Nothing Phone 1 vs OnePlus Nord 2T: Which is the best premium mid-range smartphone of the two?

The premium mid-range segment has been going very smoothly as many smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi, Realme, Samsung, OnePlus, etc have their respective offerings as they provide almost all the specifications close to that of a flagship. Lately this year, Nothing entered the market with the Nothing Phone 1 which comes with a unique design and has created a lot of hype.

Carl Pie, the man behind the Nothing Phone 1 (Review) was once the founder of Oppo’s sub-brand OnePlus which came with some very good smartphones in the past this year we have the OnePlus Nord 2T (Review) which comes with almost the flagship specifications required like a nice build and design, a 90Hz AMOLED display, a powerful Mediatek Dimensity 1300 chipset, a good of set of triple cameras, etc.

Other than the unique design, The Nothing Phone 1 brings a 120Hz AMOLED display, a powerful Snapdragon 778G+ chipset, dual cameras each of 50MP, and a 4500mAh battery with support for fast charging both wired and wirelessly. However, the commonality between both user interfaces is the cleaner software experience you will get. 

So can the newer Nothing Phone 1 take on the OnePlus Nord 2T and is it worth the premium over the OnePlus Nord 2T? Find out in the full comparison.

Both the Nothing Phone 1 and the OnePlus Nord 2T sport a different design philosophy where Nothing has gone for a unique design where you get a transparent back with 900 Glyph LEDs that light up whenever a notification, message, or call is received. The camera setup is similar to that of iPhones with a dual camera setup with a LED flashlight.

The Nothing Phone 1 is curved around the edges and is flatter at the back so it does not wobble when kept on a flat surface. On the other hand, the OnePlus Nord 2T has a rectangular camera setup that houses a triple camera setup with two larger camera modules with the top one having the main camera and the below one having the ultrawide and the macro camera and beside them is the LED flashlight.

The back is slightly curved around the sides which makes it easier to hold in hand but the camera module does protrude at the back. The Nothing Phone 1 weighs around 193.5grams which makes it slightly heavier compared to the 190grams of weight on the OnePlus Nord 2T so the latter feels compact and slightly easier to hold. 

The Nothing Phone 1 has an IP53 rating which makes it splash-resistant whereas the OnePlus Nord 2T misses this feature. Around the sides, both smartphones are equally thicker (8.2mm vs 8.3mm) but the Nothing Phone 1 has an aluminum frame whereas the OnePlus Nord 2T gets a polycarbonate frame. Both smartphones have a power button with volume buttons on their sides.

But the OnePlus Nord 2T gets an alert slider to control different sound profiles making it one of the unique smartphones to have it. On the top, both smartphones have a secondary noise-canceling microphone whereas the bottom part on both smartphones houses a USB Type-C port, a primary microphone, a dual SIM card slot, and a loudspeaker grille.

Neither of the smartphones gets a 3.5mm headphone jack nor a microSD card slot for storage expansion. On the front, both smartphones have a single punch-hole display located in the top left corner but the Nothing Phone 1 has slightly thicker bezels compared to the OnePlus Nord 2T. Both the front as well as the back of both smartphones are protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5.

Overall, when it comes to build and design, with the presence of an IP53 rating and an aluminum frame, the Nothing Phone 1 is better here.

The Nothing Phone 1 sports a slightly larger 6.55-inches display compared to the 6.43-inches display on the OnePlus Nord 2T. Both smartphones have a Full HD+(1080×2400 pixels) AMOLED display and since these displays are AMOLED, the color reproduction and viewing angles are good but the colors look slightly punchier on the Nothing Phone 1.

The Nothing Phone 1 has a 120Hz refresh rate whereas the OnePlus Nord 2T has a 90Hz refresh rate, so multi-tasking between applications is really smooth on both smartphones in all tasks. The Nothing Phone 1 has a 240Hz touch sampling rate compared to the 180Hz touch sampling rate on the OnePlus Nord 2T. However, the difference between 90Hz and 120Hz displays is very minimal.

In terms of brightness, the display on the Nothing Phone 1 can reach a peak brightness of 1200nits compared to 700nits on the OnePlus Nord 2T but under direct sunlight, both displays have good visibility. Both these displays have different color profiles to choose and you can also set the color temperature on both displays. 

Since both these smartphones have AMOLED displays, there is an optical in-display fingerprint scanner that works accurately and fast. Both smartphones get HDR support on YouTube and Widevine L1 so that you can stream HDR content on OTT platforms like Netflix, Prime, etc. but currently Netflix does not support HDR content on each of the smartphones as of now.

