Nothing Phone 2 Has Stolen My Pixel 7 Pro's Job

And those are not words I was ever expecting to say

Nothing Phone 2 back and glyphs

It feels very strange to be writing this, but the Nothing Phone 2 has taken over as my everyday all day use phone. Even stranger is that it has relegated the Pixel 7 Pro to the sidelines. In sports analogy terms, which I’m a big fan of, the Nothing Phone 2 is my starting quarterback making all the plays, and right now the Pixel 7 Pro is holding a clipboard or an iPad over by the coaching staff.

I’ve been using the Nothing Phone 2 for a little over a month now. I swapped my SIM card to it and installed some of my most used apps on Day 1 with it, and since then I’ve added just about all my other frequently used apps to it. That’s already a stage I’d never got to before when trying out another phone while the Pixel 6 Pro and then 7 Pro were my daily drivers. Those prior experiments lasted just a small handful of days, and then I knew I wanted to go back to the Pixel and started the return process for the alternative phone.

Since 2007 and the first iPhone - a year before the App Store arrived - I’ve been a fan of and a power user of flagship smartphones. I made the switch to Android over 10 years ago and have used multiple Google Nexus and Pixel devices, several generations of the Samsung Galaxy Note, and the original OnePlus One and a few of its successors. After all that experience, I usually get a strong feeling about a smartphone as early as when I first hold it after unboxing it, or within the first few hours of use. With the Nothing Phone 2, it was in “You had me at Hello” territory.

It felt light and great to hold, and still does. More than anything, it felt strikingly different - the phone itself and the UI. The hardware is different and interesting. You can see the real innards of the device when you look at the back of it - and the glyph interface (the sections that light up for various uses) is both fun and functional.

Nothing Phone 2 runs the Nothing OS, which is very clean and close to the “pure Android’ experience that I know and love on the Pixel phones. Where it differs from pure Android it enhances it; it adds slick features that make the phone extremely fast, smooth, and a pleasure to use. From double-tap to wake and sleep the phone to lots more freedom to customize the home screen, the lock screen, widgets, the uses for the glyph interface, all the way down to fun ways to customize app icons - like making an individual icon for your favorite app four times the size of all the other icons:

Nothing Phone 2 enlarged app icon

I honestly can’t remember ever having more fun with customizing my home screen - or making it work so well in matching what I want in terms of quick access to apps and widgets while keeping (what feels to me like) a minimalist approach. Here’s my current home screen:

Nothing Phone 2 home screen

One last thing in the fun area to mention: it’s crazy cool to see the “Music Visualizer” glyph feature light up the glyphs (at least somewhat) to the beat of a song playing in a music app. It’s a good idea to keep that set to off until you want to use it though - otherwise it will try to do the same if you’re just watching a video with sound.

On the functionality and performance side, there is a lot to be happy with, including:

• Great options for using gestures

• More than one quick way to invoke Google Assistant

• One widget that doubles up to show current weather and upcoming calendar events

• Using the “essential glyph” at the top right of the back of the phone. That glyph will stay on and you can customize what triggers it - a phone call, message, app notification, and more. I use it for Todoist tasks.

• The display is gorgeous and easy to see in every light condition I’ve used it in

• Battery life has been consistently excellent:

Nothing Phone 2 battery life

• On top of the great battery life, the Nothing Phone 2 ‘s charging speed is stellar too. Between ending a typical day at 50-70% charged most days and knowing that that means it will charge up to 100% while I do a quick morning workout or take a shower, I don’t even think about battery life much.

• Call quality has been superb, better and more consistent than on the Pixel 6 and 7 Pro.

• The fingerprint sensor is super fast every time, in touching to access the phone and using it with any app that lets me use biometrics - and the number of failed attempts I’ve had in a month can be counted on one hand.

• It’s surprisingly good at voice-to-text. It doesn’t offer the continuity and some of the punctuation commands recognition (like “open/close parentheses or “new line”) that the Pixel does, but it is very fast and every bit as accurate as the Pixel.

It was always going to take a lot to make me switch away from the Pixel 7 Pro, and the Nothing Phone 2 delivers a whole lot. Along with all its virtues I’ve mentioned here, I have to steal a take on it from the legend Marques Brownlee (the undisputed champion of YouTube tech reviews in any weight class). This phone has personality; it stands out from the smartphone crowd and that’s a very rare thing just now.