The Nothing Phone 2, Nothing’s second smartphone, has finally been released after months of hype-building leaks and teasers. The Telephone 2 denotes a major step in the right direction for no good reason: The Phone 2 is the company’s first phone to be officially available in the notoriously difficult-to-crack US market. The company’s previous phone, the Phone 1, was only available in the UK, Europe, Japan, and India. I have been using the phone for about a week and a half, and while I am unable to provide a comprehensive review at this time, I do have some initial impressions.
In this involved, I’ll just be addressing a couple of parts of the Nothing Telephone 2: specs (which you can see above), equipment plan, the Glyph interface, Nothing operating system 2.0, and estimating and accessibility. I will not be remarking on execution, camera quality, charging and battery, or show subtleties — that will be in every way in the survey. Keep an eye out for it.
This time around, the Glyph lights on the phone’s back have a new layout and more zones that can be individually controlled than on the Nothing Phone 1. Despite this, they only illuminate in one color because these are not tiny RGB strips.
Other than those differences, this phone’s design is very similar to the Nothing Phone 1. Nothing suggests to me that this was done with the intention of developing a solid, recognizable visual identity that can be extended to subsequent device generations. There, I can’t complain: Despite not being significantly different from year to year, Nothing’s design language still stands out in comparison to the majority of smartphones on the market.
Phone 2’s Glyph interface is back in place of Nothing’s. The fundamental idea remains the same: LED strips are hidden beneath the clear rear glass. They flash when you get a notification. Using Nothing’s Glyph Composer, you can assign different notifications to different light patterns and make custom ringtone/Glyph combinations.
However, there are a few useful new features. As Essential Notifications, you can set notifications from any app to light up one of the Glyph strips and remain lit until you view or dismiss them. That alone makes the Glyph lights much more useful—you can still glance at your phone while keeping its face down to see if it requires your attention.
There’s another Glyph Clock include that utilizes one of the Glyph strips as a kind of progress bar for clocks — however, peculiarly, only ones you set from a specific gadget or the telephone’s settings, not from the Clock application. Nothing’s likewise constructed an exploratory component for the Uber application that shows your ride’s advancement utilizing the Glyph interface. That has not yet been tried by me; it’s flawless in principle, yet I envision I’d in any case be watching out for my telephone’s screen on the off chance that I were hanging tight for a ride.
The software for Nothing OS 2.0 Nothing is essentially the same on the Phone 2 as it was on the Phone 1. The company’s approach to customizing Android 13 was similar to that of Android 12: the UI here closely resembles Google’s kind of Android.
However, there are some minor distinctions. While the Telephone 2 for the most part utilizes Google’s applications — Telephone, Messages, Number cruncher, Clock, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg — there are two or three Nothing-marked applications and a small bunch of gadgets in the organization’s unmistakable speck framework style. Kindly, there’s no bulge: no social media or games that come preinstalled, and no apps that double as apps (looking at you, Samsung).
You have the choice to Not add anything’s gadgets to your lock screen, however I don’t realize that any of them are sufficiently valuable to legitimize surrendering notice land. If you want, you can also blow up individual app and folder icons on your home screen to fill four spots instead of one. Nothing’s launcher also has a feature that lets you force all of your app icons, even those that don’t yet support dynamic themes, to be monochrome. Standard icons, Material You themes, and custom icon packs from the Play Store are also options.
Although Nothing OS 2.0 does not fundamentally alter how you will interact with your phone, it has implemented some clever tweaks that subtly enhance the stock Android experience and require very little training. I believe it’s an extraordinary methodology.
Price and availability The Nothing Phone 2 can be pre-ordered at nothing.tech beginning today. The base model with eight gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage costs $599 in the United States. You can move up to 12 gigs of Smash and 256 of stockpiling for $699, or 12/512 for $799. On July 13, open availability begins.
At a beginning cost of $599, the Nothing Telephone 2 is shockingly reasonable given its equipment. In light of my experience with it up to this point, it very well may be a decent option in contrast to other upper-midrange choices like the Pixel 7, and, surprisingly, pricier picks like the OnePlus 11, for a many individuals.
The telephone is opened and affirmed to deal with both AT&T and T-Portable, yet not on Verizon. All things considered, the telephone will in any case chip away at Verizon’s organization, however 5G is restricted to sub-6 — no mmWave.
That is all we can share for the time being, yet I’ll have bounty more to say regarding the Nothing Telephone 2 later on. Keep an eye out for the full review to learn more about performance, camera quality, and other aspects.
