Nothing Phone (2): What They DIDN'T Tell You // One Month Later

foreign [Music] this is the nothing phone 2 the much hyped follow-up to nothing's superb debut phone the nothing phone one and someone who Raves highly about that first phone I was super excited to see how nothing would improve things with their second generation and for what it's worth I've seen pretty much every bit of mainstream coverage already on this phone which has all been great so far and a lot of which I largely agree with but after using it for a full month I think there's a lot about this phone that is yet to be shared so let's Dive In as always we're going to start with the design and look I'll be honest I was probably expecting some more obvious changes to this year's design particularly when I saw tweets like this from nothing CEO Carl pay because ultimately there's no denying that the phone one and phone two they do look very similar there are really only three to four changes that they made with varying levels of impactfulness to start on the back the glyph lighting elements around the camera and wireless charging coil got broken up into more segments though the basic shape and layout Still Remains the Same and then the back glass is also slightly curved on the edges now compared to the completely flat phone one and this does make it slightly more comfortable in the hand it's nothing groundbreaking but it's a nice Improvement nonetheless then on the front of the phone we have slightly thin up still uniform bezels which is probably my favorite part about the design language of nothing phones in general and then perhaps the best Improvement they made in my opinion in terms of design was moving the selfie camera hole punch from the side to the middle the biggest thing they didn't change or improve about the design was this glossy finish on the back I really wanted nothing to move to a matte finish which I reckon would have made this phone a 10 out of 10 in terms of design but alas that wasn't to be hopefully next year and then we have the display and the phone one already had an amazingly fluid 120 hertz display which was a true joy to use but the only real downside to that display was that it didn't get all too bright well this time around the brightness has seen a pretty significant increase to 1600 nits of peak brightness which is up there with some of the best plus nothing has now adopted that ltpo display technology meaning the display can adapt its refresh rate to save on battery life so great improvements all around in this department and speaking of battery life this has got to be one of the absolute best upgrades nothing has made to the phone too now I'll admit the phone one did get much better in terms of battery life over time thanks to a bunch of software updates but where that phone is currently about a b b plus in terms of battery the phone 2 is a solid a plus no joke pretty much every day that I've used this phone over the past month plus it has been sitting at about 50 of battery life give or take when I've been heading into bed at the end of each day which has been such a nice experience and I'll be honest battery life was one of the main concerns I had about this phone when nothing announced that they were using last year's Snapdragon hn1 chip instead of the incredible hn2 chip which is known for its impressive efficiency in terms of battery life but it turns out that fear of mine was unfounded because as far as I'm concerned the battery life in this phone has been just as good as pretty much every phone that I've used with the 8 Gen 2 chip and speaking off that chip let's briefly chat about performance and I say briefly because in my experience despite using a mid-range chipset the nothing phone one still performed incredibly well and from what I understand that chipset was a huge contributing factor to the phone having such an affordable launch price and so given that the phone one already performed so well with a mid-range chipset it probably won't surprise you to hear that the phone too is absolutely top tier I have never once had any issues relating to the phone underperforming or overheating it has handled everything I've thrown at it like an absolute champ now that being said I would be very interested to hear what the difference was in price for nothing to upgrade to the 8 gen 1 chipset over the 778 plus G chipset that they used in the phone one if the price was fairly similar given that the 8 gen 1 is an older chipset then no problem but if there was a significant price increase that then caused the launch price of this phone so also increase then I'm not really sure that the upgrade was worth it and again that's more so a testament to how well last year's phone one performed and not a knock on how the phone 2 performs but it's still something we're thinking about okay so from there we have the software and with the launch of the phone 2 we also saw the launch of nothing's new OS 2.0 which is supposed to take what was a very lightweight AOSP based skin with the phone one to something with a little more character and I know when I heard nothing talking about that I got a little bit nervous and started having flashbacks to win OnePlus started using a pretty much direct version of color OS a few years back but thankfully all of those core AOSP style software elements they are all still firmly in place the main tangible changes nothing is made with this 2.0 version of their software firstly these various custom-made monochrome widgets which can also be placed on the lock screen and the always on display which is super nice we've got this new custom-made monochromatic icon pack and thanks to a recent software update it now beautifully skins every single icon even if it's not technically supported which is amazing we also have these fancy new folder customizations including the option to add folder covers which helps to hide folders under custom nothing icons though not custom icons completely at this time hopefully in the future and nothing also recently finally added support for the much requested one-handed mode any other new apps like the glyph composer or the weather app they're already available on the phone one so aren't exclusive to this 2.0 version of the software now I actually really like all the changes nothing has brought about with nothing OS 2.0 and I appreciate the philosophy behind this monochromatic look they're going with but something to keep in mind is that pretty much all of these features will be coming to the phone one at some point in the future as well so if you were thinking that this software was a reason to get the phone to over the phone one then just know that the phone one will have nearly the exact same software experience very soon on top of that I will say I do find some choices nothing made a little lot like the design of this app drawer it kind of feels a little Half Baked compared to say a pixel phones app drawer and it's kind of weird how the whole phone fades to Black