Having picked up Phone (2a) back in December, I’ve had the luxury of testing the device alongside the other insiders for a few months now. The TLDR review would be that it’s a really great experience for (what we now know) at a ridiculously good price. I’ve dropped below a bit more detail around some of the key things, as well as some of the things that were missing.
Note: throughout our time testing the device, we insiders received numerous updates to the beta builds of Nothing OS. As a group, we were able to share our experiences and highlight anything that needed refining. In addition, the testing device was housed in a protective case so we didn’t know what the rear of the device looked like, besides a very small cut-out window that revealed an element of the design. Also, we weren’t informed of the specs nor the price at the time of reviewing, to allow us to have a completely unbiased view.
Design
The immediate thing I noticed when holding the device was the weight, it’s very light even with the case that it was in. My usual driver is a Phone (2), and compared to that I feel like it’s slightly lighter, for some sort of comparative view. The buttons on the side are responsive and have a nice feel to them when pressed.
The front screen with it’s very slim bezels, similar to Phone (2), was very clear and for my personal preference, I prefer the larger screen size for various reasons – media consumption, productivity, camera viewer etc. As for the colours and brightness of the device, it’s what you’d expect to see and I don’t have any complaints about this. When turned up to full brightness, it’s very bright and easily viewable in outdoor environments. I had it on auto brightness for the majority of my testing, which was responsive to my needs and pretty much always displayed the right sort of brightness for me.
Performance
Throughout my testing, I always kept Phone (2a) with me as a secondary device alongside my Phone (2). I installed pretty much all the same apps on both devices and ended up using Phone (2a) as my work/multimedia device. So on a daily, I would be watching videos, playing music, using social media, Teams and Outlook etc – the only things I wasn’t using it for were phone calls or messaging.
What I can say is that performance-wise, it was very comparable to Phone (2) and way better than Phone (1). The 120hz display kept things smooth and transitions were great. In some of the earlier builds, there were a few times that I found some sluggish performance with certain apps or widgets, but as an insider group we were able to report on these things quickly and the team at Nothing were quick to optimise and fix these, with the various beta upgrades that I mentioned earlier.
Speaking of widgets, I should mention that we were lucky enough to get first dibs on some of the new ones that hadn’t been seen before. I’m excited for everyone else to get their hands on these too, and hear what others think, but I loved the development of Nothing style widgets for certain things. Furthermore, we were treated to the AI wallpaper generator which I used straight away. It’s fun to see how Nothing has incorporated AI into something useful, and that anyone will be able to work out and use to uniquely style their home screens.
Overall, the performance of Phone (2a) during the testing phases was positive. As mentioned, coming from a Phone (2) I was already on the higher end of the performance, but this device certainly doesn’t let up, nor does it feel like a majorly significant drop against its higher-end partner.
Battery
Incredible is the short answer. In my experience, Phone (2a) has easily gone at a minimum, 1.5 days on a single charge and in some instances, pushing to 2 days. Average SOT is about 8-9 hours with regular use of the apps I mentioned before. This exceeds the battery life I get out of my Phone (2).
Charging is fast also, whilst not as quick as you’d get from Phone (2), it’s adequate enough that if you pop it on overnight then you’ll have enough juice for the next day or so. Of course, battery life is dependent on your use cases, brightness and apps but as a regular user, it was nothing short of excellent.
Camera
It’s always going to be the talking point of any device we get our hands on, and I’m pleased to say that across our time testing the camera, it got better and better.
In the first few weeks to a month of testing the device, there were some issues around camera performance, HDR inaccuracies and other minor things – stuff you’d expect when testing a device in it’s early infancy and starter OS builds. The team were able to deliver multiple updates to constantly improve and tweak things, which were noticeably improved as time went on.
Whilst the camera set-up doesn’t have a dedicated Macro mode, you can get up close to subjects and still get some good photos. For me personally, I’m not fussed about having such a dedicated mode because I’m not sure when I would use it daily. What mattered to me, as a regular user, was that I had a good camera that I could get some really nice-looking photos on and Phone (2a) does just that.
Expectations need to be considered here, this isn’t going to be a high-performance, top-of-the-range camera because this device isn’t that, but what it is is a very good camera that delivers really good quality photos. You’re able to achieve some nice close up shots, you’re able to get some stunning wide angle shots and if you love a selfie, you can get this too with it’s front-facing camera set up.
The whole process of being part of a small group, testing Phone (2a) has been a delightful experience. It’s moments like this where you feel like your feedback and comments have been acted upon, noticeable through the various beta builds of the OS we went through during our testing phases.
The device itself is a great all-round performer, which will satisfy and please a lot of people looking to get their hands on a Nothing device. Even more so, now that we know the price of it, it would be hard to not consider this as a daily driver for anyone looking to get a phone which comes packed with unbeatable value, for an unbelievable price.
Looking forward to seeing what the rest of the community thinks about this device, congrats to Nothing on the launch!
