Nothing Phone 2 Gets A Major Update With A Bevy Of Camera And Battery Upgrades

It's hard to launch a new smartphone startup at this stage, but Nothing is giving it a shot. The company from OnePlus founder Carl Pei has just released its second phone, and it's a big improvement over the first. The Nothing Phone 2 is sleek, powerful, and it has glowing light bars—what else could you want? Oh, a better camera and battery? The phone's first post-launch update is here with just that.

The phone officially launches today, and it's common for smartphone makers to get a major update out the door so it can be installed on devices as soon as they're turned on. Nothing has developed a consistent visual style throughout the software, which doesn't even look like Android sometimes. However, it works very well, and we didn't notice too many bugs, even on pre-release software.

Still, there are things to address. Nothing has added several camera modes in the update, including portrait mode at 2x zoom, motion capture in 50MP mode, improved image processing for zoomed photos, better camera quality in third-party apps, and a Nothing watermark option, which you probably shouldn't turn on. We already liked the phone's snapshots, but it's nice to see Nothing is committed to improving it even further.

The Nothing Phone 2 has an unimpressive battery capacity of 4,700mAh. It's enough to get you through a day, but not much more. Most other phones of this size have at least 5,000mAh batteries. Nothing's OTA update makes some tweaks to battery performance and charging, which should mean more consistent performance.


It wouldn't be an OTA without a list of minor fixes and patches. Nothing says face and fingerprint unlocking is faster and more accurate, NFC works better, and the Glyph lights have more options. Nothing's promised third-party Glyph integrations are live with Uber support, and the Glyph Composer app is available in the Play Store so you can create audio-visual light shows and save them as ringtones.

The OTA update clocks in at 105MB, according to GSM Arena. Nothing does the same background install as Google and OnePlus, so you may get a notification telling you to restart any time now. If you want to check manually for the OTA, it's under Settings > System > System Update.