Smartisan is not an old company. Founded in May 2012, they’ve released less than 10 phones to date mostly in the Chinese market. The phone in question is the Smartisan Nut Pro 2, a very promising smartphone with a promising price tag. In addition audiophiles, this is most likely the best phone loudspeaker you can buy on the market today, more details in the audio section below.
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Review
Personally, the Snapdragon 660 processor is the perfect mix of power and battery efficiency for me, and I’ve used three of them to date, the Xiaomi Mi Note 3, the Elephone U Pro, and the Smartisan Nut Pro 2. I’ve praised the Mi Note 3 as a great but overpriced device (but is frequently on sale), and its objectively the best phone out of these three. That being said, the Smartisan Nut Pro 2 comes close, very close, and here’s why.
Very Promising
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Specifications
Processor | Snapdragon 660 Octacore Processor |
Display | 5.99” 2160×1080 IPS LCD |
RAM | 3/4/6GB |
Storage | 32/64/128/256GB eMMC |
Operating System | Android 7.1 Nougat |
Cameras | 12MP IMX386 with OIS, 20MP Front |
Battery | 3,500mAh |
Physical Dimensions | 15.44 x 7.34 x 0.74 cm, 156g |
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Hardware
Insanely Light
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Display
Max brightness tops out around 550 nits which allows for easy sunlight legibility, and touch sensitivity is excellent, easily useable with cloth gloves.
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Audio
I’ll get less crap for saying this than my adulation of the display, but the speakers here are the best phone speakers I’ve never heard by far.
While the Galaxy S9 might have the best speakers yet in a Samsung phone, the Smartisan Nut Pro 2 still surpasses the S9 and every other phone I’ve heard comfortably.
Where the Nut Pro 2 excels is audio quality. No matter what kind of audio you’re playing, an action movie like the Avengers, a conversation filled TV show, or any kind of music, the Smartisan has a rich, vibrant body that not only provides copious amounts of bass but is clear and undistorted at the same time. While other phones might deliver similar volumes and clarity, they lack the rich, vibrant body the Smartisan has. Even youtube videos without bass heavy tracks give comfortable amounts of low frequencies that emulate the real sound a lot better than toher devices.
Where the audio diverges a little bit is the bass output. It’s a lot more punchy and deep than any other smartphone I’ve used (except the Razer phone), however the Smartisan outputs more of a natural, non-fatiguing bass without being muddy. Its not as deep or rich as the Google Home or Apple Homepod, but it’s a cell phone for crying out loud.
One area where the Smartisan might not match up to the Galaxy S9 or the iPhone X would be volume, but even within this supposed downside is a ray of sunshine. Sure, the S9 or the X are louder, but at the very top end of the S9/iPhone X’s speaker volumes, you can hear the speakers are slightly unbalanced, with mids and highs slightly overpowering the bass which results in slightly harsher sound quality. The Smartisan at its maximum volume sounds just as natural as it would at low volume, no change in the balance or power of each set of frequencies.
Quick edit to discuss the ZTE Axon 7, I have used it and while the ZTE is able to output much heavier bass and has incredible stereo separation compared to the Smartisan Nut Pro 2, the bass on the Axon 7 is muddier than the Smartisan and the audio output on the Axon 7 is generally less crystal clear or natural than the Smartisan, hard to believe, I know.
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Battery
I’ve seen slightly better battery life out of other Snapdragon 660 phones than the Smartisan Nut Pro 2, specifically the Xiaomi Mi Note 3. I can still get 10 hours of screen on time easily on the Smartisan, but the standby battery drain is higher than I’ve seen on other devices and I hope Smartisan fixes it as soon as possible, because battery drain during smartphone use is actually fairly reasonable, even doing things like Youtube, gaming, or taking photos.
Battery’s Good
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Software & Performance
The phone I obtained came with a reseller custom ROM with Google Services stuffed into the ROM, resulting in frequent freezing, copious amounts of lag, and the inability to update. I had to perform a deepflash operation to get the stock ROM back onto the phone but once it was on, I was quite satisfied.
Smartisan’s UI is a direct skin of the skeumorphic design language of the iPhone 4 era, with the settings menu a direct copy of iOS. Whether you like it or not is personal opinion, but I suspect many people reading this would probably dislike it.
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One Touch is the only function that I personally find the most useful and fairly innovative. Activating “One Touch” (by hardware combo or swiping from a phone corner) shrinks to screen down to allow for very quick and intuitive “copy and pasting” between apps, something I do use occasionally.
The Smartisan UI is very polished and fast and while I do find launching apps on this phone a smidge slower than the Mi Note 3’s MIUI9, its still very well polished and bug free.
Multitasking on my 6GB unit was flawless, and gaming on the phone was perfect also, the phone got warm after about 30 minutes of gaming.
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Connectivity
The Smartisan Nut Pro 2 supports a rather unorthodox assortment of LTE bands, namely 1,2,3,4,5,7,8.
Users in Canada will be pleased as the Nut Pro 2 is fully supported on Rogers, Bell and any subsidiaries that use these two networks, but Telus users will have to pass.
It’s a little more complicated in the USA, but suffice it to say that you will get 3G connecitivity on all the carriers (that are not CDMA) but 4G doesn’t work on all of them.
Sprint is completely incompatible with the Smartisan while AT&T and Verizon do use bands 2,4,5, however these 3 bands are not the carriers main bands and thus you won’t get 4G connectivity in large swathes of the states.
The only carrier which is compatible with the Smartisan is T-Mobile. T-Mo uses band 4 and 12 as their main network bands with band 4 being more widespread than band 12. This means that the Smartisan will work on T-Mobile in certain cities.
This phone will also work for any European users, but in a rather unconventional move this phone does not support LTE Band 20, just bands 3 and 7. It will still work, but do be careful.
WiFi reception, Bluetooth reception, and GPS performance are all excellent. The 256GB version of this phone supports NFC while the phones with smaller storage capacities don’t. I installed Android Pay on this phone to check if it worked, and it looks like it does.
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Camera
However, where the Smartisan does fall behind is colour reproduction. While the colours in photos are generally pretty accurate, they aren’t as pretty or deeply saturated the same way the Mi Note 3 does. Colours do look a little drab unless you’re taking a photo of something exceptionally colourful. This seems to me to be a software decision as opposed to a lack of optimization, as the colours are generally fairly true to life without being oversaturated.
The stabilization on the phone is unreal. Filming my dog while walking produced a video that looked like it was filmed using a gimbal, and even a full tilt sprint yielded very useable footage. The video is cropped somewhat (by 10-15%) so you do lose out on some pixels with stabilization on, and for the vast majority of people, its worth it.
The video quality is very sharp brimming with detail as long as there is not a lot of movement in the video. Once you do introduce movement, you get a lot of ugly artifacting which looks to me to be a software issue and the 4K video looks a lot more like noisy 1080p.
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Camera Gallery
Smartisan Nut Pro 2 Verdict
The Nut Pro 2 is a stellar phone by almost all measures of the word. It hits all the important checkboxes, a well built body, incredible display and speakers, good battery life and performance, and a great camera. However, there are a couple of items that could be dealbreakers depending on your preferences.
While these issues can be deal breakers, they are a small price to pay for such a great device. I recommend purchasing the 32/64GB version of this phone as that seems to be the best bang for your buck, starting at just $315USD at various retailers, you’re not going to find a much better phone than this.
Hits all the High Notes