CMF Phone 2 Pro Review: The (almost) perfect budget phone

Phone Arena

08-05-2025

Nothing once again shows it has plenty of original ideas and can make a great, stand-out budget phones while other companies churn out uninspired devices.
The CMF Phone 2 Pro is a more capable phone than its predecessor, and it keeps the fun quirks like modularity. You can no longer unscrew the back, but now you get a new case that screws in and opens up lots of new possibilities including clip-on lenses, a MagSafe wallet and you still have the kickstand accessory.
But even if the CMF Phone 2 Pro did not have these gimmicks, it's a well-made budget phone with a big screen, solid battery life and most importantly, performance that is not downright sluggish as many others in this price class. Buyers in the US should know that like previous Nothing/CMF devices, the Phone 2 Pro is only available via the company's Beta program on the Nothing website.
You can see it in our review score — the CMF Phone 2 Pro ranks well above the average for its price class, with excellent scores for battery life, a very good score for camera, and very few weak spots.
Let's start with an overview of the CMF Phone 2 Pro specs:
In a mature smartphone market where all devices look the same, Nothing has managed to carve out its own identity and distinct style.
The CMF Phone 2 Pro with the screws on the back and the quirky shape of its cameras is unmistakably a Nothing creation (and we love its character).
For all else, this phone feels solidly put together and quite thin, but also plasticky, so that you don't really mistake it for anything too premium.
With the first CMF phone, you could unscrew the back cover and replace it with a totally different one. Here, you have screws on the back as well, but rather than unscrew the whole back, you can actually screw-in an optional magnetic cover on top of the existing back one. What can you do with it? Attach a "MagSafe" wallet is one option, and this new back cover also allows you to screw in additional lenses (you can buy a fish-eye and macro ones).
Other optional accessories include a lanyard and a kickstand.
The 6.8-inch screen size suggests a big device, and it is indeed, but we liked that it weighs quite a bit less than rivals like the Galaxy A26.
Among the notable additions here is the Essential key which first arrived on the Nothing 3a series. One press on it captures your screen, while a long-press records your voice. It also acts as a shortcut to the Essential space, a place where you gather your thoughts, voice memos and screenshots, and AI helps you make sense of it all. We are still not completely sold on the idea, but some may like it.
CMF Phone 2 Pro comes in White, Orange or Black
Nothing is also not afraid of color with a vivid orange model, and then you also have a white and black versions (we obviously have the black one for this review).
The CMF Phone 2 Pro unboxing experience is similar to high-end phones, and by this we mean that the box is slim and there is no charger in the box. Ah well, we are more forgiving about this when it comes to budget phones than $1,000 flagships. You do get a see-through silicone case, a charging cable with USB-C on both ends, an ejector tool in a cool orange color and the usual user manuals.
With a 6.8-inch OLED screen with 1080p resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, the CMF Phone 2 Pro looks quite good. Heck, even the bezels don't seem quite as thick as on the much costlier Pixel 9a.
In our lab tests, the phone hit around 1,200 nits of peak brightness, which is marginally higher than the Galaxy A26 5G, but a bit too dim for comfortable outdoor use. If you want to be able to see your screen well, we recommend looking for a phone that can reach at least 2,000 nits of brightness. Check out our phone brightness reference page to find such phones.
As for biometrics, there are no surprises. You get an optical fingerprint scanner that does the job just fine (it's positioned a bit lower than we are used to, but that was not a hard adjustment).
The CMF Phone 2 Pro means business with three real cameras on the back. We say "real" because the optional third camera on budget phone in this price class is usually a quite useless low-res macro camera. So, is the CMF Phone 2 Pro the budget phone camera extraordinaire?
Well, it might be! If you don't expect flagship quality, the camera system here actually surpasses expectations for the class quite a bit. On our camera score, the CMF Phone 2 Pro gets 125 points, beating the Galaxy A26 which has 122. The difference comes from better performance from the main camera and a significant upgrade to zoom quality. Video recording on the CMF, however, is one small step below the A26, which performs well with the main camera.
