself. These issues are impacting the overall user experience and raising questions about quality control and customer service.

Nationwide Issues: While the location of a specific problem might initially seem localized (e.g., Bangalore), concerns like heating issues, display problems, and unresponsive customer service likely affect users across India. Treating the entire Indian market as a unified whole is crucial for addressing these concerns effectively.

Unresolved Heating: The persistent heating issue with the Phone 2 hasn’t been acknowledged or addressed, leading to user frustration.

Quality Control Concerns: Many users are reporting display problems, suggesting potential quality control issues.

Unresponsive Customer Service: The lack of prompt and effective responses from Nothing teams to reported problems is disheartening.

Battery Drain after A14 Update: The Android 14 update appears to be causing significant battery drain for many users, myself included.

Limited Service Network: Relying solely on authorized third-party service centers is a concern for a phone in the ₹50,000 price range. Opening dedicated service centers across India would demonstrate a stronger commitment to customer satisfaction.

My Feedback Efforts: Despite submitting 10+ detailed feedback reports, I haven’t received any concrete action or updates from Nothing.

Call to Action: I urge Nothing to take immediate steps to address these widespread issues.

Investigate and address the root causes of heating, display problems, and battery drain.
Implement stricter quality control measures.
Improve customer service responsiveness and effectiveness.
Consider establishing dedicated service centers across India.

By taking these steps, Nothing can regain and reassure the trust and confidence of Indian consumers.

Remi F

Well I’ll try to answer most of the points and being unbiased as usual.
Value Proposition: very competitive for the price, good performance, premium build quality, innovative technology (I don’t buy a phone for it’s camera)
Limited Functionality: functionality is on pare with what offer other competitor, stock android is stock android ! I don’t want bloatware or functionality that I don’t use ! Glyph interface is well integrated, home screen customization is really well implemented also (lacks some feature tho) and for your info : disabling navigation bar is coming in the next update so…
Ineffective Feedback Loop: the feedback loop is 100 times more effective than any other smartphone manufacturer, it just takes time to implement what people want ! A lot of feature that the community requested came on the last update for example.
Community Engagement Discouraged: tag people is part of the code of conduct, moderator just follow the rules 😉 anyone can post what they think, as long as it’s respectful, not fake assumption/news and honest.

Instability: never had any crash whatsoever in any Nothing / native app since a LOOOOT of month.
HDR Limitations: that was a request from people that was added, the HDR toggle. Camera quality is improving over time, again —- time.
Night Photography: is the strongest area of the NP2, see MKBHD blind test, NP2 is on top of the list
Haptic Feedback: phone 2 is still 300$ cheaper than the “premium” smartphone area, you need to make some cuts in some area 😉 they feel nice to me.

Unresolved Heating: Never had heating issue even while playing. Living in Europe, there were some report from people living in hot region, might be the cause.
Battery Drain after A14 Update: battery is even better in 14 for me, tho many tier apps had some problem with the transition to A14 and causes a lot of drain with processes on the background, for example the withing watch app. Check your apps to see if there is an unusual activity.

thalapathy

Remi F Glad that your experience is positive with Nothing products! It’s great to hear.

However, there seems to be a difference in experience for Indian users, who are a significant market for Nothing. Many users here are reporting hardware issues (display, battery, heating), software glitches (camera app crashes, missing features), as I’ve mentioned earlier.

There’s a concern that Indian-made units might have quality issues due to supply chain problems or different materials. This is because some users haven’t reported these issues with China-made devices, like yours(might be).

Additionally, customer support in India seems to be less responsive compared to Europe. It would be great if the Nothing team could address this disparity.

On the community point, fostering respectful comments and suggestions is important. While tagging the CEO or other prominent figures might not be necessary, removing such comments entirely, striking it feels discouraging.

To reiterate, there seems to be a higher prevalence of issues with Indian-made units. It would be appreciated if Nothing could acknowledge these concerns and take appropriate action.

SunilThori

For me and most Indian user just the uneven or faulty display is the biggest issue plus there is no acknowledgement from the brand and the third party service center (they are far af hundreds of kms), software is great so far, i knew what i was getting, camera is shitty compared to what other phone is doing the price segment and this seems to be staying that way as well. They do add new features in camera app when users point it out , but as seen with hdr and night photography is shitty implementation,

So in summary great hardware(other than the faulty display in Indian units), great os, great network reception, great optimisation

But

Poor camera quality, poor after sale service, poor brand acknowledgement of issues, poor communication

I have made my peace with these and enjoying the device.

Remi F

SunilThori that’s pretty fair ! I kinda agree with most of what you say in your last message 😉

irfun4ever

this type of “nothing features are limited” posts are interesting to me. I Am using mobile phone since 1999 and using smartphone (i will add Symbian as a smartphone) since 2003. And Android since beginning and used IOS before moving to Nothing. Only day i remember missed a feature in Nothing is editing button when i took screenshot and we received it after next SW update.

Which features are u guys looking ? what feature is missed?

MuhammedNazeefK

yeah, same here.

dissapointed with nothing now..

im also a NP2 user for 7 months,

im also facing a little heating issues after the latest update, and a performance drop too. before i used to get constant 60FPS in BGMI/PUBG, but now its getting low as 40-45 what the hell happened? no battery drain issues for me though.

and i agree to all the points about features missing in nothing OS, like the option to hide the navigation bar, its a basic simple feature yet nothing OS does not have it🤷.

and the haptics, its so bad for a phone in this price range, i swtiched from Realme GT 2 PRO, and i am missing its haptics sooo much, i used to toggle its haptic sensitivity low because its haptic was soo good and crisp and tight. and the implementation was also good.

and yeah nothing OS is fast and smooth, i love that but its missing quite alot.

and a big major concern for me is, BGMI/PUBG is a really demanding game and still after releasing the phone for 10 months they did not add the support for 90FPS, i just don’t get it🤷 why are they not adding this???

NP2 Has snapdragon 8+gen1 chipset, a very capable chipset.. and many phones that cost less than NP2 have 90FPS support. and now some phones are bringing 120FPS support! and we are still stuck with 60FPS that too is not good, its dropping after 20-30 minutes of gaming. i have raised this concern so many times yet no solution have been made.

MadOne

MuhammedNazeefK I agree with the heating and frame drops during gaming after the latest update. Phone heats up to 38C pretty fast and then starts dropping frames. Ambient temperature is around 14C where I live. Hope they fix it in the next update.

Earlier gaming was so smooth and lag free. No overheating issue at all.

jcsss1

I don't understand this complaining. I had a pixel 7pro and a pixel 8. I changed to phone 2 and the phone is great, fast, the battery is great and the camera is not too far behind. only the adaptive brightness not working is very irritating

thalapathy

jcsss1 Instead of comparing Nothing Phone 2 to Pixel phones, let’s focus on the Phone 2 itself.

In India, the Phone 2’s price tag doesn’t seem to fully justify the features offered, especially considering the hype around Nothing OS. Additionally, the update to Android 14 appears to have caused significant performance issues, detracting from the premium experience users expected.

There’s also a concern that Nothing’s Indian customer support might be prioritizing issues from specific cities over nationwide problems. While it’s understandable that user concentrations exist in metropolitan areas, it’s important to address concerns from all regions of India.