when closing or opening the app drawer even these super wide app shortcuts when long pressing app icons I kind of find them a little odd looking again compared to the much cleaner more standard looking app shortcuts on other phones I will also say whilst I seriously love that we can use third-party icon packs with the default nothing launcher there is this bug that's also evident on the phone one that means when you are using a third-party icon pack it actually breaks the super clean launch icon animations that I think help to contribute to a phone feeling super fluid so nothing if you are able to fix that that would be amazing also for reference there's still no inbuilt screenshot editor it just jumps straight into Google photos which is not a huge issue but it's something I'd love to see introduced in a future software update the phone did also ship with some bugs like issues with volume across various apps the Google discover feed was also crashing fairly regularly plus a couple other minor quirks but thankfully these issues have all been patched now and the experience is pretty much as bug free as one would like a phone to be all right that was a lot of information so let's take a quick break whilst I thank today's video sponsor pulseway I've spoken about pulseway a bunch of times on the channel now but that's because to put it simply it is an incredible it management tool that can seriously change the way that you work you see pulseway gives you access to any system device from any device that you want your computer of course but the real kicker is that you can also use their world-class mobile app as well and it is staggering just how much the app lets you do from monitoring networks to patching systems and executing automation workflows even to complete remote control access it's all available right within the app and thanks to the clean and well-designed UI it just makes getting work done an absolute Breeze plus thanks to the fact that it's on your phone you can obviously do it in any location as well and if that wasn't enough what's even more amazing is that you can actually try it out completely for free no commitments whatsoever so to get started with using pulseway and their incredible app use the first link down in the description below all right now in my six month later review of the phone one I made the comment that there were three things I desperately wanted nothing to change for their next iteration and in no particular order they were the fingerprint sensor the haptics and the cameras so let's start with the fingerprint sensor and I'm happy to report that the entire biometric experience on the phone 2 has seen some huge improvements in reliability and speed over the phone what the sensor itself is still a little too low in terms of placement but aside from that what I think has made the biggest improvement over the phone one is a single subtle change that nothing made to their face unlock implementation and I'd like to think that I had an impact on this change coming to fruition given that I was just about the only person to mention this but in my six month later review of the phone one I asked nothing to copy Google's own face unlock implementation namely the one feature where even if and when your is successfully registered that the fingerprint sensor icon does not disappear and that it instead becomes a button that you can use to unlock the phone and I was overjoyed to see that they had in fact implemented this exact change with the phone too and boy oh boy does it just make the entire unlocking experience so much more liable this time around then we have the haptics and uh unfortunately the haptics are virtually identical to the ones found in the phone one look it's not like they're out and out bad haptics they're definitely not but when you have Samsung Google and apple all placing top tier haptics in their own phones also in this similar price range the slightly metallic feeling haptics in the phone too they do feel a little cheap and then finally the cameras and I'm gonna say out of everything this was the feature that I was most disappointed did not get a hardware upgrade over the phone one yes technically the selfie camera did get an upgrade but as someone who almost never takes selfies more than anything I desperately wanted a telephoto lens on the phone too and so when I saw the leaked renders I was hoping that they weren't true and then when I attended the product briefing prior to launch and it was confirmed that there were indeed only two cameras still to say that I was a little disappointed is probably a bit of an understatement and perhaps I'm sounding a little dramatic here but as someone with three kids who are often off and playing in the distance at the beach or at a playground a telephoto lens is probably the lens I use most when I'm using other phones and it's gotten pretty close to a deal breaker for me now when it comes to considering whether I'm going to keep using a phone full-time or not now I will say by and large I do think nothing has made some really solid Improvement in regards to how photos are processed this time around particularly in reference to images of people which is what I'm most interested in and from what I've heard this improved processing is perhaps actually the biggest benefit of the upgrade to the 8 gen 1 processor in terms of the phone's performance but in saying that for what it's worth I do still much prefer pixel phones when it comes to pictures of people but I'm still very satisfied with the results nonetheless I do also appreciate that we now have improved animations in the camera app when switching between camera lenses which makes the shooting experience just that little bit more pleasing however there is a huge issue that I've had with the camera app on this phone whereby it is near impossible to capture photos in quick succession back to back the first time you launch the camera app you will be able to capture about three or four photos in about a two second period but then the phone will start processing those images and will literally block you from taking any additional pictures for a solid second or two and again with kids who might only be willing to pose for photos for half a second or if you're trying to take time critical pictures of anything this is a serious issue and it has caused me to miss quite a number of photos throughout the month that I've been using it so yes there have been some improvements in regards to how the images are actually processed resulting in better end results however no telephoto lens and poor processing speed makes the overall camera experience one that would prevent me from being able to use this phone full time as my main everyday device [Music] nothing does watch my videos there are two specific things I wanted to make mention of at the back end here before wrapping up this video that I'd love for them to address firstly I'm going to say some of the sound effects used throughout the interface