The £$350 Flagship Phone Antidote

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Nothing Phone 2a Review

When OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei split from his former company, it was to change smartphones again. London-based Nothing have since been challenging the status quo with high-spec devices at affordable prices. And there are perhaps no device that encapsulates this ideology more than the Nothing Phone 2a.

As soon as you pick up the 2a you notice the difference. Every design choice that has gone into the phone serves a purpose. Gone is the glass-and-metal structure of competing devices and instead Aluminium and plastic sit in your hand. This means a device the size of larger competing phones at half the weight. For someone like me who had a Max iPhone trigger latent arthritis, it allows the enjoyment of a larger screen without ergonomic compromise. And it’s still a nice slab of glass around the front.

There is no flex or pop to the plastic, it’s regidity belying the tank-like design. A single moulded back allows for a playful transparency, where the phone internals have been artfully arranged into a design feature. Sat around the edge of the 2a’s ‘robotic’ camera arrangement are a series of lights known as Glyphs. By turning the phone on it’s face and flipping it to silent, the Glyphs light up to let you know of incoming calls or flash at received messages. The idea here is to let you know of notifications without…