I’m on: Nothing OS 3.2 Galaga-V3.2-25-0507-1139-IND
Easily the biggest selling point for a phone by Nothing, and my personal favorite.
Beautiful, no-bloatware OS. This holds the same OS as seen on the higher end (3a) series, no corners cut. A very appreciated move.
The Home Screen🏡
The (optional) Nothing monochrome skin easily stands out. It’s got a touch of striking red, and an overall clean vibe.
Widgets
The heart of Nothing OS. I’d say it’s worth taking your time playing with all the available widgets and building your own home screen. You end up with a focused yet useful page, where no two Nothing phones look the same.
My personal favs are the date and the snake game widgets (yes, I find myself playin’ it once in a while).
That said, it’s not hard to find inconsistency in widgets, an example:
Customization
Being able to resize the app icons is a really nice-to-have feature I didn’t know I wanted.
The Nothing icon pack makes all your icons follow the monochrome trend. It does make a particular app a bit hard to find if you’re not using the search bar, that is justified by the brand’s claim that it makes your phone “less distracting”.
Lock Screen & AOD🔒
The lock screen follows a similar pattern - with space for a couple widgets here as well.
Customization
You get to choose from six different clock styles, and the basic features such as quick setting shortcuts work well.
Always On Display
We don’t get customizations for AOD though - it just a reflection of the lock screen. Would’ve been better if we had more control here (show/hide notifs and widgets, etc). Due to lack of an LTPO panel, the AOD runs at 30Hz, which does takes a slight hit at the battery.
The Wallpapers🎑
We get some real unique set of default wallpapers (I love the circuit designs!), but what makes them better is the Atmosphere and Lenticular Glass overlays.
I’ve been using lenticulars on my wallpapers. Also while clicking photos. Yes, I like the vibe :]
The App Drawer📱
A fresh look here - apart from the default app tray that comes with Android, we have the “Smart Drawer”, that automatically sorts your apps into some predefined categories they belong to.
For now, there is no control of the user over creating new categories or changing categories for an app, so you gotta live with what the algorithm decides for your apps (which is fine, most (not all) of the times).
Nothing Apps📲
Nothing has been slowly releasing its own versions of basic apps over the past few months.
Nothing X🎧
By far the best earphones software I’ve used. Has all the features you can ask for (equalizer, control settings, find my device, etc.) with a very minimally aesthetic interface. No complaints.
Nothing Gallery🖼
This is where I expect improvements.
It’s a pretty basic gallery app. Google Photos takes the win due to its rich features like accurate people (and pets!) recognition, memories, and of course - Google backup integration.
The most important issue to me, however, is the lack of a photo editing interface baked into the gallery app. If I’m using a gallery, I expect to not rely on third party software for, at the very least, some lighting adjustment and retouching.
Other apps like Weather (w/ cool dot matrix widgets) and Recorder get their job done as you would expect.
Private Space🔏
A new addition that came in with the 3.0 update recently.
Being private in nature, it’s well hidden lol - you must swipe right from the app drawer to access your private apps and files.
As of now, if I open an app via private space, it still runs on the same account internally, so it’s not cloning but essentially moving your app from the app drawer to the private space.
Essential Space🌟
Talking about essential stuff, let us address the elephant in the room, the Essential Space - a full scale AI addition from a brand that has been keeping the buzz word out of it’s agenda.
With the new Essential button, one click and it’ll capture your screen, summarize whatever’s on there and save it in the Essential Space (yes, there’s an app), with the option to add text or voice notes.
What I like:
Detects useful content, and crops out the rest from the screenshot.
Understands text/voice notes to perform basic tasks like set an alarm, add an event, etc.
It’s something that I don’t find myself using very often right now, but definitely has potential to integrate itself as a go-to app. Improvements like a dedicated section for todo list, ability to edit the AI generated summaries (since it can be off sometimes) and web integration is enough to make it a daily-use app for me.
Animations and experience🌕
In daily usage, the device feels fluid and responsive. The animations are smooth, and even though it doesn’t have the most powerful chipset of the segment, good optimization saves you from most of the stutters, but they’re not impossible to find, especially in the camera app and while heavy multitasking.
You also get the promise of 3 years of software updates, and six full years of security patches (damn), which is very solid for a phone at this price.
