this is the Nothing CMF Phone 2 Pro And in a very weird kind of way this is the phone that I’ve been most excited about in 2025 because if you remember the CMF phone 1 from last year that thing came out of nowhere introduced an entirely new ecosystem of accessories that you could very literally screw into the device was an actually amazing phone even outside of those accessories and was only priced at $200 or $250 It was so good that I ended up awarding the thing budget phone of the year And now
we have the sequel It’s a little bit more expensive at £219 but it’s claiming to be able to do so much more But if it actually pulls it off this is going to become like the most instantly recommendable phone on the planet So this is the box I got There’s a whole truckload of stuff inside So let’s just get rid of that and let’s start with a new wallet and stand Well that’s already pretty interesting that they’ve managed to combine both of those things There’s another new accessory here Interchangeable lenses Well that’s
interesting Let me take you back to the last video a second My mind is kind of wearing of the possibilities Like I’m just thinking as an example What if you use this screw and this screw to add a permanent lens attachment to your cameras and now they’re a real thing oh the universal cover which as you’ll see works quite differently to how it used to feel all that premium It’s a little flimsy There’s a lanyard This looks like the same as the one you got with the last phone Why is it so thick though
feels like you could tow a car with this thing And then two new earphones So these are the Buds 2 which look like a very basic pair of 39 lb wireless earphones and they feel about as plasticky as you’d expect them to But I’ve tested these and I was not ready for how damn good they sound Like very explosive very bassy but still clear audio The active noise cancellation is not the best but they have all the key features like auto pause when you take one out and pretty responsive controls up here I would actually go as far as to
give them a 9.5 out of 10 And then also the Buds 2 Plus which are 10 pound more at 49 And they are basically just a little bit better at everything They have this smoother texture This little dimple is made of metal now They have slightly better sound They have slightly more noise cancellation But the standout thing has to be that the battery life is up to 61 and 1/2 hours which is very much up there Also a 9.5 You can’t really go wrong with either All right So that’s the accessories Now we just need
something to accessorize So these are the CMF Phone 2 Pros We got three of the four colors Let’s just go for orange So first thing you see is the insert which does actually contain a case Why are budget phones always the most generous so then the phone and at the very bottom this blocky CMF styled USBC to C cable and the also custom oh my god seriously cmfstyled SIM ejector tool all leading to this one peel So what has actually changed since the first phone well if we hold the phone 2 Pro side by side with the phone
one I mean there’s a whole extra third camera there’s a very unique feeling button on the side that they’re calling the essential key And just generally the body of the phone is a little bit more refined kind of like the phone one just went to the gym It’s about 5% thinner It’s about 5% lighter and it’s a little curvier so it doesn’t dig into your hands as much One weird thing is that there are slightly different finishes depending on the color that you pick Like they’re saying that the green and
the black are meant to look glass-like But in person I actually don’t like them because it’s not glass And in trying to fake glass just feels more like every other budget phone out there So let’s get rid of these and we will stick to the orange cuz I think they’ve done a better job here Oh no No It looks okay actually Well there you go That’s our durability tester Anyway long story short pick the orange Looks better It feels better But here’s my big question How does this fit in with all of this well I got good news
and I got bad news Let’s go the way that I want it Bad news first So the way that the phone one worked is the entire back and sides were completely replaceable You would take these four screws and this spinny thing out and the whole thing would just pop off as one piece And then for each accessory you could secure them directly onto the back of the phone using those same few screws But it’s a little different now You’ve still got the screws but the back plate is actually glued onto the phone now So
even if you took all the screws out nothing comes off which is what’s allowed them to make the phone slimmer It’s what’s allowed them to improve the IP rating from IP52 to IP54 which means it’s protected from splashing water from any direction as opposed to water from specific angles But it also means that you’re losing one of the key pieces of DNA that I think made the original so special which is that you damaged the back or the sides of the last phone Who cares you swap the entire thing out for
£29 which meant that you could happily use this phone completely naked guilt-free Whereas because this is now stuck on we’re right back to where we are with just about every other phone which is well I should probably use a case now But then doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of the thinness improvements plus you might not get much choice when it comes to the case Because while it is very cool that we now have interchangeable camera lenses and this magnetic wallet stand thing if you want to use them you need this case This