Overall, in terms of display, the Nothing Phone 1 is better as it has better brightness levels, a slightly higher refresh rate, and a better touch sampling rate.

Both the smartphones sport a different chipset where Nothing Phone 1 has used a powerful Snapdragon 778G+ chipset and on the other hand, the OnePlus Nord 2T uses the flagship Mediatek Dimensity 1300 chipset. In terms of daily usage, both smartphones can handle all the tasks easily but when it comes to gaming, both perform almost equally well.

In BGMI, both smartphones can run HD graphics with Ultra frame rates and also Smooth graphics with Extreme frame rates. The gameplay is smooth on both when it comes to other games like Apex Legends, Call Of Duty, etc. After long hours of gaming, the back of both smartphones felt slightly warmer but the Nothing Phone 1 was having slightly lower temperature compared to the OnePlus Nord 2T.

In terms of benchmarks, both score equally well but the scores are slightly higher on the OnePlus Nord 2T. In terms of CPU throttling test, the Nothing Phone 1 has a sustained performance of around 85-90 percent with almost no throttling present whereas, on the other hand, the OnePlus Nord 2T throttles a lot as the sustained performance goes from 60-65 percent which is not so good.

In terms of network connectivity, both smartphones have support for good carrier aggregation but when it comes to 5G, the Nothing Phone 1 has support for 12 bands of 5G compared to 8 bands of 5G on the OnePlus Nord 2T. Both smartphones are available in 8/12GB RAM with 128/256GB UFS 3.1 speeds of storage with the Nothing Phone 1 having 8GB RAM with 256GB storage variant.

The Nothing Phone 1 has slightly faster LPDDR5 RAM compared to LPDDR4X RAM on the OnePlus Nord 2T. Overall, the performance is equally good on both smartphones but when it comes to gaming, the Nothing Phone 1 is slightly better.

The Nothing Phone 1 runs on NothingOS and the OnePlus Nord 2T runs on OxygenOS 12.1 with both of them running Android 12 out of the box. Both the user interfaces do not have any sort of bloatware except that the OnePlus Nord 2T has Netflix and Spotify pre-installed which are very useful applications. 

In terms of features, OxygenOS feels slightly better and it provides more customizations where you can change the icon shape and size, change different wallpapers, and styles for the fingerprint scanner, Always-On Display compared to NothingOS which provides a single icon pack but you get a lot of themes and wallpapers. It also has a nice dot matrix pattern throughout the user interface that looks eye-catching.

In terms of UI elements, the NothingOS resembles more of a Stock Android look almost Pixel-like user interface whereas the OxygenOS resembles more like ColorOS. In terms of software experience, the Nothing Phone 1 will be getting another three years of AndroidOS updates and four years of security updates whereas the OnePlus Nord 2T is assured of another two years of AndroidOS updates and three years of security patches.

So software experience all depends on personal preference whether you like NothingOS or OxygenOS. 

The Nothing Phone 1 has a dual camera setup whereas the OnePlus Nord 2T has a triple camera setup of which both have the same main camera i.e. 50MP f/1.9 Sony IMX766 sensor and the Nothing Phone 1 has a 50MP f/2.2 Samsung JN1 sensor for the ultrawide camera whereas the OnePlus Nord 2T has an 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera and a 2MP f/2.4 macro camera.

On the front, the OnePlus Nord 2T uses a 32MP f/2.5 Sony IMX615 sensor whereas the Nothing Phone 1 uses a 16MP f/2.5 Sony IMX471 sensor.  In terms of images from the main camera, both smartphones take images with a good amount of details that look sharper and have a good dynamic range with almost no noise in the background but details look slightly softer on the Nothing Phone 1 of the two.

However, there is slight oversharpening present in the background of the images taken on the OnePlus Nord 2T compared to the Nothing Phone 1. At night, the details look sharper in both images but the level of noise is slightly less on the OnePlus Nord 2T and with the Night Mode turned on, the images have an equally good dynamic range with almost no noise but there is some oversharpening noticed on the OnePlus Nord 2T.

Coming to the ultrawide cameras on both smartphones, the Nothing Phone 1 with its larger 50MP unit takes images with sharper details, less distortion, and better dynamic range compared to an 8MP unit on the OnePlus Nord 2T. The Nothing Phone 1 also takes natural colors whereas the colors look slightly oversaturated on the OnePlus Nord 2T. The noise is also more prominent on the OnePlus Nord 2T.

