Nothing Phone 2: all the updates on the road to a flashy new phone

CMF, the affordability-focused brand owned by Nothing, has launched its first line of products: the Buds Pro, Watch Pro, and a 65W GaN fast charger.

The Buds Pro wireless earbuds offer a solid set of features at a £49 / $49 price tag. The buds come with hybrid active noise cancellation (ANC) that uses microphones on the inside and outside of the bud to detect and cancel out noise with a depth of up to 45dB.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta break the rules and go for it. I attended Nothing’s New York City product drop last week and got my hands on the Nothing Ear 2s and the Nothing Phone 2. Now, I’m a longtime Verizon customer, which seemed like a major hurdle for actually testing out this phone and its flashing glyphs. At one point, Nothing had mentioned “limited” support for Verizon on its website, but the company has since removed the carrier from its tech specs altogether — never a good sign.

But as I’ve come to find out, as long as you’ve got an active SIM that was already in another Verizon-certified phone, you can toss that into the Nothing Phone 2 and get going without any immediate headaches. When I tried doing so, the phone’s mobile data lit up, calls and texts worked fine (including RCS messaging), and I’ve so far avoided any hangups. The automatic SMS scolding me for using an unauthorized device never came.

Carl Pei has made a lot of phones. As the co-founder of OnePlus and now as the founder and CEO of Nothing, Pei has spent the last decade trying to find new and exciting ways to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung.

His most recent attempt is the Nothing Phone 2, a $599 device that improves on the company’s Glyph interface, brings a fresh coat of paint to Android and has some big ideas about the right and wrong way to use your phone. But mostly, Pei says, the Phone 2 just needs to be a good phone. Nothing else matters if it’s not a good phone.

Nothing’s Phone 2 has officially arrived. The company has already preannounced plenty of details about the handset, so the big news today is the Phone 2’s price and release date. It’ll be available starting at $599 (£579 / €679), and unlike last year’s device, the Phone 2 will be available to buy in the US. Preorders start today, and the phone will be publicly available July 17th.

There are a couple of different variants of the Phone 2 available. The starting price gets you 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, but there are also step-up models with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $699 (£629 / €729) and 12GB and 512GB of storage for $799 (£699 / €849). For comparison, the Phone 1’s starting price for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage was £399 (€469) in the markets where Nothing sold it. So the Phone 2 has received a substantial price bump for Nothing to justify.

The launch of the Nothing Phone 2 on July 11th is less than a week away, but a new leak spoils some of the device’s potential specs. In a thread on Twitter spotted by 9to5Google, leaker Kamila Wojciechowska shares that the Nothing Phone 2 could feature some improvements to its camera system.

According to Wojciechowska, the upcoming device could feature a 50MP Sony IMX890 main camera sensor with optical image stabilization (OIS) and in-sensor zoom. That’s the same primary sensor used by the OnePlus 11, which my colleague Allison Johnson listed as one of the positive aspects of the device in her review. It’s not clear how much this will actually affect the camera quality, though, as the Phone 1 already comes with a 50MP main sensor.

Nothing is upgrading its signature Glyph interface for its upcoming Phone 2 smartphone, which is due to be officially announced on July 11th. YouTuber Marques Brownlee has put out an early hands-on video with the new smartphone that offers a thorough look at the flashing light interface built into the back of the phone, and the changes Nothing has made to it compared to last year’s Phone 1.

Although the Glyph interface uses roughly the same pattern, it now includes more zones of LED lighting, which should allow it to offer more granular control of the phone’s lighting effects. There are almost triple the number of zones this time around, with the Phone 2 including 33 zones versus 12 on the Phone 1.

We knew that the Nothing Phone 2 would arrive next month, and now we have a precise date: July 11th, a day shy of the Phone 1’s first birthday. It’ll include a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset and a bigger battery, and it will launch in the US this time. We know all of this because Nothing has said so in a series of spec teasers, a tactic that founder Carl Pei loved to employ at the last company he helped found: OnePlus.

Based on a teaser image accompanying today’s news, the Phone 2 looks like it will continue to offer the “glyph” notification lights featured on the back of the Phone 1. On that device, they’re partly a style flourish and partly practical since they can indicate different types of incoming notifications by flashing in different patterns. Underneath the blinky lights, the Phone 1 was a good midrange phone that only sort of launched in the US.

Ahead of the official launch of the Nothing Phone 2 next month, leaker OnLeaks has published unofficial renders based on a prototype of the new device via Smartprix. You might be disappointed if you’re expecting the phone to be a radical departure from Nothing’s previous devices since it looks like the essential design of the Phone 1 lives on in its successor.

But there are a couple of differences to tease out from the renders, though Smartprix cautions the phone’s design may have changed since this prototype was produced. Most notably, the flat, squared-off top and sides of the Phone 1 appear to have been given more of a curve for the Phone 2. As Android Authority notes, it makes the Phone 2 look like an iPhone 6 next to the iPhone 5-style design of the Phone 1. Smartprix notes that the front and back of the Phone 2 also have a subtle curve to them.