Nothing Phone (2a) review: Shaking up the midrange market

The Phone (2a) is 161.74 mm long, 8.5 mm thick, and weighs 190 gm, which feels light and very well built with excellent weight distribution. However, just like Nothing’s other phones the Phone (2a) also felt a bit wide for my comfort at 76.32 mm, and one-handed usage may seem difficult for some users.

Not surprisingly, the Phone (2a) has a plastic frame and the back is made up of polycarbonate but the same is of excellent quality and doesn’t feel cheap.

Nothing Phone (2a) out of the box. Image - Moneycontrol

The dual camera layout brings a refreshing change, with a horizontal camera setup in the top middle of the phone while the rest of the elements are positioned using a circular grid system that extends to the phone's edge. Overall, it gives the phone a softer look and feel, making it look cute and the camera positioning adds a human touch.

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While I am not going to delve too much into the Glyph lights anymore, for the uninitiated, these lights at the back of every Nothing phone are intended to pass on customisable notifications to the user without actually turning on the phone. It allows users to create personalised glyph patterns that are assigned to specific callers or any specific function of the smartphone like alarm or battery charging functions.

In the Phone (2a), these lights are restricted to the top half only this time, compared to the costlier Phone (2) which had its presence throughout the back.

The phone comes in two colors – Black and White. My review unit was the black one, which is subtler, but in my opinion, the white unit will appeal more to the masses. While the glass back with Gorilla Glass 5 protection and IP54 certification does look premium, the matte plastic sides add to the feel.

Portrait shots taken on Nothing Phone (2a). Image - Moneycontrol

But the phone is very slippery and will need a case for tension-free usage.
The Phone (2a) comes with a USB Type-C port at the bottom with a dual-speaker setup, two microphones, and dual-SIM functionality with no option for memory extension. It also packs a power button on the right, with an in-display fingerprint scanner that feels quick to unlock. The phone lacks a headphone jack and doesn't include a charger in the box.

Display

The Phone (2a) comes with a 6.7-inch flat display with a flexible AMOLED panel that has a resolution of 1084 by 2014 pixels with 394 ppi and 1,300 nits of indoor peak brightness that looks decently sharp with punchy colours. The screen offers a 120 Hz dynamic display rate. While the outdoor brightness of 1,100 nits is not the best, it does get the job done.

Nothing Phone (2a) normal daylight picture. Image - Moneycontrol

The screen on the phone has a 91.65 percent screen-to-body ratio, the thinnest bezel seen in Nothing phones so far, with symmetrical sides and a punch-hole display on the front, looking sharp and crisp. Its screen also boasts 10-bit colour depth, so viewing multimedia content was pleasurable keeping the cost of the phone in mind.

Performance

Powering the Phone (2a) is the MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro processor, a 4-nm chip with eight cores and a clock speed of up to 2.8 GHz that Nothing claims have been exclusively co-engineered for the phone for better optimisation and power efficiency. My review unit was the top-of-the-line variant with 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB internal memory with UFS 2.2 storage speed. The phone comes with RAM Booster that uses the phone’s existing storage as virtual RAM to extend it to 20GB RAM.

In my daily usage, the phone felt snappy, barring a few app crashes which I feel could be due to the processor being newly optimised. Broadly there were no lags or jitters, including app opening/closing and keeping apps in the background. I also did not notice any major heating issues, thanks to the extra-large 3,200 mm2 vapour chamber and the processor’s cooling chops. Although I was testing a pre-release unit, I got two software updates with the February security patch during my review.

Indoor shot taken on the Phone (2a). The one in the left is wide angle. Image - Moneycontrol

While I am not an avid gamer I played some heavy games on the Phone (2a), such as Asphalt 9, BGMI, and Genshin Impact on the smartphone with medium settings. And it could play every one of them smoothly without any major heating.

Camera

For optics, the Nothing Phone (2a) packs a dual-camera setup, the primary being is a 50-MP shooter with a f/1.88 aperture lens, 1/1.56” sensor and optical image stabilization (OIS). The second camera is also a 50MP ultra-wide sensor with 114 degrees field-of-view.

For a mid-range smartphone, images taken on the Phone (2a) pleasantly surprised me – detailed and sharp during daylight while still holding up once the sun sets. I liked the natural colurs on the shots and edge detection during portrait shots was done nicely as well.

However, in certain scenarios, I could feel the pictures a bit underlit. The primary camera only offers 1x zoom on the 50MP mode, and for 2X zoom one has to downgrade to 12MP mode, which I didn’t like.

Outdoor night shot taken on the Phone (2a). Image - Moneycontrol

The camera’s processing speed also needs work. Every image I clicked with the phone took at least 5-6 seconds to process, while went up to more than 10 seconds in some cases. This was surprising for a phone that runs a near-stock Android OS, and Nothing must look into this.

The phone has a 32MP front camera, which clicks decent selfies. However, I felt skin tones on selfies can be improved with software updates.

Selfie taken on Phone (2a). Image - Moneycontrol

The latest software update, which I received about a week before my review, did improve the camera and processing speed to some extent but Nothing still needs to work on its camera capabilities with regular software updates.

When it comes to video recording, the smartphone can shoot 4K video at 30fps with OIS and EIS image stabilisation. Videos captured in daylight reproduce good clarity, dynamic range and exposure. At night, the exposure captured 4K video at 30fps with satisfactory noise reduction but some details were compromised while videos came underlit.

Battery

The Phone (2a) houses a 5000mAh battery, the biggest on a Nothing phone till date. While the company claims the phone can last up to two days with a single charge, my experience was slightly less than that.

Even though I am not an avid gamer, I was able to extract one day’s usage with the phone with about 10-15 percent battery left. This was with dual-SIM, three email accounts, two WhatsApp accounts along with Slack, YouTube and other popular social media accounts running all through the day. I got a screen on time averaging anywhere between five to seven hours, which is respectable in my opinion.

The battery supports 45-watt fast charging and with the Nothing GaN charger (purchased separately), I got it fully charged from 20 percent to 100 percent in about two hours. The charging speed could have been better and the device might leave you wanting more if you're always on the go.

Software

The phone comes with Nothing OS 2.5 which, as expected looks very professional and nearly similar to stock Android with zero bloatware. In fact, of all Android skins, this OS and UI from Nothing is my favourite now. The phone also comes with dual SIM functionality and throughout my usage, I got excellent call clarity and network signal.

However, all said and done, the OS is not perfect. I faced major issues with the auto-rotate function which I felt was too sensitive for my liking and was making my screen rotate even with the slightest of unintentional movements.

While I like the abundance of black and grey colour schemes in the OS, some may feel bored with the slightly dark OS. Nothing should provide some cheerful design options and more colourful wallpapers to brighten up the OS.

Nothing promises three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates on the device, same as the costlier Phone (2).

Verdict

Nothing Phone (2a) brings a much-needed alternative to the mid-range smartphone segment, which mostly has been an experience full of compromises to date – gimmicky triple camera setup, buggy and bloatware-infested OS and below-par software support. While the phone seems to have fixed all these issues to give a new choice to budget-conscious buyers, Nothing still needs to fine-tune the software to reduce stutters and app crashes and improve camera performance, especially during low-light situations, processing speeds and selfies.

Nevertheless, this start looks promising.