Nothing Phone (2) has a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 Chip

The new Nothing Phone (2) will arrive this summer and it will be powered by a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip. Nothing founder Carl Pei confirmed the news in a series of Tweets, noting that this means a “clear” upgrade from Phone (1).

We first learned that Nothing would use a Snapdragon 8 series chip back in February. At the time, Pei and Nothing’s partners weren’t specific on the chip, so we sort of assumed it would be the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. If it was going to be the newly released Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that Samsung was about to rollout for its Galaxy S23 series, they would have said so.

The good news is that the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is an excellent chip that showed major improvements in efficiency and heat management over the original Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Seriously, if you owned the early Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 phones last year, like the Galaxy S22 series, you might have been disappointed in how they performed under stressful settings and how poor battery life was. The switch to a device on the 8+ Gen 1 was major in a way we don’t typically see within a single year.

For Nothing to go this route, we don’t have any complaints. Sure, the 8+ Gen 1 will be a year old by the time they launch it in a phone, but we can hope then that you’ll get a discount on the overall price of the phone. I’d imagine part of the reason for choosing a slightly older chip is to keep the Phone (2)’s price lower. The chip will continue to perform well for years to come too.

Of course, the 8+ Gen 1 will offer a massive upgrade in performance vs. the Phone (1), as Pei notes in his series of Tweets. But that’s to be expected when you consider the Phone (1) used a mid-range chip originally released in 2021.

Got your eye on Phone (2)?