Get a Pixel. They said, "You haven't tried Android till you've had a Pixel."
They told me, "I don't remember the last time I had a phone that I've had to
force close my app so many times, that I've had my keyboard not come up, that
I've had my voice dictation just randomly not work for as often as this
phone." Okay, it managed to work that time. But I swear to you, it breaks all
the time. And maybe the Phone 2 Pro from
CMF by Nothing is going to be the solution. The 3A Pro wasn't. But third
times the charm. I can't keep track of their numbering scheme. Maybe this is
the third one. Who knows? Welcome to
nothing. Well, I'm not reading that. It's nothing, right? No. Sorry. Sorry.
The joke's old. Okay, what else we got here? Wait, what even is their branding?
They're not even pretending CMF is a separate brand anymore. What is the
point of it? The point of it is a decent value phone with a decent processor at a
fair price. And compared to the CMF Phone 1, there are some key
improvements. For one thing, the Ingress protection is significantly better. It
is now IP54 rated instead of IP52,
meaning you can splash it from any direction. It has three rear cameras,
now a 50 megapixel wide, a 50 megapixel
telephoto with a 2x optical zoom, an 8 megap ultrawide, and finally a 16
megapixel front camera. Other than that, they've added the same essential key
that we saw on the Nothing 3a series, which opens up a little AI notetaker
thing. And it is apparently their slimmest phone yet, which personally I
appreciate, especially the uh smaller camera bump compared to the 3a Pro. That
was it ended up being kind of a dealbreaker for me to be honest with you. It was like hard to get in and out
of my pocket. Let's finish off our visual tour. We've got our lock button
on the right, noise cancelling microphone on the top, volume rocker on
the left. That's going to make taking screenshots that easy. USBC on the
bottom that runs at USB 2 speeds. Speaker, microphone, SIM tray, and not a
whole lot else. This is not in fact a dial. Nope, sorry, not a dial. But at
the back, we get the same modular interface that you know and love. Okay,
you probably don't know it, and odds are you probably don't love that they've
actually changed it. So, any accessories for the original CMF phone are not going
to work on this one. Whoops. Well, let's check it out anyway. Oh, right. Right.
The tools are apparently in here. Along with a USBC to C cable. That's a stylish
cable. Very square. I heard it's hip to
be that. You know, I saw people get upset sometimes at how carelessly I
treat the accessories and packaging for the stuff that I unbox. Look, if they
can't handle what I'm doing to them, they are never going to survive that
trip to your house with the FedEx or UPS driver. Let's be real here, folks. Ooh.
Interchangeable lenses. A concept that has never been any good and probably
still isn't. Actually, I've heard there are some that are decent. Are there some
that are decent now? Xiaomi. Does Xiaomi have a decent interchangeable lens?
Okay. All right. Well, you know what I have to say about that? If you want to
match them, show me. Okay. What do you I'm going to figure it out. God, you
don't tell me step one, then tell me step two. You got to do this other thing
before step one. Are you kidding me right now? I don't even feel bad for
being confused by that. Well, where is it? You know what? We're going to try it
later. Wallet and stand. More like mag dangerous. Going to
break your Oh, wait. Do I need this stupid thing? I need this stupid
thing. This is what has the magnet in it. This doesn't even have the magnet.
It's a universal cut. So, the only thing
modular about the interface is you take off these screws and then you add the
interchangeable lens and the magnet feature that was supposed to have. How
much is this thing? €25. This is €25.
Okay, fine. They only sell them in the European UK. What? You can't even buy
the the universal cover here. It's not very universal then, is it? But thank
god I can put a lanyard on it. What kind of nerd would use a lanyard in this
year? Oh my god. Who would use a lanyard
this big on their phone? Hi, welcome to
Best Buy. I hang my phone around my neck because I literally want everyone to
know what a slave I am to my digital devices. What can I help you with? Like
seriously. Well, here's how you put it on anyway. Look at the profile of this
thing off the phone. I mean, it makes sense coming from the company. What br
you the giant camera bump coming off this high? But like, what do I tie it?
Like, do I tie it in a little bow back here? Like, what do I Is this the style?
