Android Central Labs
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One of the hallmark traits of the CMF Phone 1 was that it felt like a phone twice the price in the most important respects. From general performance to camera quality, an excellent display, and even a unique build, the CMF Phone 1 quickly became our favorite budget phone of 2024.
The CMF Phone 2 Pro follows up with a slight price increase and a significant quality improvement, once again pushing the boundaries of what’s expected from a sub-$300 phone. While the phone features improvements across the board, three features have stood out to me since I started using it last week.
Chief among these is the camera experience, followed closely by a significantly improved display. The third doesn’t take as much analysis to explain, but it positively affects the experience palpably: the haptics.
Haptics on the CMF Phone 1 felt like those of every other cheap phone on the market — straight-up awful — but the CMF Phone 2 Pro upgrades the haptics to match the rest of Nothing’s more expensive portfolio, and it rounds out a trio of upgrades worth celebrating.
CMF Phone 2 Pro display review
Everything about the CMF Phone 2 Pro’s display is better than the panel on the CMF Phone 1. While both are AMOLED panels, the CMF Phone 2 Pro doesn’t exhibit the slight rainbow color shift that is visible when tilting the Phone 1’s display at an angle. The bezels are also noticeably thinner, and while they’re not quite as thin as a flagship phone like the OnePlus 13, they’re thinner than basically any other phone you’d expect to find in this price range.
Additionally, Nothing nearly doubled this phone’s brightness levels and the PWM rate compared to the first generation model. The CMF Phone 1 achieves a brightness of nearly 900 lux at 100%, while the CMF Phone 2 Pro reaches nearly 1400 lux with the same settings. HDR mode will see the display hit near 3000 nits in the brightest areas. I can’t see brightness getting any better in this class.
The display isn’t LTPO, so it doesn’t feature the better energy savings found in more expensive OLED panels, but it can dynamically shift from 30Hz to 120Hz — in 30Hz increments — when needed. You can also lock the refresh rate at 60Hz by selecting “Standard” in the display settings. Locking to 120Hz, however, requires enabling the “Force peak refresh rate” setting in Developer Options. LTPO would make things even better, but I don’t see that being realistic in this price range.
The CMF Phone 2 Pro follows in the footsteps of the Nothing Phone 3a series, featuring a more eye-friendly display that should work nicely for anyone sensitive to PWM dimming. The CMF Phone 2 Pro uses DC dimming at 50% brightness and above, sporting 7-15% modulation at 60Hz, while 120Hz roughly doubles those numbers. Very sensitive users should stick with 60Hz since it’s the most flicker-free option.
Regardless of the refresh rate, the phone switches to 2160Hz PWM dimming at 49% brightness and below. This is 10 times faster than phones like the Google Pixel 9a, making it significantly more comfortable in the dark and far better for your eyes over time.
Overall, this is an excellent display and is essentially unmatched in this price range. I would expect this level of quality from a $500 phone, not a sub-$300 one.
CMF Phone 2 Pro camera review
One of the reasons for the “Pro” moniker in the phone’s name is the camera performance. A rear triple-camera system with a manual camera mode qualifies it for this naming convention, and the results certainly feel more in line with similarly named phones, such as the Nuu B30 Pro.
Compared to the CMF Phone 1, the CMF Phone 2 upgrades the main 50MP camera with dual-pixel PDAF and a larger 1/1.57” sensor with 1.0-micron-sized pixels. That’s in comparison to the 1/1.95″ sensor with 0.8-micron-sized pixels on the CMF Phone 1. The CMF Phone 2 Pro also features a new 1/2.88” 50MP 2x telephoto camera and a 1/4” 8MP ultrawide sensor. The only sensor that remains unchanged is the 16MP selfie camera.
However, before we delve into quality comparisons, it’s worth noting that Nothing has given the camera UI a slight overhaul to add features and, in some cases, make it more user-friendly. List-style menus have been revamped to a more standard tile style.
While I appreciate the visual change, I prefer the previous style, which presented all the options upfront. With this new design, you have to tap each tile an unknown number of times to cycle through all the available options. I don’t find either design to be more or less friendly for one-handed use.
The settings overhaul may not be an improvement, but the new Presets feature is a significant enhancement that should spark some interesting community creativity. The phone comes with four pre-installed Presets — Soft Focus portrait, B&W Film, Wide Angle, and Lenticular — and it’s as easy as pie to import or create your own Preset.
Presets include a cover photo, name and description, camera mode, front or rear lens, and focal length selection, exposure value, filters, and even advanced settings. This, coupled with the powerful manual camera mode, helps make the “Pro” moniker make more sense than some other Pro phones.
A new portrait lighting engine was added, offering five different types of bokeh and lighting looks; however, I struggled to discern a noticeable difference between any of these in practice.
The new Presets feature is a significant enhancement that should spark some interesting community creativity.
On the quality side, the CMF Phone 2 Pro is mostly an improvement over Phone 1. The inclusion of an ultrawide-angle camera gives you more control over your shots and video. The ultrawide camera and the front-facing camera are both limited to 1080p30 quality, while the main and telephoto sensors can push 4k30 or 1080p60 video.
The ultrawide camera on the CMF Phone 2 Pro is quite good and has surprisingly excellent dynamic range. It doesn’t double as a macro camera like some other ultrawide-angle cameras do, but that’s usually reserved for more expensive phones, anyway.
The new 50MP telephoto camera noticeably enhances zoom performance compared to the original phone. While it’s only a 2x lens, the phone can perform “lossless” 4x zoom thanks to pixel binning. I’ve found that quality degrades beyond 6x zoom, although you can find notable quality differences between Phone 1 and Phone 2 up to 10x zoom.
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Nothing has improved its HDR algorithm from the CMF Phone 1, and the CMF Phone 2 Pro typically exhibits a very wide dynamic range from all camera lenses. This means, for example, that subjects are illuminated well while keeping the sky blue and natural instead of grey and overly bright.
However, there are times when something is amiss with it. In one scenario, pictured below, a picture of a flower had very strange, overly bright artifacts across the brightest parts of the image. In another indoor scenario, the lights were blown out, but the bright white shirts that some people wore looked perfectly balanced. Nothing has a little bit of fine-tuning to do here, but it’s generally an improvement over Phone 1’s dynamic range.
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Color accuracy appears to improve during the day, but a distinct warm shift occurs in low light. The CMF Phone 1 also does this, but the Phone 2 Pro is slightly warmer than that. Neither phone takes great pictures of moving subjects, but I was able to snap a few decent ones of my pets and son, so not all is bad.
The front-facing camera is pretty hit-or-miss. When HDR is required, the front-facing camera is a significant improvement, as illustrated in one example below. At other times, the quality appears worse than that of the CMF Phone 1, despite using the same sensor, as the Phone 2 Pro’s image tends to look softer. This will likely get fixed in a software update down the road.
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Overall, if you’re upgrading from CMF Phone 1 or just choosing a new budget phone, know that Nothing has most improved the dynamic range, color accuracy during the day, added an ultrawide-angle camera, and improved zoom detail by a notable amount from the telephoto camera.
Aside from that, the CMF Phone 2 Pro boasts a superior build, enhanced display, improved haptics, additional accessories, and a more refined overall experience compared to the first-generation release.
Not for Nothing
The CMF Phone 2 Pro is an impressive phone for one that costs less than $300, featuring a customizable design, impressive specs, and all the right upgrades.
