Like some of the other Insiders here, I’ve also been using the Phone (2a) for the past couple of months, and I’ve summed up my impressions here! I’ve been daily driving it, with the Phone (2) relegated to a secondary phone.
We did not know the specs or the price point until the public announcements, so many of my opinions were initially formed blind, but I have added in context where relevant to my review.
Initial feeling
My initial response was that this is a big phone. It’s the same size as the NP2, which I find surprising from a budget phone. I’m not a huge fan of big phones, but I am definitely impressed with the quality of the screen on this thing as that’s often where corners are cut with budget phones since smaller screens are cheaper. Other than that, aside from feeling a little lighter that P2, it generally feels very much the same in hand, with the added bonus that it balances properly when laid down due to the rear cameras being central. Small point, but very much appreciated. In hand it would feel almost identical to me with a case on, so the plastic exterior wouldn’t detract from the experience much.
Performance
Through general use, the smoothness and responsiveness is impressive, and I would say they are better than NP1 but not quite as good as in NP2. Coming from NP2 I could feel this difference. Nothing striking, just little things like the fingerprint scanner takes ever so slightly longer to process before unlocking, or an app is a bit slower to load up. With my current knowledge regarding the specs and the price bracket though, I’m impressed that Nothing managed to get the general performance so close to that of NP2.
That said, there was also some quite aggressive memory management to start with, where apps would not stay open for very long in the background. But thankfully this was either patched to be more optimised or the device learnt my usage habits better and could therefore optimise my background tasks, massively improving my multi-tasking experience 😊
OS
One of the key selling points of the NP2a is that it is of course running Nothing OS 2.5, with practically all the features I’ve seen in NP2 included (and even a bonus feature or two 👀). From what I could tell, the only feature which was not present was the macro mode for the camera. All the glyph features, widgets and OS functionality were present which I was glad to see. There’s honestly not much more to say here as the functionality has been almost identical to NP2!
Battery
The battery is one area where it is a clear upgrade, even compared to NP2. I wouldn’t say it gets me through two days of usage, but definitely more than a day. I generally charge it every day still out of habit and when it is most convenient, but there is a lot more starting charge when I do.
Camera
I’m not a huge camera person. I enjoy having it, but ask me to take the best pictures and I mostly rely on the camera to do the work for me. I have admittedly preferred the photos taken on my NP2 in general, but the quality of the photos taken has increased, especially in terms of HDR, as updates have been shipped. It handles colours quite nicely, and one area where it has trumped NP2 in my opinion is when taking images with the sun in as in my experience the NP2a has handled that better.
Conclusion
Overall I would say this is phone has an incredible performance price to performance ratio, as it does a lot of what the NP2 can just as well. I can definitely feel the progress Nothing has made from NP1, and appreciate the level of focus and attention to detail the NP2a is receiving from Nothing; this isn’t just another phone!
It’s not going to be for everyone of course, and after this I will be going back to the NP2, but if I had to choose between buying the NP2 and buying the NP2a, I might just lean towards the 2a and save a few hundred quid to get something that packs a punch for an affordable price without compromising on the Nothing experience 👀
