Those Nothing Phone 2 renders might be totally wrong

Carl Pei has been using the Nothing Phone 2 as his daily driver for a while now. He’s admitted this on numerous occasions. That’s why, yesterday, when he tweeted out a screenshot of his phone’s home screen, we knew it was from a Phone 2.

However, it’s only now (with a hat tip to Android Police) that we noticed something off with the screenshot. Check it out for yourself below:

Can you spot what’s off about this screenshot? If it helps, here’s a screenshot of the Nothing Phone 1’s home screen running its latest version of Nothing OS:

Check out the time in the upper left corner of the status bar. See how the time on the Phone 1 is pretty far from the side? That’s because there’s a display cutout there to house the selfie camera. Meanwhile, on Pei’s Nothing Phone 2, the time is much closer to the side of the screenshot. This heavily suggests that the Phone 2 would have a centered display cutout.

This all leads back to the leaked renders for the Phone 2, as seen at the top of this article. Those renders show off a phone with a left-aligned display cutout. We can now be relatively confident that this is incorrect, which begs the question: what else is wrong with the renders?

Nothing Phone 2 renders way off?

The only leaked renders we’ve seen of the Phone 2 come from Steve Hemmerstoffer, aka OnLeaks. Hemmerstoffer is one of the most accurate and reliable leakers around, so we usually default to his judgment on these matters. However, he has certainly been wrong in the past, so it’s not out of the question for the Nothing Phone 2 renders to be incorrect.

Interestingly, the renders we’ve seen aren’t based on the usual CAD files manufacturers use to create a new smartphone. The Nothing Phone 2 renders were instead “created based on live pictures of a testing stage unit,” as described by SmartPrix, which first published the images in partnership with Hemmerstoffer. Therefore, the renders we’ve seen could misrepresent what we can expect from the Phone 2.

To add fuel to the fire, Carl Pei called the renders “fake” when they first leaked. Of course, we were skeptical of that at the time because there have been plenty of examples in which a company has lied and said a leak is fake in an effort to weaken its impact. With this screenshot, though, it’s looking more likely that Pei was being truthful.

The Nothing Phone 2 launches on July 11. That means we’ll learn what it really looks like in just a few weeks.