(cube bounces) (electronic crackling) - Budget phones are fun, because, pretty much with all of them, if you poke around hard enough, you will find the thing that
they had to cut corners on, you'll find the thing
that they trimmed back to get it to be a budget phone. And so for picking one for
you, it's just a matter of picking the one that
makes the trade offs that you're okay with. Like maybe you love, you gotta have good build
quality and cameras. Well then, iPhone SE is
probably a good one for you. And then you know you're
not gonna get a great screen or battery life or things like that. Or maybe you gotta have
a great big screen. Samsung makes the Galaxy A54. Ar maybe you gotta have
good software and cameras. Pixel 7A. This phone is 350 bucks. And this, this is the designer one. (sophisticated electro-jazz music) (electronic crackling) So, this phone is not
going to win anyone over with raw specs. It's not gonna win by
having the best camera or the best battery life
of any budget phone. The performance isn't gonna
blow you outta the water, but you could definitely argue that it's the prettiest $350 phone. So Nothing has had this
transparent aesthetic going for a while with their phones, and then also the earbuds. This one definitely also has that. There's also a white version of this. I think it looks better, it
also has like black buttons, so it's kinda this nice contrast, but, you know, dark
version looks cool too. And honestly if the mission is
to look like a Nothing phone, and not be mistaken for anything else, then, yeah, mission
definitely accomplished. The dual cameras in the
middle and near the top is pretty unique. Kinda like a pair of eyes maybe. And the NFC coil actually
surrounds the cameras. Then there are three bars of
LEDs making a glyph design around the camera circle again. Then it's kinda this split design, the bottom half is like
a PCB-inspired look, apparently inspired by the
New York City subway map. And Nothing's already shown people this, like there's been some
reactions to the design already. Some people love it, some
people actually hate it. I don't know, it's a bit asymmetrical, so it's unconventional for
sure, but I think it's nice, not gonna lie. But even if you don't like
it, at least you can say it's at least somewhat
visually interesting. You know, there's some textures,
there's some exposed screws and some text and that little red square, it's not functional, it's
just purely to look cool, so, I appreciate that. And if you do like this look but have maybe a more boring phone that you're not willing to give up, then channel sponsor dbrand has you covered with
their Something skins. So if you haven't heard of it already, dbrand has performed some, and these are their words, not mine, "Creative plagiarism" on
Nothing's whole design language, both in light mode and dark mode, so I'll leave a link below
if you wanna check those out. But guess what? It's an extremely
competitive price bracket, so you get a good looking phone, but you still will have to
make some sacrifices to get it. So first of all, it's clear
plastic, not glass, at the back. Which, you know, I'm sure Zach will get to
this phone at some point, but I think it'll be easier
to scuff and scratch, but harder to shatter,
like glass would be, so, but I think it's a
reasonable trade off. It's also a textured
plastic frame as well, so it looks like aluminum, but it's this plastic all
the way around the phone, to the point where this phone
actually ends up feeling surprisingly light in the
hand for how big it is. But we should just get to that, this is a huge, it's a
jumbo-sized phone, it's gigantic. Some people might not love that, but I think a lotta people
like really big screens, and you get the natural advantages that come with a big phone, which is a big battery and a big screen. So this is a relatively
giant 6.7-inch display corner to corner. It's literally ultra phone size. And it gets pretty bright too, so definitely not flagship bright, 'cause we have some
crazy numbers these days, but 1300 knits peak brightness is very visible in bright indoor lighting, and bezels are even all the way around the front of the phone, so, aesthetically, I have no complaints. And then even at this price, it's AMOLED, it has an optical fingerprint
reader under the glass. Its variable refresh rate up to 120 hertz. And it even has 2160 hertz PWM dimming. So if you don't like
the back of this phone, at least the front of it, that you're actually
looking at all the time, is pretty impressive for 350 bucks. But I'd say an even bigger
strength to this phone is battery life. So battery always comes from
three main things, basically, obviously having a huge physical battery. Also good software and an efficient chip. We'll get to the software. But, this phone has a
5000-milliamp hour battery, that's literally bigger than their flagship phones from Nothing, so, really big battery. It doesn't have wireless charging, but it does have 45-watt wire charging. Which is pretty good, that's
zero to full in an hour. And the chip it's running
is this little thing called the MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro. So, this was my biggest
question mark, actually, going into testing this phone, 'cause, you know how Nothing teases the specs and stuff ahead of time. So we find out it's a MediaTek chip, and I'm not sure if this
one's going to perform the way I've been used
to some other phones, like they're showcasing
all these, you know, specifically handpicked
benchmarks results, of course they will, but
conveniently, they only compare it to a two-year-old Nothing Phone 1 which had that mid-range,
778G Plus from Qualcomm. Now, I'm not expecting
flagship stuff for 350 bucks, but like, what's it gonna land at, this feels like a make or
break part of the phone. And I've been pleasantly surprised. Now, it's not gonna win
any prizes with raw specs, and I definitely don't think
it'll earn anybody's money with the benchmark scores alone, you look at those numbers, you're like "Okay, not
a total shock here." But as far as actual performance,
when you use the phone, the way I'd put it is, it's respectable, and I really feel like that is
a testament to the software, and how well it's working together. So, at this point we're on Nothing OS 2.5, on top of Android 14. And you already have seen
Nothing Phone software with the dots and the
aesthetic and all that stuff, but, it's clean, there's no bloat wear, and there is a solid
focus on fast and smooth, it kinda feels like a throwback to the old OnePlus Magic back in the day. But with regular use, this phone
is quite smooth and snappy. Sometimes a fingerprint
