Nothing Phone (2a): A Practical Review

the nothing phone 2A is actually kind of good okay so I've been using this phone for a few days now and the phone I came from was of course the Galaxy s24 Ultra and these devices have quite the price difference I mean the nothing phone 2A retails in the US for $350 and the s24 ultra retails for $1,300 so nearly ,000 more than the nothing phone and while the video is not going to be a comparison between these two phones I do think that the nothing phone 2A is not worth $11,000 less than the s24 ultra it's honestly pretty pretty dang good for the price now before making this review I made sure not to watch any other reviews that could you know impact my opinion on this device so uh this is just my thoughts and my experience using the nothing phone 2A as my daily device now I had the opportunity to use both the nothing phone 1 and the nothing phone 2 and what I'll say is that the nothing phone 1 was great except I had one main complaint and that was that it was kind of underpowered as far as processing goes but of course they then fixed that with the nothing phone 2 when they introduced a better processor and the nothing phone 2A being positioned in between the nothing phone one and the nothing phone 2 I was kind of wondering if it would have performance issues issues and it actually did at first so on day one the first day that I switched to this device of course you know it has to set up everything it's installing all of your apps it's configuring so you can kind of expect it to be a little bit slower and you know not at Optimal Performance and you know that was definitely true cuz this phone was lagging a good amount I was I was lowkey kind of disappointed I was like dang this this phone is not as smooth as I as I hoped but then I went to bed I woke up picked up the phone and all of a sudden it was like a massive difference because it was all of a sudden smooth and so I think it just goes to show that yes you really do need to wait for a phone to finish setting up and configuring before you can truly judge how well it performs because now this phone is very smooth now it's not perfect you know this still is a $350 phone so like for example when I open up the camera you kind of got to be a little bit patient with it it'll it'll uh take a second to actually get it up and running but in just like my normal General day-to-day usage you know going throughout the operating system going throughout different apps it is very smooth especially for a $350 device it's it's impressive oh and I think it is also important for me to note that my specific unit is the one with 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage but I believe if you purchase the phone in the US you get 12 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage and you know when I use my phone I don't do anything too intensive like I'm not a big mobile gamer I don't typically edit videos on my phone I'm I'm really just doing you know normal phone tasks and so I can't really speak for like very intensive tasks but for those normal tasks it did perform very well and you know probably the two most important things to me when it comes to a smartphone is performance but also software and I'm very happy to say that along with having good performance this phone also has one of my favorite softwares of any smartphone because you know it is fairly stock Android like you know you you swipe down your notification panel in your quick settings menu it looks pretty close to the same as like a Google pixel which is great and there's no bloatware which is also great but the thing that I'm excited about is just the super awesome customization options that nothing provide because typically when I set up a home screen on an Android phone I use a launcher to be able to set it up exactly how I want so if we look at my s24 ultra right here you can see what I'm talking about but with the nothing phone I don't have a custom launcher on here this is literally just the normal nothing launcher that comes on the phone and one thing that I love about this is that it allows you to install custom icons by default so typically where I would have to install a launcher or maybe an additional app to get custom icons this phone just lets you install them and it just works and nothing even has their own custom icon pack that they made and it actually is able to make every single icon custom you know sometimes when you set custom icons they don't have icons for every single app that you have well nothing's icon pack forces every single app with like an algorithm to be a custom icon and so the custom icons along with their custom widgets as well just make this phone super cool and of course it is kind of an aesthetic that you have to like but I mean good for me this is an aesthetic that I really like so we have good software good performance but what about the battery life and you know I actually kind of came into this experience expecting the battery life to be good because it does have a 5,000 milliamp battery which is you know a pretty big battery and you know it's not a super powerful device so I can kind of assume that it's not going to be using a lot of power and hence getting you know more battery life and I'm happy to say that the battery life on this phone has been great like I'm probably averaging maybe 8 to 8 and 1/2 hours of screen on time pretty much every day and so for pretty much my entire time using this phone I made sure not to charge it during the day so I would