universal cover is the only way to get the mount that you need to attach the lenses into And this is what has the magnets inside to be able to snap the wallet onto So this would be its own thing that you’re also going to have to buy And to install it you got to undo the screws on the back You got to place this on top of your phone’s back plate and then you redo all the screws on top of it The point I’m getting to is that if you’re planning on using any of these new accessories which feels not unlikely
if you’re choosing a phone like this then you’re not going to keep unscrewing and res-crewing this whole cover You’re just going to keep it on And so what that means is that you’ve now paid extra to make your phone thicker than the previous device Also not to pile on but I don’t even think this magnetic wallet stand thing is worth all that As far as it being a wallet it stores they’re saying three cards I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting more than two in there And as a phone stand I felt like I’ve been spoiled by my Taurus case This
stand has every orientation and every tilt level baked into it The CMF stand is it’s just a stand So that’s the bad news The good news is that because the CMF Phone 2 Pro does still have these screws and because these screws are in the same positions the new phone does still have full compatibility with the old phone’s accessories So you could still carry over the old phone stand or the old wallet or the old lanyard and they will still bolt in place in the exact same way Plus these interchangeable lenses they are actually
extremely cool But we’ll get to them when we talk about cameras First though what’s this phone like to actually live with well folks they’ve done it again As far as the phone experience this keeps everything I loved about the first phone and fixes pretty much everything I felt was lacking like NFC We didn’t have it before We do now So you can use Google Pay The storage is not massive Like it starts at 128 gigs but you can expand it with micro SD by up to 2 TB You are getting a display here that does not
feel normal for this price Completely even borders around the edges which we didn’t have on the CMF1 And the panel itself is AMOLED It has a 120 Hz refresh rate which can scale down when needed to save battery Its brightness is not quite flagship but definitely not budget Point is when you watch videos on this thing it is a high-end viewing experience It doesn’t feel oversharpened It doesn’t look washed out It’s very close to the best phones you can buy The speaker isn’t It’s a single mono speaker that
shoots out from the bottom But it does have one twist a new feature called ultra volume where you can go 50% above max volume which nothing is saying shouldn’t damage the speaker as long as you’re not going crazy with it and using it all the time And it does actually make a big difference Let me give you a real time demo So you’re these ears This is what the phone would normally sound like to you on max volume Now we’re going to go up to boost volume Hopefully you could tell quite a tangible difference Battery is stellar
It’s the same sized 5,000 mAh battery as last time but just now with a more efficient display and more efficient software So we’re talking 7 and 1/2 hours of screen on time if you push the thing but you could easily make this phone last 2 days if you wanted to The software is smooth like really really smooth It’s smooth enough that you completely forget when you’re using this thing that it isn’t like an upper mid-range 600 lb device The only few times you’re reminded are when the odd thing takes a little bit longer to load
than you were expecting But that only feels jarring because of how insanely slick the rest of the experience is It’s that sweet spot combination of just good enough hardware The base model here has 8 gigs of RAM and the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Pro chip which is a very modest 5 to 10% faster than what we got before but still capable enough to play say every game on at least medium settings but that’s paired with a lot of care put into optimization And that’s the difference While for most big companies
budget phones they’re an afterthought because they make a fraction of the profit per phone you still feel here as a user of this phone like your experience has been the first priority Now that might change in the future I already get the feeling that nothing is starting to evolve into one of these bigger companies with tons of product lines with pro products plus products budget versions of products They’ve got their own ecosystem It is frankly getting a bit convoluted but thus far I haven’t seen that affect the quality of
the software Nothing OS is still very light on bloatware even if I haven’t exactly made it look it right now And you do get three years of OS updates which by Western standards at least is very acceptable for a budget phone And then there are some brand new features You’ve now got customizable widgets on your lock screen You’ve got this new smart app drawer which you know having installed like 100 applications onto this is extremely clutch has done all the organization for me with now an extra private space for the apps files