reader shudders a little bit, like when you're first unlocking, but for the most part, if you're just using the phone
doing stuff like messaging or flipping through a couple
apps, email, web browsing, taking your pictures,
this is a smooth phone. It's pretty similar to what they did with the Nothing Phone 1, with this 778. It's very solid with everyday use, and the second you try to
do super high-end stuff, like gaming, then you'll see where the
benchmarks come up short, where you start dropping
frames and all that. But, again, this is a $350 phone and I am definitely not
complaining about that. Now Nothing has had some time now to build up their aesthetic
and their identity and what they really want
a Nothing phone to be. And I gotta say, they
have a lot of unique, really identifiable things going on here that you may like or dislike,
but they're all here. So aesthetically they've
got the dots everywhere. So the stock apps have
this dots aesthetic, and the thin font to go with it. The back arrow in Android
is made of these dots. And they have this extensive
built-out selection of Nothing widgets now, most of them with the dots theme as well, so you can have this very
consistent home screen aesthetic. And then there's other little stuff, like you can enlarge a single app icon to fill up four spots on your home screen for a unique home screen grid. I don't know, you might be into that. There's also this nice little animation with the folders on the home screen. Also this new thing which
lets you add a glass effect to your wallpaper, so it's blurred behind your home screen for better visibility, I
actually really like that. There's also AI wallpapers now, so you can jump into the wallpaper studio and create the most soulless combo art the world has ever seen
in just a few taps. There's also third-party icon pack support on the home screen, with
instant one-touch previews. And then of course the glyphs. So, this phone still has
some lights on the back, it's less lights that the
flagship, than the phone two, but, about the same
amount of functionality. So there's one vertical
light on the right, and a small one down
here on the bottom left, and then the big top one
arcing around the top left. This is the one that works
with the glyph countdown timer. Maybe you'll find that useful. The blinking notification
glyph when your phone is down, I still wish I could just
customize it a little bit more, I know they don't wanna do
RGB, but if this was RGB, I would totally have different colors light up for different app notifications and I would go to town
with that, but, you know, it still works with just white lights. And it also does music visualizations to sync up with any music
coming out of the speaker, so... (phone plays electro-R&B music) I don't know. Sure. Obviously some of this stuff is gimmicks. Some of this you may find
useful like once or twice, I almost never use the countdown clock, but the one time I use
it, it's kinda cool. Side note, I couldn't
get the glyph composer to work at all on this phone. The UI worked, but it didn't light up
the lights on the back. But you know, on super closeup photos, maybe the glyph fill flash
is decently useful sometimes, useless other times. But hey, while we're on
the subject, the camera. The cameras on the back
here are serviceable, like, it's just practical to have cameras on the back of your phone, and these, they're not
good, but, they're fine. I always feel like we go
into budget phone reviews kinda knowing, okay, this isn't gonna have
cameras that blow me away, it's not gonna be as
interesting to test these, but, you gotta test 'em anyway
and see what they're made of, so, this has a different new 50-megapixel primary
camera on the back, and then it has the same ultra-wide camera as the Nothing phone too, and actually also the same selfie camera. And look, it can take okay pictures. Alright, passable pictures. I know 50 megapixels is a big number, but, here's what I'll say: at this level, even in great lighting, the photos aren't particularly sharp. The dynamic range or depth
of field aren't amazing. Like, you're not buying this phone to take the greatest most
artistic photos and videos the world has ever seen. But, what you do need is
for it to be serviceable, to be quick enough for autofocus to work, for it to capture a moment,
document scanning, video calls, sharing photos with people. And it does all that,
and it's totally fine, and I can't complain. And really what's left a
bigger imprint on me using this is that, compared to their
other flagship phones, almost all of the features are still here. Like the only one I'm not actually seeing on this budget version of
the phone is macro mode. And that, that theme of
keeping a lotta the stuff from the more expensive phones and not doing these artificial cuts, that's what feels good about
this phone as a budget phone, to me, it actually feels like
they're trying to give people all of the Nothing phone
experience for less money. Now, we definitely can't
say it's one-to-one, there's obviously cuts,
especially with hardware, Like there's no wireless
charging, like I said. It's IP54 instead of IP68. It's plastic instead
of glass and aluminum. But, I like that once you
start to get to use the phone, especially with the software
features, experience wise, I don't feel nearly as many
artificial-feeling cuts as we've seen on other phones. Like there's no pro mode in the camera that's missing from the budget phone. All the same advanced settings,
the experimental features, all the home screen
features with Nothing OS, it's all here, on this cheaper phone. And the crazy part to me is, they obviously wanna compare
this to a lower-end phone, so they compare it to the Phone 1, and my natural instinct is
like, "I'm ignoring that, "of course they're comparing
it to the old phone." But when, you actually look
at that 2-year-old phone, you kinda see how far they've come. And you look at the things that are actually better
about this budget phone. This Nothing Phone 2A has
a bigger, brighter screen, with thinner bezels. It has a larger battery,
with faster charging, a higher-processor clock speed, a higher-resolution front camera, and a wider variety of refresh
rates than the Phone 1. Like, no wonder they
wanna show us the Phone 1. But, in general, if you're
looking for the TLDW, yes, this is a good, solid,
all-around budget phone. And the way Nothing has
been tracking with software, it appears, I mean they're promising three years of Android
updates with this phone. I think this will be a
good budget phone to own for the next couple years. Well done, Nothing. Well done. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Base.