just wake up with a full battery and then just go throughout my whole day and I had uh one or two days where I actually ended the day with 50% or more battery life okay I think it's time we brought up one of my favorite things about this phone because of course we can't talk about the nothing phone without bringing up the design and of course this can be a very subjective thing like some people might hate the design of the nothing phone but personally I love it like especially in a world where every single smartphone nowadays kind of just looks a little boring in a way like this phone just goes out there and makes it look so stinking cool like especially being someone who loves transparent Tech like this is just perfect and you know specifically uh with the nothing phone 2A the device we're talking about it has like this new kind of camera arrangement with the phone and at first I wasn't super sure about it I was like honestly I thought it looked kind of weird at first uh but you know now that I've got to use it and hold the phone I actually really like it and in some cases I kind of think it looks better than the nothing phone one and the nothing phone 2 now yes this phone is plastic it has plastic sides it has a plastic back but honestly I feel like this is an excellent example of you know not using premium materials but still being able to have an excellent phone design and a excellent phone appearance because a lot of times when a phone is plastic it can you know kind of look cheap and feel cheap but this phone does not look cheap it just looks cool you know and one great thing that they did here that you can't typically do when you have you know metal rails on a phone is they made the rails of the phone white and I just think that that's super cool because you pretty much never see white sides on a phone and it just kind of gives it like a stormtrooper look and I love that now another thing that this phone has done really well is actually the display and you know it's not going to be as good as a flagship phone of course it is still a $350 phone but for that $350 you're getting a 120 HZ AMOLED display with even bezels which honestly like what what more can you ask for at this price point now you be thinking at this point like all right Parker you're literally only saying good things about this phone like what's the catch and like honestly I don't know I don't I don't think there really is a catch I think it's just kind of a a good phone now if I want to throw some nitpicks out there and just give some things that I have found that I don't like like okay um the fingerprint scanner is a little bit low which has been this true on both the nothing phone one and the nothing phone 2 like it's kind of at an awkward position and then the cameras you know aren't anything crazy I mean we don't even have a telephoto camera at all I mean the front-facing camera can only record up to 1080p video uh the rear-facing camera can record 4K 30 but not 4K 60 and like overall it's like a okay camera as far as I've tested but it's nothing like insane but then one thing that actually is kind of not great honestly are the speakers and initially actually I thought the speakers were like literally like kind of trash honestly and I it's because of this weird reason and so I I obviously upload videos to Tik Tok a lot and so I'll record videos upload them and then watch them back on my phone and when I did that it sounded like really bad and so for like days I just thought the speakers on this phone sucked and until I watched back one of my videos on YouTube shorts and suddenly it sounded way better and so it turns out that for whatever reason videos on Tik Tok or at least my videos on Tik Tok just sound bad on this phone like I don't know kind of weird now I will say the speakers still aren't you know super great like if if I compare especially obviously s24 Ultra is way more expensive of course but if I compare like listening to music on either of these phones like it's obviously like fairly significantly worse than you know my more expensive phone but other than that I mean uh we have no wireless charging which is you know kind of a nice to have feature that you know isn't super expected at this price point but yeah overall this phone is great I mean will I be switching back to my s24 ultra yes I mean the s24 ultra is obviously a better phone but for the price point this phone Nails it I mean I would probably say that the nothing phone 2A is giving me about 65 to 70% of the experience of my s24 ultra and it's only 27% of the price so that's that's a heck of a deal but anyways I'm very excited for nothing's future just because they bring something different to the table something nice something that is just cool and exciting and like different and I I really like it I really really do so yeah anyways thank you guys so much for watching if you have any other questions about the nothing phone 2A feel free to leave them in the comments down below but other than that we'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Parker Burton

Views: 124,370

Keywords: nothing phone, nothing phone 2a, nothing phone (2a), phone (2a), nothing, nothing smartphone, transparent smartphone, nothing 2a, nothing (2a), android, nothing phone review, nothing phone 2a review, nothing phone (2a) review, is the nothing phone 2a good, best cheap phone, good cheap phone, parker burton, imparkerburton, android guy, tech guy

Id: 5DxcrGJrW_g

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024