Is this what the kids are wearing? Do they walk the runway in this in Europe
and the UK? Yeah, Mom. I'm just doing a show right now. Got to go. I said I'll
talk to you later, Mom. God, this is atrocious,
dude. Like, let me have some people like wearing it like a sling. Yeah. Like a
cross body. Cross body. We could try the Let's try the cross body cuz the No, I
look like an idiot. No longer. It's supposed to be by your hip. So
convenient. It's okay. It comes with a screen protector. Let's get the SIM tray
open. I could still be pleasantly surprised. Wo! Sim 2 micro SD. Oh. Oh,
we got expandable storage here, folks. We got expandable storage. I was looking
at it again half expecting to find a headphone jack. You know what else we got in here? This message from our
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shortcircuit. Dude, I feel like we barely scratched the surface of this
thing because it has a screen protector. Get it? Otherwise, we would have
scratched it pretty good. Okay, let's play around with the camera. I got the
wallet working. Huh? Wallet. Kind of mediocre stand, but it's attached to
your phone already, which is so convenient. Oh, dude, there's so much still to talk about. So much. Okay, you
know what? Well, we'll get to the camera in a second, then. Let's talk performance. One of the big selling
points here is the MediaTek Demensity 7300 Pro 5G chipset, which as far as we
can tell is basically the same damn thing as the last one, but like maybe a
couple% faster. That's not a terrible thing. It's a pretty okay chip, and it
didn't thermal throttle in any of our testing, but it wasn't much of an
improvement over last gen. So realistically, if the phone feels more
responsive, that's probably coming down to the faster touch pulling on the new
device. So it's still 120 Hz display,
supports variable refresh rate, but the touch polling is far more frequent, so
it could feel a little more responsive in games, and it has more AI. Also,
apparently the screen can hit 3,000 nits
now. Gosh, that's a lot of nits. Too bad
it only does that in like a special test
file in Google Photos. Hey, it's Wi-Fi 6, though. Bluetooth 5.3. Okay, that's
the same as the other CMF phone. I'm I'm going to find some stuff. I'm going to
find some stuff that's different. You just wait. It's still pretty
mind-blowing for a relatively affordable phone. I mean, we usually talk pricing
at the end, but I think it's one of the big highlights here. $280 for this
thing. That is a flipping lot of phone for the money. I mean, it even has NFC
now, and you don't need the universal stupid thing in order to have it. That
was one of my biggest complaints with the original CMF phone. And I know that
in at least one of their main target markets, India, QR codes are a much
bigger deal than NFC, but NFC is a thing pretty much everywhere else. And it's
nice to have it. I don't want to be locked out of using it as a feature.
Love to see it. No wireless charging still though. But hey, the wired
charging is reasonably fast. It'll do 33 watts, which okay, it takes a little
over an hour to reach a full charge. But hey, it's a 5,000 mAh battery, guys. And
we got over 18 hours of video playback in our test. So, what half an hour to
run for like freaking 9 10 hours. I still like their skin. I did have some
bugs with the 3a Pro, which were part of the reason that I abandoned it. Like, I
would just get random music playback when I would disconnect it from Android Auto. It would just like play a song for
a little bit on the phone speakers, even if I didn't even have music on. And I
don't love having to interact with this
multiple times every single time. I want to be able to drag it all the way down.
I didn't actually realize that that's just an Android thing now. So, overall,
my impressions of Nothing OS have been pretty positive. I didn't personally
find much use of the essential key. it just wasn't that essential for me. But I
do generally like the idea of being able to add a quick voice note that I can
refer back to later. And just having that go somewhere organized for me as an
ADHD brain, it's pretty appealing, but it's the kind of thing that I would
really have to work to get in the habit of using. And when I haven't locked into
a phone just yet, haven't put a ring on anything, it's hard to make that a
habit. Speaking of putting a ring on things, why don't we fire up the camera
and uh try out some of these interchangeable lenses. Mid. Quite mid indeed. Let's try
the telephoto. Less mid. More bad. You
know what though? I'm sure the lenses are going to fix this. Fix it right up.
Why would I bother with this? This is
Dude, this is trash. Look at this chromatic aberration here. It's fisheye.
Yeah, it is. I don't want to be a fish then because they apparently can't see
so good. Let's check out the real texture on this Dbrand skin. This glow
circuit skin
ltttore.shortlinus.dbrand.com. Wow. You can really see that texture. Damn. The
question is, do we even need it? Could we just go in macro mode? Wait, does
this not even have a macro mode? Well, wait. No, I get it. No. If I want if I
want my media to be macro, I got to get the
flash using the main shooter. Just
taking a shot from farther away. You know what? No. Okay. The macro lens does
something. It does something. It does something. But hey, Mag
Safe. Yeah. Mag Safe. All right. Selfie.
Is it euthanizing me? No. No. Not that kind. I mean making me look more
youthful. Oh my god. If only my skin was
that smooth. I don't even need no pores. Who needs pores? That's like holes in
your skin. You don't need that. Oh, that's too bad. Did you see how good the
color looked for a second before it like bunged it? Take the
picture. See that? It like flattened it all out. Such a fluttery photo. Don't
worry about it. Don't worry about it. Okay. Here. Here. Here. Here. Check this out. Check this out. Look at that. Like
I I looked like I was alive and then it was like, "No, dude. You old."
Retouching. Natural. Strong. Ooh. Whoa, buddy. Wa! Strong retouch.
Damn. Oh, no. That's better. Okay, maybe it wasn't in no retouching mode. Okay.
Okay, that seems fine. Poor choice of subject, but otherwise, good photo. Oh,
yeah. Speakers. Okay, let's check these out. You know what? I have high hopes.
Nothing's quality for the price has generally been pretty good in my
experience. So, I feel like these speakers are going to be stereo and
they're going to be pretty strong.
Well, we were bound to find at least one
reason that it is not a flagship phone.
The speaker is that reason. Those are rough. I shouldn't say those. That just
one speaker. That that speaker that speaker is rough. We haven't talked
about the RAM yet. It's got 8 gigs of RAM. So, if you like 1 gig of RAM,
you'll like this eight times more than that. About all you can expect at this
price point. 3 years of software updates, 6 years of security updates. Oh
yeah, and the screen is 6.77 in. For those of you who were kind of wondering
about that before, subscribe to ShortCircuit. I'm going to keep looking at
these bezels. Decide whether to switch to this phone.