Alright, so you're telling me the Nothing Phone 2a runs with the Pixel 7a in terms of performance,
runs cool, and starts at 330 euros? I mean, yeah, I get it. There's some issues on paper.
It's using a MediaTek chipset, which in the past has basically been a budget.
But this is looking like a very complete package this time around.
Oh, I like that it's not super heavy. Dude, I was looking for a phone to take with me on my trip,
because I need one for my kids to borrow for the plane. I picked up one of the most recent iPhones.
It'd been a little while. It was like, damn, these things are heavy. Packaging wise, you get a whole
lot of... not much. It's not nothing, but it isn't much. You've got a sim removal tool.
Apparently the cable is supposed to go here, but Ars didn't have one in the box. Maybe that's
because it's an early unit. And you get a phone. There is a lot to like here. Obviously,
nothing is design language is back in partial force. You're not going to get any of the fancy
lights on the back, but personally, I love the transparent back. And I also love that this is
one of the first bones I've seen in a little while that doesn't have a gigantic camera bump on it.
We've got two 50 megapixel cameras back here, one regular, one ultra wide, both with Samsung sensors.
And that's not the only thing that they've done to help shave down costs. I already mentioned
they've gone with a MediaTek chipset. So it's the Dimensity 7200. But while MediaTek doesn't
have the same kind of brand recognition that Qualcomm might have, this is not exactly your
Grandpa's MediaTek chipset. It's using the latest TSMC 4 nanometer process. It's got
eight cores paired with eight or 12 gigs of RAM with their RAM booster feature that essentially
allows apps to run over from memory into storage and practice. We found that in a phone configured
like this with a decent amount of memory, it didn't make a measurable difference in anything
that we were looking at. But hey, maybe it's a cool idea for Apple. You're going to take that, Andy?
Apple doesn't put enough RAM in their devices. He has no defense even. Even the Apple fanboys
can't defend it. There are more compromises. You won't find a coil here for wireless charging
because there isn't any. And the USB-C port on the bottom is only USB to just like the
non-pro versions of the latest iPhones. But it supports 45 watt wired charging and that's a
5,000 milliamp hour battery in it that in our testing performed admirably. We ended up with
about 14 hours in our longevity test, which is playing back YouTube videos at 250 nits and
a full charge was only 63 minutes. Pretty nice considering what value phones used to be like.
And the same can be said of the display. Yeah, the Pixel 7a outperforms it, hitting higher peak
brightnesses and small Windows. So you're going to get a better HDR experience out of that phone.
But the nothing phone 2a managed to hit about a thousand nits peak brightness full screen in SDR.
So you'll be able to use it under any conditions. I realize I'm getting ahead of myself a little
bit here though. I haven't talked about the design pretty much at all. We've got the lock
button on the right, volume rocker on the left. I already showed you guys where the
sim location is. It's right next to that USB-C port and that's about it. Always canceling
microphone here. And ah, yes, the glyph lighting interface does make a return, but in a much
simplified form. So here, let's go ahead and, uh, oh, gestures are enabled by default. So no
bottom buttons, although you can reactivate them if you really want to. And then let's, uh,
let's see. Glyph lights on. Hey, there we go. And that's just a brightness slider. Okay, what the?
Hello? That's on. Okay, what just happened?
This is like, this must be like watching my grandparents use a computer. Okay, now they're on.
What, they're gone now? No they're, okay. There you go. That's cool.
You gotta get them full points for style, you know? This is one of those devices you look at and go,
man, why would I pay a huge premium for design when this exists? It is so cool. And sure,
I might not be the arbiter of what is cool and what isn't, but do you really disagree?
It looks freaking awesome. I gotta say, as someone who doesn't really care that much about the skin
on my phone, yeah, this makes less of a difference to me than it might to some people, but I can't
deny that it looks really good. As cool as it looks, I'm more interested in how it slides though.
It's not LTPO OLED. Okay, so you're not going to get those one hertz variable refresh rate values
and you're not going to get that super high peak brightness, but you are still going to get inky
blacks. It still manages variable refresh rate down to 30 hertz, so you will get some power
savings there. And as we saw already, it gets, in my opinion, bright enough, especially when you
consider the price. Some might complain about the 1080 by 2412 resolution, but in my opinion,
even at this size, it's not a problem unless you are extremely keen eyed. The first thing that I
tend to do with the device is turn the text size all the way down because I'm all about
information density. So let's do that and have a look. I mean, come on, I get you want to show off
how well you can see, but even if I had a screen that ran at a higher resolution natively, I would
probably still turn it down to 1080 just for the power savings and increase in battery life.
It's got Corning Gorilla Glass 5. It's flat. So if you're one of those people who doesn't like
curved glass, then you can suck on my Note 9 and you can buy this phone. Personally, I like the
curved glass, but I also get it. The bezels are pretty reasonable again for a more value-oriented
device. A big question mark for me though is the camera. First of all, can I double tap for camera?
Yes, I can. Thank you. Oh, interesting. It struggles a little more than some of the
more premium phones compensating for the exposure issues that shooting into this light generally
has. That's in case you guys were wondering why I'm always taking pictures in such suboptimal
conditions on set. What I'm looking for is how much this light source blows out the rest of the
image. And you can see the answer for this phone is at... I would expect, based on what I've seen
so far, that under better conditions, it will fare quite a bit better. And the answer is,
it does. That processing is pretty slow. That's one of the things that Qualcomm has done a really
good job of over the last five years, is building neural processing and image processing capabilities
into their chipsets that are just better than what you're going to get on a budget chipset.
