Nothing Phone (1) Review: Seeing Through the Hype!

 In today's nothing no i'm just kidding i swear there will be no more nothing puns for the entire rest of this video but in all seriousness today i get to do something i don't get to do very often which is review a new phone from a new company so this is the nothing phone one 

  So on one hand this is a new phone from a new phone company but on the other hand you pretty quickly realize there's a lot of stuff here that we've seen before it's a company from carl pay former chief of oneplus running the hype playbook we've seen before of slowly revealing more and more info about a phone to drum up interest but what's new and interesting about this phone is what they've chosen as their differentiating feature so like i said in the Impressions video if you're a new company coming along you have to give people a reason to choose it over the boring established ones that most people buy and so oneplus in the past would sort of lean on exceptional specs for a low price that was the thing that you could count on from a oneplus phone to stand out with nothing its design now i have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this design after Using it for the past week there's both a dark and a light version of the nothing phone as you can see they both have flat aluminum sides all the way around the strategically placed antenna lines power button on the right volume on the left and then the back is the signature transparent gorilla glass with a design underneath it it is a pretty simple design but it is just nuanced and complex enough to appreciate it it has some depth you know it has indicators For certain pieces inside the phone like the wireless charging coil it has exposed screws it has written text on the back and most importantly it has the 900 plus leds organized in these diffused strips all around the back of the phone with the unique functionality that i'll get to in a second but overall with all of this together i think it's safe to say i've never seen a phone that looks quite like this before so as far as standing out from The pack with a unique design well mission accomplished but at the same time if you squint it does kinda look like an iphone still you know with the flat sides and the dual camera placement it has the shape of an iphone matter of fact this well this is an iphone with the brand's new something skin applied to it uh and short of lighting up the leds it basically accomplishes 90 of the same look from the different shading of the White color to the red recording light to the faithful indicator of where the wireless charger is supposed to be in whatever phone you skin all the way to the text on the corner that's just a very well considered easter egg i guess that's why they're a channel sponsor well done guys i'll link it below but the lights are what's really unique here as you can see the the glyph interface so not only do they look quite unique But they also serve a purpose they actually have a function to them at least they're supposed to so there's one light up around the cameras one at the top right corner one big one all the way around the wireless charging coil in the middle then an exclamation point at the bottom so for getting a phone call the lights all just light up and sync with whatever ringtone you have sweet the exclamation mark at the bottom will also light up to Indicate your charge status and then it can show you again with a convenient little bump i definitely like that a lot and then it'll also light up when you talk to google assistant so if you say hey hot word what's the weather tomorrow you can see it lights up with a little feedback as you're talking then it reads you your answer out loud it's basically the defining feature of this phone in the dark or the light i actually think it looks better in the dark now that I've seen it but it's it's huge for this phone they also made a transparent case to be able to see it all the time now here's the thing all of these require you to have your phone out on your desk and face down which is cool but for me personally i typically have my phone in my pocket or even if i don't i'll have it on my desk but it'll be face up and even if it is on my desk and face up i also typically have it on silent so Now that i'm using this phone i'm like oh i got to make a conscious effort to make sure i remember to put my phone face down more often just don't put it down on some some grit or some sand or anything and scratch the screen but it's the nothing phone like that's the whole point i gotta use it but even then i still find myself just flipping over the phone to check my notifications because i don't get that many calls and most of the time it's just a single blinking Light at the bottom and i don't know what that means like i wish there was more granularity in what the settings could let me choose the led lights to do like i remember back in the day phones used to have rgb notification lights so i knew that a yellow notification light meant i have a new tweetdeck notification or a new blue one is a new email or a new green one as a new text message with this one it's all white leds so it would be cool if in the Settings i could set a certain dot pattern to mean a notification from a certain app like that basically seems like the whole point of these lights best case scenario it can communicate with you without you having to pick it up but as of right now really your only options are to change the brightness and then to turn certain light features on or off i don't know based on the light flashing what type of notification i have what app it's from who's trying To contact me nothing i kind of assumed i would be able to do that and i wouldn't put it past them to enable that with some sort of software update but like i always say buy a phone for what it is now not what it's promised to be so yeah as of right now that's not real now there were some other questions about the lights some people were wondering if they took a lot of battery power nope they don't if you leave them literally on all the time for an hour Straight they'll take maybe two to three percent of your battery so it's almost nothing and then the other thing was people were wondering about maybe some slight discoloration between the leds because as it turns out getting a bunch of different small cheap white leds to all be the exact same color temperature is actually pretty difficult now i have noticed that the top left light around my camera is slightly more green than the rest of mine but not enough to Bother me or make any difference in the way i use it and the lights do actually get bright enough to use as a fill light that's one of the features and so in in really dark places really with a very close-up subject i can actually say that it is better to use than a normal flash but anyway now that you know about the aesthetic i can actually talk to you about using the actual phone and i think the good place to start with that would be The price and the price is starting at 399 great british pounds so that's the baseline price for this phone and it behaves exactly as you'd expect from a mid-range android phone in 2022. and when i say that i mean that as a compliment there are some really good phones in this price range