But that doesn’t mean that it was just slapped together, packed up and shipped. Nothing seems quite proud of the Phone (2a), with tons of teasers, a special reveal party around MWC 2024 in Barcelona, countless of social media teases, and a very bold marketing page. The Phone (2a) is a Nothing Phone — a bit cheaper, but still striking, distinct, and somewhat quirky.
We don’t have a final score for it just yet, but what we do have are the results from our extensive battery life tests. The Nothing Phone (2a) is the first among its siblings to reach 5,000 mAh battery capacity — its predecessors had 4,500 mAh and 4,700 mAh.
The MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro inside the Phone (2a) is not an extremely powerful processor per se, but we happen to have no complaints about its performance so far. It seems it’s drawing a good amount of power, judging by the numbers here:
A pretty balanced performance through our three categories. Notably, it doesn’t reach the 15 hours of web browsing that its bigger sibling does, nor other competing midrangers. But it also doesn’t fall off in endurance when 3D gaming. It’s a perfectly dependable rating, which will very definitely last you a full day, no matter what you like to do on your phone.
For charging — there is no wireless charging here. And the Nothing Phone (2a) does not even ship with its own power brick. What we do know is that it can draw up to 45 W on the wire, so if you find a proper plug (or buy the official one from Nothing), you can top up quite quickly, but it’s not blazing fast:
All in all, these are pretty OK battery stats. We don’t get the stunning endurance of the Nothing Phone (2), but we don’t get its lows, too. The real threat here is the OnePlus 12R — the midranger from OnePlus, which really wowed us with performance, design, and value on offer. Stay tuned for the full Nothing Phone (2a) review, so we can see if it has more tricks up its sleeve!