Nothing has a new smartphone—the Phone (2a) Plus—that’s nearly identical to the Phone (2a) that came out earlier this year, but with slightly beefed-up specs. It costs $399 and is available in the US via the same beta program . But it’s not the new Android handset that we’re most interested in; it’s the company’s new widget.
The News Reporter widget, available by default on all Nothing and CMF smartphones plus other Android and iOS devices via the Nothing X app, lets you quickly play a news bulletin summarized by artificial intelligence, read out loud by the synthesized voice of Tim Holbrow, the company’s chief financial officer. (Nothing uses ElevenLabs technology for sound synthesis and output.) Once you tap the widget, you’re greeted by a soothing British voice:
“Welcome to Nothing News, where the only thing we take seriously is taking nothing seriously. I'm Tim, your CFO and reluctant newsreader. Today we're making something out of nothing, because that's literally our job.”
The widget starts by cycling through a selection of news stories. You can hold the widget and tap Edit to add or remove categories you're interested in, such as business, entertainment, technology, and sports. These news stories are pulled from “trusted English-language news sources” via the News API, using Meta's Llama major language models for summarization.
You can swipe down on the notification bar and hit the next button in the media playback notification to skip ahead to a story, to which Holbrow adds a quip. “You don’t feel like doing that? Let’s find another story.” After I skipped a few in a row, AI asked Holbrow, “Do you even like the news?”
The summaries are about a minute long each and you get eight stories per day. The widget refreshes with a new batch every morning. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, the widget doesn’t give you much to go on if you want to read more. There’s no attribution as to where the news comes from and no links are provided to read directly from the source.
Every smartphone company has announced some sort of generative AI feature in new devices this year. Samsung has Galaxy AI; Google has its Gemini chatbot and a bunch of AI features in Pixel phones; Motorola recently introduced Moto AI ; and even OnePlus has teased a few AI features in its phones, like AI Eraser, which lets you remove unwanted objects from photos. Nothing introduced ChatGPT integration in its earbuds earlier this year, and this widget is the latest generative AI feature to land.
That said, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a news summary feature. When Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant were popular, one of the best features was being able to ask the voice assistant to play the news. You could then hear short snippets of news from various sources, like NPR and CNN. That said, I do like the implementation in Nothing’s widget, but I’d also like to see attribution and a way to dive deeper into a story if it’s interesting.
And what about that phone?
As for the Nothing Phone (2a) Plus, I’ve been using it for a few days now and it’s… indistinguishable from the Phone (2a) I reviewed positively back in March. I like the new gray color option, which hides scuff marks on the back better and makes the phone’s already nice design pop even more. You still get the same Glyph light functionality, which allows the LEDs to light up for notifications and calendar events, and can even act as a visualizer while music is playing.
The biggest change here is the processor. Inside you’ll find MediaTek’s Dimensity 7350 Pro 5G (as opposed to the Phone’s (2a) Dimensity 7200 Pro), which offers a 10 percent increase in CPU power and a 30 percent jump in graphics performance.
The next upgrade comes to the camera, namely the selfie camera, and its new 50MP sensor is capable of recording 4K at 30 frames per second (up from 32 megapixels). The company says it has pushed out seven updates since the Phone (2a) launched with 26 improvements to the camera, including upgrades to charging speeds, color consistency and blur accuracy in portrait mode. The Phone (2a) Plus launches with all of those improvements, and the 50MP front-facing and ultra-wide cameras on the back are the same.
Selfies do indeed look much nicer, especially in low light, where my face appears sharper with better HDR and more balanced exposure. The rear cameras produce nice results considering the price, and I found daytime renders to have natural-looking colors. It can still struggle in super-high-contrast scenes, but this is a solid camera system.
Finally, wired charging on the phone now supports 50W (up from 45W), which will reportedly give you a 10 percent faster charging speed. Everything else is identical to the Phone (2a) specs, from the 6.7-inch AMOLED display to the 5,000mAh battery.
Nothing new
I’ve been enjoying the phone for the past few days, but its launch feels so strange considering it doesn’t introduce any groundbreaking updates to the Phone (2a). So I asked the company why it decided to launch the (2a) Plus now. “We’re not launching Phone (3) until next year, and we saw an opportunity to improve on the smartphone we launched in March with Phone (2a) Plus, a new smartphone — aimed at power users — at an accessible price point,” said Jane Nho, Nothing’s US PR chief. The company launched its last flagship phone, the Phone (2), in July 2023.
And there you have it: the Phone (2a) Plus is a seemingly painless way for Nothing to stay relevant amid all the other smartphone launches, still have an AI story, boost sales, and, oddly enough, try to turn its CFO into something of a digital celebrity.
Nothing says it will go on sale in London at Nothing's store in Soho on August 3, in gray and black, with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. In the US, the device will follow the same beta program as the Phone (2a) and CMF Phone 1. That means you'll have to sign up for the beta, and once you're accepted, you'll be able to buy the device for $399. It'll be available on August 7 at 9am ET.
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