Captured at sunset, the above images have very pleasing colors and you can see that golden hour indeed looks golden.
We like that there are no artifacts with HDR photos, which is an issue on other budget phones . Detail on the main camera is also quite decent, but in ultra-wide shots you can see a slight drop in quality (but that is kind of expected).
We also appreciate having four different focal lengths for portrait photos. Again, this is better than other budget phones which are often limited to wide portraits only (and those result in unflattering facial features).
The Phone 2 Pro comes with a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Pro chip on the inside, which is not particularly notable. It's in the same ballpark as the Samsung Exynos 1380 on the Galaxy A26, maybe just a tiny bit faster.
You also get 8GB of RAM, which is again standard for the category, but CMF goes above expectations with the storage: it offers 256GB, double the competition at a much lower price. That's great value!
In the industry-standard GeekBench 6 CPU test, the CMF Phone 2 Pro scores around 1,000 points for single-core performance and 3,000 points for multi-core, beating the Galaxy A26 5G narrowly. GPU Performance And as for gaming, the performance is unchanged from the first edition CMF phone and again slightly higher than main rival Galaxy A26.
Good news is that the CMF Phone 2 Pro supports microSD cards, so you can expand the storage easily. CMF Phone 2 Pro Software The phone runs on Nothing OS 3.2 on top of Android 15.
We like most of the things Nothing does with its custom interface, but most noticeable in our opinion are the optimizations to the speed and fluency. Everything runs quite fast and there is only an occasional stutter. This is a much better experience than most other $300 phones that stutter a lot more in daily operations. The CMF Phone 2 Pro will also receive three major OS updates (supposedly Android 16, 17 and 18). Here, rival Galaxy A26 has the upper hand with a promise for six major updates, but we have our reservations about this whole Android update situation as we see that budget devices receive updates months and sometimes a year after they are officially released, often rendering those updates quite useless.
With a 5,000 mAh battery inside, this phone fits in the typical Android budget phone mold.
However, you know we had to run our in-house battery tests to find out more.
The CMF Phone 2 Pro surprised us with excellent battery life all around. It scored more than 14 hours on our lightest web browsing test, but the most impressive showing was in the YouTube video streaming use-case where it got nearly 13 hours and a half, a good 50% over the Galaxy A26. It performed very well with our 3D gaming test that stresses the GPU as well.
Overall, we estimate that the CMF Phone 2 Pro will get you nearly 8 hours of screen time, which is a very good number. Of course, battery life depends on the usage, so always keep that in mind.
With 33 watt charging speeds, you can expect quite fast top ups as well. A 30-minute top-up gives you 54% back on the power meter, and a full recharge takes a very reasonable 1 hour and 10 minutes.
The good news is that Nothing (and CMF) use standard USB-C PD protocols, meaning that you can use any third-party charger to achieve those speeds, while some companies like Motorola for example rely on proprietary charging standards and require their own charging brick for fast speeds.
There is no wireless charging on board the Phone 2 Pro, but that is expected at this price range.
While we were mostly happy with the CMF Phone 2 Pro for performance and display quality, we really wish the speakers on it were better.
Right now, listening to music is just not a pleasant experience on this phone and you can notice the harsh and unimpressive sound quality even when watching YouTube videos.
If there was one thing we could improve in this phone, that would be the loudspeaker quality.
Haptics, on the other hand, feel quite nice and sharp, with none of the unpleasant buzzing of cheaper vibration motors that we often see on budget phones .
As you could probably already tell, we like the CMF Phone 2 Pro quite a bit.
It's great value for the money and it is nice that you get double the storage at a lower price than the competition. CMF's most important added value is the clean and well-optimized user interface, and coupled with adequate hardware this results in a phone that runs quite a bit smoother than others and is a joy to use.
We are not fully sold on the modularity idea and the screw-on lenses, as those seem more of a marketing gimmick rather than adding real value.
However, we do appreciate the quirky design and our only real complaint would be the sub-par audio quality. If you can deal with that, the CMF Phone 2 Pro might just be the budget phone of 2025.