Hello, I’m Florin and I’ve been testing phones for about 7 years. So I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone when I say that at some point enthusiasm for smartphones wanes, so I’m very happy when a company tries something different: whether it’s a foldable phone, whether it’s a rotating camera, whether it’s a phone with two screens and so on.
The Nothing Phone 2a brought back some of the joy of opening a smartphone box and using a phone for the first time. For a very long time, it hasn’t happened to me that after I turn on a phone for the first time, I don’t leave it in my hand for an hour. Now with Nothing Phone 2a, I turned it on, it did its updates, then I played with the widgets on the home screen, the notifications, the lights on the back and the wallpapers.
Nothing has managed to bring a breath of fresh air to this industry and I’m glad they’re doing it now and at a very affordable price. Nothing Phone 2a has a price of 1600 lei, the version with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage and the model with 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage reaches 1800 lei. Cheap for a phone that looks good and distinctive.
Design – the winning ace
Let’s talk about design. Nothing brought that transparency and LED aesthetic with the Nothing Phone 1 and 2, and now they’re bringing it to an even lower price point. The cameras have been brought to the center, and around them is the NFC coil and there are also the three LEDs that light up when you receive notifications or a phone call. Then we see this cable running along the phone. This model is in black, but there is a milky and a white version, and I definitely prefer the white or milky model. You see black phones everywhere, but not so much white ones and you can also see the components better.
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Nothing doesn’t tell us what the back is made of, but I’d say it’s plastic. That’s good and bad. It’s good because it’s sticky and the phone has a good grip and won’t slip out of your hand. It’s not good because it doesn’t have that premium feeling and it attracts a lot of fingerprints, but also lint or hair. I don’t know, but it charges electromagnetically, and if you leave it somewhere for a while, you get lint, hair, dust, and so on. Basically, you either have to carry a microfiber cloth with you at all times, or you put a clear case on it. I would choose the cloth.
Otherwise, the edges are matte, pleasant to the touch, and the corners are rounded. The phone has that boxy look with flat edges, with a large 6.7-inch display and very small, symmetrical black bezels. It weighs 196 grams but somehow feels lighter and is 8.6mm thick, but also IP54 certified for water and dust.
The display is AMOLED with FHD+ resolution and variable refresh rate of 120 Hz with a maximum brightness of 1300 nits and has support for HDR10. It’s a good display, quite bright and pleasant to look at, whether it’s social media, games or series. However, the refresh rate is 60, 90 or 120 Hz and does not go lower than on other premium phones. It is protected by Gorilla Glass 5. The media consumption experience is completed by a decent set of speakers with a fairly high volume.
Within the Glyph interface on the back there are a total of 26 individually addressable zones, allowing for all sorts of functionality such as Glyph Timer and Glyph Progress. The latter is quite interesting as it allows you to track the progress of certain third-party apps such as delivery or ridesharing services like Uber
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Of course, you can also use Glyph lights for notifications. The lights are also large enough to be useful as a kind of extra light for the rear camera. You can also use the lights as a countdown indicator for photos. Things like volume and battery percentage can also be viewed.
They also flash when you’re watching a video, whether it’s on YouTube or Insta Stories. Of course you can turn them off if you want, but they are part of the charm of this phone.
It looks good, especially considering the price, but how does it perform?
Performance
The Nothing Phone 2a is equipped with a Mediatek Dimensity 7200 Pro processor, 8/12 GB of RAM and 128 or 256 GB of storage. Decent features for its price category. Those at Nothing said they didn’t put a Snapdragon equivalent to this Dimensity 7200 because it was weaker. Indeed, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 scores lower in benchmark tests than this processor.
These tests aside, the phone does well in daily use and was quite smooth during the testing period. I say enough because I’ve seen little stumbling in the camera app before, when you close and open an app. Nothing serious, but it still happens. But in general I was satisfied. The only concern is how it will fare in a few years.
Otherwise I even tried some light gaming with games like Mighty Doom and Nothing Phone 2a consistently took it to 60 FPS.
Nothing has come with changes on the software side as well, and you can make it look unified and different from any other Android phone on the market. So you have widgets for weather, clock, battery and shortcuts like wallet, airplane mode, do not disturb and so on. Also, the system tries to unify all the icons for a unified look, but not all of them work as is obvious.
There is also an Always on Display in the same Nothing style, minimalist but useful.
Another thing I liked is the AI Wallpaper feature, so you can combine different styles to create something new. It’s pretty cool, most of them turn out well and that way you always have something new, without having to search the internet anymore. Another cool effect is this glass effect that I really like.
Photo cameras
This smartphone has two 50 MP rear cameras, one wide and one ultrawide. From the start, we notice that we don’t have a telephoto camera, but in this price category you don’t really find that. Instead, you have a 2x sensor zoom and a digital one up to 10x. Otherwise both cameras do well in light, with good HDR, high contrast and detail. I also liked the portrait mode which separates the subject from the background well and adds some extra light to the face. It works well at night and even has a pro mode where you can shoot RAW. It actually does quite well on pictures and Nothing has also worked on processing pictures from the Nothing Phone 2, so I’m on the right track.
On video it can shoot 4K at 30 fps with both cameras which is good. It doesn’t have 4K recording at 60 FPS, but I didn’t even think about it at this price and with the selfie camera it can only shoot FHD. Optical stabilization on the main camera helps to achieve smooth shooting.
Nothing Phone 2a – the best “budget” smartphone
I’m used to getting excited about phones over 1000 euros because they have the latest features, the best design and so on. But the Nothing Phone 2a managed to make me happy, it brought back that joy of trying out a new phone through its design, both externally and internally through the software. The performance is satisfactory, so are the cameras and in this price category it’s hard to find something better and I’m telling you right now that this smartphone is very likely to win many awards for the best budget smartphone. The only real downside is that the back attracts a lot of spills and is hard to clean.