where it's kind of hard to go wrong with the top options here the pixel 6as the galaxy a53s of the world And the nothing phone fits right in alongside those so it's really good it has a snapdragon 778g plus and it runs android very close to stock i would keep in mind the base price has just 128 gigs of storage and that model only comes in black but the version i'm testing which has 256 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of ram is 499 pounds but it has performed very well big time shout out to this display not only is it a pretty big flat 6.55 inch 1080p oled with pretty good brightness up to 1200 nits and not only does it have an under display fingerprint reader that doesn't suck and a corner hole punch with a selfie camera and not only does it have perfectly even bezels all the way around which is a pretty notably more expensive thing to achieve since we've got to use a flexible oled display but it also has a high refresh rate now it's not Ltpo but it will dynamically bump between 120 hertz and 60 hertz depending on what you're doing and it has a 240hz touch sample rate so it is very responsive and smooth especially in just regular day-to-day stuff it can drop some frames when you're doing some more heavy stuff some gaming when there's just a lot more going on and that's understandable this isn't you know a super high end power hungry chip so there's going to be some trade-offs but It definitely helps that this software nothing os is mostly very close to stock android with just a few of their light touches on top lots of those touches are aesthetic and animations like they have their own fonts with this dot matrix style this nice extra custom animation when you pull open a folder on the home screen or pull down the quick settings and they have a couple extra home screen widgets They've tossed in and to me it looks like the only stock app that they've touched that they've skimmed are the camera and this voice recorder app which also has the dot matrix theme going on and they say it's gonna also be able to add this tesla car control feature which kind of lit my eyes up like oh that's what i would be able to use but right now it's in the experimental features section and even though i'm signed into The normal tesla app every time i try it it just keeps saying no cars found in your account so it doesn't work yet but apparently that's supposed to let you put some vehicle controls up in those quick settings like a door unlock or flashing the lights or something when they get that working but you know for now don't count on it i think basically i'm just happy there's no bloatware like it's just a very clean reasonable Refined android experience and i think part of that is that it's not arriving on us carriers so you might have seen the headlines this phone's not destined for the us at least not right now but i also am having no problem using it on att doesn't get 5g but i've had no problems with getting 4g everywhere but it basically feels like a tweaked pixel which is a compliment i like it and then the rest of the phone across the board is uh Pretty middle of the road pretty mid-range like i said it's not really flexing with the specs so these are some pretty modest ones across the board here there's a 4 500 milliamp hour battery inside which i was comfortably getting all day battery life with so that was nice it was a solid five to six hours of screen on time which for my use is a b plus and the charging speeds were yeah pretty modest 15 watts wireless charging and 33 Watts wire charging which will get you half battery in half an hour it's not bad the haptics are solid definitely not bad but not notably amazing or anything i like them but the speakers are pretty forgettable technically they're a stereo pair with that earpiece up top but the earpiece is not doing much work and blocking the bottom speaker pretty much mutes the phone and it's only ip53 water resistant which means no dunking or Splashing or wiping down the phone like you might be able to with an ip68 phone it's just one of the short places they save some money and the cameras typically this is the thing where you separate the mid tier from the flagship pretty quickly and i don't know if it's just because i just finished testing one of the absolute best smartphone cameras in the world but the nothing phones cameras were particularly average so there's a pair of 50 Megapixel cameras on the back here with the primary having ois and at f 1.8 and with 114 degree ultra wide i think some people might go into this with high hopes based on the hype but they'll pretty quickly adjust because again this is a 400 phone okay so if i give it good light and good enough conditions i can get some decent shots nothing to write home about but acceptable photos which is good but as soon as you have anything less than a ton of light the photos very Rapidly deteriorate mostly just adding a bunch of noise and the shutter speed going way up getting way slower so you can pretty much forget about taking pictures of moving objects in anything other than direct sunlight for context though just so you know the main sensor is the sony imx 766 which we just saw in the rog phone 6 i reviewed and it's also in phones like the oneplus nord 2t so set your expectations right and you Won't be that disappointed but if you're hoping for some type of flagship killer camera this is definitely not it but hey on the sustainability note the nothing phone is made from 100 recycled aluminum these rails and also an impressive 50 plus percent of the plastics inside are made from bio-based and recycled sources also the box that came in is very thin and small which of course is too small to include a charging brick but it is fully recyclable paper and cardboard so I can appreciate that basically i'm overall happy to report that the nothing phone one doesn't feel like cheap corner cutting as much as that does feel like they set out to make a phone that hits a certain price point and then separate it from the pack by being a good user experience but also having a unique cool interesting aesthetic i think that's really smart so i think the bigger picture now is okay they're they're Working on an ecosystem around this thing this new nothing company they started with the earbuds which were not the most amazing sound or performance in the world but had a very solid user experience and a very distinctive design and then they moved on to a phone which didn't have the most amazing performance or specs in the world but had a really solid user experience and a really distinctive design So what's next is it going to be a tablet a smart speaker i don't know it could be anything but whatever it is i think we can safely expect it to not be super focused on performance and specs but to just have a solid user experience and a distinctive design that's what they're going to lean into that's smart and i like it so even if it might not be for me someone who's pixel peeping and is particularly concerned about Performance on the highest end i do like that we're still getting cool looking stuff that i just gotta say that more cool looking stuff please in the world of not as cool looking stuff it was nice it's dope either way that's been it there is nothing left to talk about catch you guys the next one peace