The ultrawide camera on the Nothing Phone 1 also doubles up as a macro camera which means you can go closer to a particular subject and use autofocus which results in sharper details with good dynamic range and saturated colors compared to the fixed-focus macro camera on the OnePlus Nord 2T that takes macro images with softer details, poor dynamic range and lot of noise in the background.

In terms of portraits, the skin tones look natural on the OnePlus Nord 2T with slightly better details and dynamic range but the edge detection is equally good on both with proper background blur. The subject separation from the background is slightly better on the Nothing Phone 1. 

When it comes to selfies, the OnePlus Nord 2T with the larger 32MP camera takes better details and dynamic range with less noise compared to the 16MP camera of the Nothing Phone 1. The selfies on the Nothing Phone 1 look slightly oversharpened but you do have better contrast compared to the OnePlus Nord 2T. However, the differences are very marginal.

In terms of videos, both the OnePlus Nord 2T and the Nothing Phone 1 can record 4K videos at 30fps from the main camera, and the video footage on the Nothing Phone 1 has better stabilization and slightly better dynamic range compared to the OnePlus Nord 2T though both are having OIS on their main camera. The video footage on the Nothing Phone 1 has better contrast and slightly less noise than the two.

The ultrawide camera on the Nothing Phone 1 can record 4K videos at 30fps whereas the OnePlus Nord 2T can only record 1080p videos at 30fps. The ultrawide videos have much better dynamic range and details look sharper on the Nothing Phone 1 compared to the OnePlus Nord 2T which has a lot of noise and distortion around the edges. 

On the front, both cameras can record 1080p videos at 30fps since both of them do not support 4K video recording. The video footage on the front camera comes out with slightly better dynamic range and stabilization on the OnePlus Nord 2T which has EIS present compared to the Nothing Phone 1. Overall, when it comes to cameras, both smartphones are equally good.

Both the Nothing Phone 1 and the OnePlus Nord 2T sport a 4500mAh battery which can easily last for two days with normal usage also if you use heavily, both smartphones can last for one day and all these testing were done with the display set to their respective higher refresh rates. The standard screen-on time was around 6-7 hours on both smartphones.

In terms of charging, both smartphones use different technologies where OnePlus Nord 2T is bundled with an 80W fast charger that charge it from 0 to 100 percent within 40 minutes whereas the Nothing Phone 1 only supports 33W fast charging with no charger bundled inside the box. The Nothing Phone 1 supports 15W fast wireless charging and 5W reverse wireless charging which is not present on the OnePlus Nord 2T. 

Using any fast charger, the Nothing Phone 1 can reach 0 to 100 percent in around 1 hour and 20 minutes which is very time-consuming. So it all depends on your personal preference whether you like the faster-wired charging of the OnePlus Nord 2T or the wireless charging features of the Nothing Phone 1.

Both the Nothing Phone 1 and the OnePlus Nord 2T have a dual stereo speaker setup that sounds adequately loud and clear but the levels of loudness are slightly higher on the Nothing Phone 1 compared to the OnePlus Nord 2T and also it has better bass levels but the difference is marginal. Neither of them has a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Both the Nothing Phone 1 and the OnePlus Nord 2T are great premium mid-range smartphones that bring in some very good specifications like a premium build and design, and high refresh rate displays with stereo speakers making them great for media consumption, both also have powerful chipsets for daily usage and gaming, the battery life is equally good on both and also both of them provide a good set of cameras.

Neither of them has any bloatware and provides a clean software experience. However, there are some areas where differences can be seen. The Nothing Phone 1 has a slightly better display, a more stable chipset with no throttling, and a better set of cameras, and that unique design with the transparent back with those 900 Glyph LEDs will definitely draw the impression in the market.

On the other hand, if you want a smartphone that has slightly faster performance, a simplistic design, provides a good display, a clean software experience, and fast charging, then the OnePlus Nord 2T is the better option as you also get the brand value of OnePlus compared to Nothing which has just recently entered the market.

Now talking about the price, the Nothing Phone 1 is priced slightly higher than the OnePlus Nord 2T, and should you be going for a slightly better display, more functional cameras, better-sustained performance, that unique design, etc. then the Nothing Phone 1 is a good recommendation but if you want value for money smartphone between both, then definitely the OnePlus Nord 2T is also a very sweet deal.

It all depends on your personal preference which one you choose and you cannot go wrong with either of these.