This is a bit of a rant about a phone I really really loved when I got it, wanted to spend 4 years+ with it, but how it just felt like it was abandoned. I still love Nothing products, the CMF buds pro 2 are my favorite earbuds, I'm thinking of getting the headphone 1 or the CMF headphone pro, I was even considering the NP3 at some point…
TL;DR: software issues, cameras really sucked, phone abandoned, problems never really solved
So I bought a NP2 around a year and a half ago and I genuinely loved that phone from the first day. I got it used for a very good price and the feature set and UI experience at that price was so good compared to the xiaomi or samsung phone I would have to buy. For sometime the pros outweighed the cons, the user experience was very good, clean, minimal, the speakers were pretty good, the screen was pretty decent… So even though I encountered bugs, the cameras sucked (the app somehow managed to be worse) and nothing os was still very primitive, I was sold on it and thought "nothing a software update can't fix, right?"
But the core issue was, you can get the beautiful design down, the cool widgets and everything, but if you don't nail the fundamentals it doesn't really come together very well. The NP 2's camera was bad, like really bad… It oversharpened everything, just the preview in the camera app was always laggy, I couldn't even take 2 shots in a row without it loading, shots took like 5-10 seconds to process, switching between lenses felt jagged, there was the weird AI filter thing that I could turn off but magically the option disappeared one day, the camera app never remembered my settings so it always reset them and so on and so on. And I don't think this was a hardware issue too, I've had cheaper phones with weaker chipsets and worse camera hardware but a much more tolerable camera experience than this, but sadly the update to fix the camera never came, so I barely took any photos with it because it was so frustrating, and even though on update logs they'd say camera improvements, at the end of the day I never really saw any.
The software experience quickly became the next part of the problem. Nothing OS is really nice and minimal but it still needs work. I encountered frequent bugs, it used to stutter quite a bit, and an update always brought a problem, especially to do with battery life and bluetooth. The NOS 3 update killed my battery life, and it took them like 2-3 months to fix… at some point my buds (CMF buds pro 2) were frequently disconnecting, I couldn't change ANC settings and whatnot from the phone e.t.c. that bug wasn't fixed for quite a big amount of time. At some point the quick settings area never respected my theme so if I switched to light theme it would stay in dark theme but with a light background…. But even though I still had all these issues I still loved nothing os and hoped for the update.
Battery life at some point took a massive dip. I used to get 6 hours+ of SOT, sometimes even 7 but after a few months and a few, updates I started getting 4 hours at most maybe 5.
I feel like the team at Nothing just started focusing on different things. It seems like they are trying to get into as many product categories and release as many products as possible, so their priorities may not being in actually improving on their already good UX base by fixing all these issues.
Funnily enough, I was considering buying a NP3 after the 2, but the same problems still persist. Nothing OS 4 is nothing more than an incremental update with a new clock and some AI features (they still havent fixed any of the long term issues I've had with the NP2 just to begin with), The camera on the NP3 looks fine, but it still has the same shutter lag and whatnot, it's pretty expensive for what you get (the price will drop tho anyway), the display is not even a real LTPO display, the chip is a step down, the battery life is not that great for a silicon carbon one etc, so I just wonder where to go from here?