they need some tweaking in particular I'm referring to the sound effect that you hear when capturing a screenshot the sound when capturing an image and more than anything the sound effect that plays when switching the sound profile from Silent to loud and I know that you can just disable most of these and that they're also designed to tie into this whole machine-esque electronic design language that you've got going on but these sound effects in particular do not play nicely with phone speakers and in fact they kind of make the speakers sound a little bit broken particularly that's silent to loud sound effect and then the second and final thing that I want to make mention of in this video are the glyphs and look I know that the nothing team is heavily invested in this feature through and through and I like how it differentiates the design of the phone and I also like their philosophy of using the glyphs to try and help us to be more mindful with how much we're using our phones but and this is a big but ultimately they are a gimmick a nice gimmick sure but still a gimmick nonetheless and the main reason for this is twofold firstly the screen protector that comes pre-installed on the phone is just about the lowest quality that you can get and all you have to do is put your phone screen down one time on a surface with a bit of dirt on it and that screen protector will all of a sudden be scuffed and become very unpleasant to use but even if there was a better screen protector installed or we bought and installed one ourselves it still makes me wince quite a bit at the thought of placing the phone face down and risking any scratches or imperfections to the screen protector or worse yet to the display now the solution to that is to somehow invent a display that just does not scratch or scuff at all but the likelihood of that happening without the phone reaching astronomical prices is pretty close to Impossible and so there's issue number one but the second issue is that as far as actually using the glyphs to decipher any information even if we had all the customizations in the world like changing specific notifications to specific colors which by the way we can't do but even if they push this technology a bit further and we were able to do that with a future version of this phone I still don't think that's very useful make sure they've got all this new functionality this time around like the glyph timer the volume indicator and even this handy Uber functionality that shows a progress bar indicating how far away an Uber is but hang on a sec what happens if the Uber driver got lost and is trying to call you if your phone it's on silent you'll have no clue or sure the glyph timer is cool for like Pomodoro style focused work for a bit but other than that if I'm in a pinch and need to set a quick timer there's very little chance that I'm gonna remember to come into this specific section of the settings menu to set a timer I'm just going to open the clock app and set the timer that way and so for me I think we need just a little bit more functionality for this whole philosophy of checking our phones less to actually work functionality that unfortunately LED lights on the back of the phone are never going to be able to provide you see an LED indicator for a quick glance is nice but I think in reality we actually all want to know specifically what notifications we are receiving I think if nothing really wants to push this ideology forward they need to switch to making I don't know a flip phone with a smaller front display so that we can actually see specific notifications coming in perhaps even interact with them quickly without ever having to fully open and unlock the phone with is therefore what temps us into then inadvertently opening one of our many social media applications otherwise as far as I'm concerned these glyphs on the back even if you push them as far as they can go in terms of customization they will never really serve a proper functional purpose and they'll forever be relegated to gimmick status and that's fine with me as long as the nothing team don't keep pouring tons of money in terms of research and development into improving this feature therefore causing the price of the phone to continually increase now that being said if they can guarantee that continuing to work on improving this feature won't increase the price of future phones or sacrifice improving other areas of the phone like the cameras or the haptics then no problem but if the glyphs do become such a focus that other improvements are sacrificed or that the price will increase the nothing please just leave them as they are a fantastic distinguishable design differentiator which some handy but honestly rarely used functions to go with and so with all of that being said here are my final thoughts on the nothing phone too first and foremost it is a fantastic phone and if you missed out on the phone one that really wanted one then you'll no doubt really enjoy this phone but is it a big improvement over the phone one no it isn't and in fact thanks to the price jump I actually think that a lot of people would be better off getting it they're now nicely discounted phone one instead yes you get a better chipset but that's pretty hard to notice unless you're a gamer or a heavy user of sorts a brighter display that is love that I have but the display on the phone one itself was fantastic and for the price you'd probably gladly trade having a slightly dimmer display the main tangible Improvement I think is the battery life but again after a couple of software updates as I said the phone one itself ended up being pretty solid in terms of battery life now this phone does have better battery life but again you have to ask yourself does the price difference justify the improved battery experience that's really only a question that you can answer for me whilst I really really like this phone I gotta admit the lack of improvements to the haptics and the camera system in particular those are what's holding this phone back from being a top shelf easy recommend of a phone it'll no doubt continue to feed a lot of videos on the channel thanks to its beautifully minimal design and clean software but as for using a nothing phone as my main everyday device Beyond this review period well I guess I'll just have to hope that next year's phone 3 will better fit the bill thank you [Music]

Channel: Sam Beckman

Views: 258,471

Keywords: sam, beckman, nothing phone 2, nothing phone 2 review, nothing phone, nothing phone 2 camera test, nothing phone 2 vs pixel 7, nothing phone 2 features, nothing phone 2 vs, nothing phone (2), nothing phone 2 vs nothing phone 1, nothing phone 1 vs nothing phone 2, nothing os 2, nothing phone 2 one month later, nothing phone 2 long term, nothing phone 2 in depth, nothing phone 2 long term review, nothing os 2.0, nothing phone 2 gaming test, nothing phone review

Id: 80FWZ5ZauZY

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023