With that said, this is not behaving like a budget chipset either with respect to this.
Sure, the processing times are taking a while, but damn, that is like really good.
Here, just for context, okay? Just for context. I know it's an older flagship,
but this is what passed for a flagship phone like five years ago. Come on, buddy. You can do it.
Let the phone app open eventually. I take back all the nice things I just said.
It just got crushed by a Note 9. Now, there's things people will like more about the nothing
image. It's poppier, but like, that is not what that looks like. Okay, it's in shadow.
That's what it looks like. This light, the Note 9 blows it out. You can see it's clipped,
but the nothing phone just has no idea what's going on here. Like, this looks like too light
side by side when it is not. That's a white wall with a little bit of spill on it,
just like we're looking at here. Ironically, the ultra-wide handles that light source a lot better.
If you're a shutterbub, this might not be the thing for you, but it'll definitely do in a pinch.
Selfie camera, though? 32 megapixels and, you know what, again, maybe I'm getting bamboozled
here, but all of this is very usable. Like, very usable. Let's say, for example, instead of a blank
space, you had friends, you could put them there. Not bad. And to their credit, they're not overdoing
the processing on the selfie camera. I see this so much, even from big brands, where they have
all these effects and everything turned on. It's like, no, that's what a tech bro who's pushing
40 looks like, for better or for worse. Feel like I've aged 10 years in the last decade.
For video, she'll do 4K, 30fps, and the lab reported that the audio recording quality was
actually surprisingly decent. So that's a pleasant surprise. What's up, y'all?
Not bad at all. Really not bad. I mean, it's no iPhone, but it also caught, like, what the
tricks did the iPhone start at these days? Okay, technically, the iPhone SE still exists for 429,
but get real. So 13 starts at $600 US.
13 starts at $600 US. Yeah, I would take this over that in a heartbeat. It's got an aluminum frame.
It's IP54 rated, which admittedly is not really par for the course anymore. It's as good as the
nothing phone 2, but I would like to see that up to an IP67 rating. And I guess now's the time
for us to explore nothing OS a little bit. We ended up using this instead of the stock
Android experience for our testing because, well, we liked it. It's more than just a theme on your
desktop. There's kind of similar to Carl Payne's previous employer OnePlus, thoughtful customizations
to the stockish Android experience. And we didn't find that it had a noticeable impact on performance
or battery life, which is all we can really ask. Right there. Right there. Back button on the right
side. Is that so much to ask? See, thank you. Nothing. Thanks for nothing. OS. And to everyone
who can't be bothered to do that, thanks for nothing. I just, I like the back button on the
right. Okay, we've got to do a quick audio test. Does it have an amplifier to your
peace speaker? I guess we're about to find out. I wouldn't expect it at this price. I'll be impressed
if it has it. It does. Not bad stereo imaging either. And that's something that has really
improved in the last two, three years. My goodness, has it gotten a lot better across the industry.
And not just phones, laptops too. Just these tiny little devices with these tiny little speakers
sounding like they're coming from all around you. A little muddy, not the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Very reasonable considering the price. You know, I didn't really think about it until I was sitting
here using the phone some more, but the glyph interface is kind of perfect for me. I have this
problem and you'll have seen it actually here. The editor will have seen it. Roll the clip of me
getting interrupted by my phone notification. The nothing phone 2a. Look, I'm very popular. Okay.
I forget what I have my phone set to very, very often. And so I'll end up with it on when I'm
supposed to be filming and then I'll end up leaving it muted when I'm supposed to be accessible to
my family or my colleagues. And so if I could just use their flip to glyph, see a little phone
flashing out of the corner of my while I'm filming, but put it in my pocket and have the
notifications go, that would be kind of awesome. Some of the functions of the glyph interface
are less applicable to me. You can use it as a countdown timer, for example. Why do you need
to spend more than 350 bucks on a phone? Oh, speaking of $350, it's unfortunately not available
in the U.S. outside of their developer program where it costs $350. So it's not available, but
it is. And the pricing is perfectly reasonable. So what does that even mean? I'm not even going
to speculate why that is, but it's $350 for a developer membership and you get a phone,
sure, whatever that means. This is cool. They apparently have NTFS optimizations for moving
files to and from Android and Windows. That matters to me a lot. I'm one of those dinosaurs
that still offloads my photos from my phone with a cable. And man, is it ever slow. Oh,
ringtone sound pack. Glyph composer.
I have the ideas to be annoying and get my attention.
Wow, boy, would that ever be effective. Delete. Never exist again. Thank you.
There's a few more lab's notes on the phone. It's Wi-Fi 6, but speeds were
as expected for a device of this caliber. It uses Bluetooth 5.3 only, but at least Bluetooth
connectivity was extremely stable. And so was the performance of the in-screen fingerprint
sensor with it registering 28 out of 30 times across what is a mostly anecdotal test. They
were also very pleased with call quality, which is something that, you know, it should be good for
a phone. Now, that leaves the last big question, and that is, how long exactly will you be using
this phone for? Nothing is promising three years of updates with four years of security updates,
which is not on par with some of the really big players in the space anymore. But at this price,
I consider to be extremely reasonable. Better than nothing, you might say. No, exactly the same as nothing.
Look, if they don't want people making these jokes, then they should call their company
something not stupid. Yeah, I don't mean stupid. I mean, meme-able.