Severe concerns with the Nothing Phone (2a) Plus Front Camera
For context, I have moved from the Phone (2a) to the Plus version of this series. My main bone to pick with Nothing is, how is a more premium series of a phone worse than the original one. Like something is seriously lacking in the Phone (2a) Plus. I don’t know about others but I can talk for myself when I say that as a customer I can’t help but feel scammed. Right off the box the UI on the Phone (2a) Plus is more glitchy than the Phone (2a). For those who are wondering, you really cannot tell the difference between the two phones in terms of use. Imo the Phone (2a) feels better to use. I don’t even want to talk about the camera on the Phone (2a) Plus, I personally hate opening the camera app itself. As much as I am a fan of the brand and what they are doing in the market, I lost my cool as soon as I clicked my first few pictures on the phone. Just pathetic. Progressively my experience with the camera only got worse.
Selfies started to look like some kind of painting. I like the way my face looks, why is there a need to process the photo post click to make me look like something out of an animation. When I went to the service center to rectify this, I showed a side by side comparison of pictures from the Phone (2a) Plus and the Phone (2a). There was a world of difference in skin tone, clarity and even focus. A 32MP front camera was doing better than the brand new 50MP camera. If you think the back camera is alright, I’m sorry to tell you, it’s worse. Random color corrections on the face, some kind of weird pixellation issues.
The Phone (2a) Plus struggles with basic focus on the front camera, the phone needs to be at a certain distance while taking a selfie to even get a decent picture without focus issues. And even if the focus is right, the processing as I mentioned earlier makes faces look horrible.
After a painstaking wait of 4 hours at the service center, which included rebooting (factory reset and OS Updating) my phone, nothing changed, so I received a new piece even after me telling them that I was sure it wasn’t a software issue but an issue with the hardware. Now I have a new Phone (2a) Plus piece which is just as bad on the camera and UI side.
The Nothing Phone (2a) Plus had me wishing I had never upgraded within the first week of usage itself. Again there are cheaper phones in the market that fulfill the basic criteria of clicking decent pictures.
I made a personal choice last year to sacrifice performance on my previous phone for aesthetic appeal on the Phone (2a) first and then the Phone (2a) Plus later. But now after using the Phone (2a) Plus I am frantically trying to re-sell and get this phone out of my hand.
I understand the arguments about mid range phones and I probably would never have known the difference between the two if I hadn’t used the Phone (2a) first. Would have probably thought, wow the camera is just that bad (maybe the Phone (2a) also has a bad camera).
I have raised multiple concerns on the community page and I have seen many other users with similar issues and no re-assuring answers for the same.
Also personally writing this as a service to those who are looking to upgrade to the Phone (2a) Plus during the recent sales. Please don’t. They’re almost similar in prices 3-4k difference, but compared to the Phone (2a), the Phone (2a) Plus is a disappointingly bad phone in terms of camera experience.
