Price Dumping

Review: Nothing CMF Phone 2 Pro - The best mobile you can get for 300 euro

What Nothing is doing with the CMF Phone 2 Pro can almost be classified as price dumping.

Published 22 May 2025 - 10:15

British Nothing, founded by OnePlus defector Carl Pei, is not necessarily a budget brand. Their phones are often affordable, but it's partly about pricing in while building the brand. CMF, on the other hand, which is a kind of sub-brand to Nothing, has a distinct budget focus. They started with cheap headsets and watches, and last year it was a budget phone that offered ridiculously much phone for the money. Now the successor, Nothing CMF Phone 2 Pro, is here, and it really is ridiculously much phone for the money even now.

Nothing CMF Phone 2 Pro costs 3000 kronor, at the upper end of the budget segment, but with inflation taken into account, it is becoming more and more rare to find phones for between 2000 and 3000 kronor. What you have the right to expect in this price segment is that the phone works, not that it has a good screen, good cameras, or is fast. For the most part, the CMF Phone 2 Pro performs in these areas like a phone for double the price.

OLED screen

To begin with, you rarely find an OLED screen in this price range. The CMF Phone 2 Pro has an OLED screen, also a fast screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate, better than what you find in the iPhone 16 for more than triple the price. If you take the screen out in sunlight, you notice that it doesn't have the highest maximum brightness you can get today. It performs about as well as a top model from a couple of years ago. Which, of course, is ridiculously good for a 3000-kronor phone, and I think the screen holds up even in the sun.

OLED screen also makes it possible to have a so-called always-on display, meaning that only a small part of the screen is lit, which can be used to show the clock and notifications even when the rest of the screen is off. Cheaper phones with OLED screens usually can't handle this, but here the function is available.

The phone is powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 7300 Pro chipset, an updated version of the chipset found in last year's CMF Phone 1. In performance tests, we notice small or no improvements compared to its predecessor, but the important thing is perhaps rather that the processors are fast enough to deliver a smooth and fluid user experience in the system. The phone doesn't feel slow, and that's unusual for the price tag.

Both telephoto and wide-angle camera

On the back, we have three cameras, and none of them is a useless macro camera, which is common in cheaper phones. Instead, we have a main camera with a 1/1.57-inch main sensor, as large as the one in the Samsung Galaxy S25, which costs almost four times as much. Finding a telephoto camera in a phone at this price is unusual; in the CMF Phone 2 Pro, it is also 50 megapixels with a larger sensor than the telephoto camera in the previously mentioned Galaxy S25. It provides two times optical zoom. The third camera is a simpler wide-angle camera without autofocus and with only 8 megapixels resolution.

Now it's not just the camera sensor that makes the picture, and when I compare the image results between the CMF Phone 2 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S25, the S25 is better. The colours are more vibrant and the images more detailed and less harshly sharpened when you zoom in. However, the CMF Phone 2 Pro handles night photography just as well as the Samsung.

But it's a phone for 3000 kronor. My expectations for the cameras are that I should be able to take pictures in daylight that look okay if I don't zoom in on them. The CMF Phone 2 Pro exceeds these expectations by a wide margin.

The battery is a fairly standard 5000 mAh, and the battery life of 12 hours of screen time is also quite normal for a phone with an AMOLED screen, but a lot for a phone in this price range which often has more power-hungry LCD screens.

More restrained design

The predecessor CMF Phone 1 was not just a cheap phone, it was also a fun phone. In the corner was a wheel that could be unscrewed to attach a loop with a cord, and you could unscrew the back and change the colour of the phone or attach different accessories. The CMF Phone 2 Pro is more toned down in comparison. The wheel has become a design detail, a decoration that cannot be turned. The back is no longer removable, but this has brought the positive effect that the phone has become noticeably thinner and now feels reasonably sleek. They have also been able to add an NFC chip for contactless payments, something that was sacrificed in the previous model's modular design. They have not completely abandoned the enthusiasts who want to 3D print accessories for their phone. The screws remain and CAD drawings are available so you can create your own accessories that you can attach to the phone.

The playfulness is more noticeable in the system, Android 15 with Nothing OS 3.2. Here you can choose a stylish monochrome retro theme with matching widgets on the home screen, for example. It might not be entirely practical to remove the text under the app icons while making them all in the same monochrome colour scheme, but if you find this annoying, you can choose a more conventional theme for the system.

Just like all other mobile manufacturers, Nothing is also investing in artificial intelligence to take place in the phone. In addition to the features that come with Android itself, such as Gemini and Circle to search, there is also a feature called Essential Space, which even has its own button on the phone.

When you press the button, a screenshot is saved in Essential Space, to which you can add comments. You can also dictate a voice note by holding down the button. Artificial intelligence will then help interpret the images and transcribe the voice notes and, with other context, create more useful information. This might be a feature with potential for the future as it develops, but as it stands now, it's not something I feel inclined to use. And then it's a problem that it has its own button located right next to the on/off button. The number of times I trigger the function by mistake is much greater than the times I do it intentionally.

But it's just a small misstep in an otherwise excellent mobile. It would have been a really good mobile for 6000 kronor. Now it costs half of that, and it's by far the best mobile you can find for 3000 kronor.

Questions and Answers

What memory configurations does the phone come in? The cheapest variant for 3000 kronor has 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage. For 300 kronor more, you get 8/256 GB. Both variants have space for a memory card.

What accessories are included? Only a transparent silicone case to protect the mobile and a charging cable.

How is the speaker sound? There are no stereo speakers and the only speaker has a slightly tinny sound, so it's considered one of the mobile's drawbacks.

An Alternative

Motorola Moto G85 is currently sold for under 3000 kronor. It also has an OLED screen and a slightly more compact format, but it's slower and doesn't have quite as good cameras.