or photos that you don’t want anyone else to see And then we’ve got this rather curious essential key which is this very unique feeling rounded glossy button which does actually help to not get it confused with the power key So you press this button it takes a screenshot and it gives you the option to add a note You hold this button it takes a screenshot and lets you give a voice command And then you double tap this button and it opens up your essential space where all of this stuff is being collected And I think there is
a very useful feature set buried inside of here somewhere I just can’t find it I love the idea I love the idea that you know we’re using 50 different apps at this point And each one has its own way of bookmarking things and trying to save information which is why this is trying to become the one space that brings together everything that you want to keep and everything that you need to remember So the company is basically saying instead of saving that post on Instagram add it to your essential space
organized into the various different collections that you’ve created Instead of opening up Google calendar to add an upcoming event just tell your essential space to remind you in 3 hours You can even if you open up your camera app and then hit the essential key take a photo and attach a note Like I was looking at London restaurants recently You can point to one and tell it to remind you to book it on Friday And it’s even got AI built into it that tries to understand what it is that you’ve just
captured which I assume might help you to organize it in the future But right now doesn’t feel like it’s quite there It’s designed in a little bit of a convoluted way It works pretty unreliably like half the time it doesn’t understand me right or doesn’t register what I’m trying to ask it to do and you can’t yet organize anything or search through the things that you have saved It needs more cooking but it might taste great when it’s done And now just before we wrap this all up the time has come to
talk about one of the most unique parts of this experience the cameras So accessories aside for a minute because while this is very cool of course the key key reason that I liked the CMF phone 1 so much is that even if you had none of the extras it was still a very polished experience for its price and the camera was one of the main areas that came through And so with that in mind it’s actually a little bit crazy just how much the company has further upgraded them here So the 50 MP main camera on the old phone is still 50
megap but now using a substantially bigger camera sensor and the difference is immediately obvious like side by side with the last already pretty good budget camera shots are brighter they’re crispier they have more depth That fairly useless camera at the top which was just there to assist the main camera has been replaced by an 8 megapixel ultrawide now which as you’d probably expect is not amazing but it’s as good as ultrawide cameras at this price tend to be And then completely separate to both of those cameras there’s now a
brand new 50 megapixel two times telephoto camera too And this is a pretty huge improvement It gives you basically twice as much power to be able to zoom longer distances And even more importantly for me a better quality portrait mode You’re not about to confuse this with a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra camera You will notice lag while using it You will notice bits of jitteriness from the lack of optical image stabilization and its image processing is not as advanced as more intelligent phones leading to the odd
shots with very obvious over or underexposure Then again show me a 200lb phone that does it better than this So what happens when you add these lenses well for starters you got the fisheye which on first glance seems very strange because you put it onto your main camera and it basically turns that main camera into an ultrawide with almost the exact same field of view as your ultrawide camera But then in another way that’s also the upside You can take ultra wide shots with the quality of your main
camera although with quite a lot of softness around the edges That does make it feel artsy but would also probably put me off using it The second though is the macro lens which is extremely good It gives your main camera the ability to focus at very close distances And this is something that you don’t really get to see without a lens like this It’s very high quality close-up photography Like the complete opposite of those tacky 2 megap macro cameras that cheap phones used to be famous for So here’s
the down This is not what I was expecting it would be but it’s every bit as great as I was hoping it would be What I was expecting when I saw the price was big changes to the way that this accessory ecosystem works and a real level up in terms of what it means you can do But with the phone itself being largely the same In reality kind of the opposite Like there aren’t that many exclusive new accessories And I don’t think the ones that they have made are particularly game changers especially because of this whole fiddle
with this universal cover that you have to do But then the phone itself is far more of an improvement than the small price jump would make you think Especially in this budget segment things don’t usually move this fast making this as prophesied instantly recommendable.
