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| iPhone Nothing 1 Review |
This is an iPhone. This is the new nothing phone. It's advice that's making three huge claims. The Android companies aren't in knock-renovating anymore, Apple is the gold standard in the smartphone market right now, and this nothing company is the only one that can challenge it. Wild, wild, all claims, which is why I've refused to cover this phone until now until I was sure that I could actually give you an answer as to whether they are a threat to Apple or if it's all just marketing nonsense.
I will say, as far as the design is concerned, this is masterful. I mean, they have clearly borrowed the skeleton of an iPhone. The same chamfered edges, the flat front, and back, and the rough camera position remind users that this is an iPhone alternative. And I could see how this similarity also makes it look a bit like a knock-off iPhone with the whole this was customized in someone's garage vibe that you get from the completely exposed spray-painted components. But I think it pulls it off. I think there's just enough uniformity to this chaos. And because it's such a confident design because it so very clearly knows what it wants to be and isn't scared to do it, it's one of those that you're going to love or you're going to hate, but I love it. Not to mention the 900 Led lighting system on the back, but we'll get to that in a minute. It's not quite iPhone quality. The glass on the front is Gorilla Glass five, which is not as strong as Apple's ceramic shield. But hey, this is a 399-pound phone here in the UK. This is 779. So for the price, I'd go as.
Far as to say that this is.
A better design phone. Side note, between the two colors, white is the way to go. It's more defined, so it stands out well. The LEDs better match the color of the back, and it also hides your fingerprints and dust better.
So then you flip the nothing phone one around and another one of its key aesthetic pillars becomes apparent. The screen is about as good as you can get for a 400-pound phone for two reasons. One, the panel itself ticks the boxes. It's a big, fat 120 Hz refresh rate OLED display with just this little hole punch in the corner as the only interruption. But also, too, this is one of the first Android phones that doesn't have a chin at the bottom. Almost all of them, whether they're $200 or $200, they make this bottom bezel thicker to leave space for their flat display to connect to the phone's motherboard. But the fact that this company has not done that and instead paid twice as much money to buy a flexible display for the sole purpose of being able to bend that display around the bottom bezel just to keep the border symmetrical around it's, a touch that I really appreciate. And so even next to the iPhone 13, which is twice the price, the Nothing genuinely holds its own. Its display is less bright, but it has twice the refresh rate. It uses slightly less high-end materials, but it's got so much more design flair.
This is quite funny. I actually handed this phone to a couple of people in my team, and I asked them how much they thought this phone cost. Remember, we are tech people, but one guy said 800 pounds, and one guy said 950. And I can kind of see where they're coming from. But before we can get to the fun stuff, the performance, the camera quality, there's something I have to make really clear. There is a reason that Nothing is only comparing itself to the iPhone. There's a reason they've made their phone look like an iPhone, and that their marketing basically pretends like other companies aren't even in the picture. The truth of it is this phone one, it doesn't have iMessage. It doesn't have a face ID. No AirDrop, no native FaceTime. It has three years of software updates, not the five that Apple gives you. It's not an iPhone killer because it's not offering the features that an iPhone user will be looking for. And as of right now, it's not offering any unique equivalents either. But the reason that Nothing is so adamant about solely comparing to Apple is to try and distract you from comparing it to other Androids, where the value illusion fades a little.
Let's put up a spec sheet. The 399-pound Nothing Phone One has a snapdragon seven, eight G chipset, one thousand and eighty P, one hundred and twenty Hz OLED display, eight gigs of Ram, and 128 gigs of storage. Or in other words, the core spec of the Phone One is actually very similar to a 250-pound device that you can just find on Amazon. The implication is that the total power available here is barely 50% of the iPhone 13. And when you try to push the phone, you can tell this is one way of looking at it, but I don't think it's the right way of looking at it, because, for the purposes of 98% of users, this will still feel like a really fast phone. And while it does share a chipset with much cheaper devices, those rarely have the polish that this does. This tiny company, they actually contracted 500 engineers just for software optimization. That's 500 people working at the same time to make this one phone as fast and stable as possible. And you can feel it. And then on top of that, even though the Phone One does have a very ordinary amount of Ram and storage, it's fast flagship quality Ram and storage, which for the day-to-day experience and loading times it takes you most of the way to it's still feeling like a premium experience.
It still can't keep up with the iPhone's ultra-fluid navigation of the camera app. It's an immensely fast shutter time and its the unhinged level of smoothness even when you're pushing it to the extreme. But it's not as far off as the specs might lead you to believe. And I just as often find it faster thanks to the more responsive screen and the surprisingly faster WiFi. And this brings me onto nothing's extra features because yes, while this phone one is just yet another reasonably priced Android, it does have a couple of unique traits that lift it above the budget Android pile. Like one a premium feeling vibration motor for sharp Haptics stereo speakers that sound.
Well, not quite iPhone quality but also Not cheap software that's 100% bloatware and ad-free. It comes across as sophisticated and respectful to the user, both wireless charging and wireless reverse charging with additional mood lighting, an IP 53 splash resistance rating, and then finally this glyph lighting system. This is probably the most different thing about the phone one and if I have to guess, I would say that it's going to be a big part of their marketing. It does four key things. It lets you match each of your contacts with a specific animation so that you know who's calling by looking at the back. It could light up different patterns for different types of notifications like it could be one animation for calls, a different one for emails. It serves as an indicator of how much your phone is charged and it acts as a light source when you're taking photos and videos. It brings me no joy to say this, but I think it adds, well, nothing.
Like why would I look at the back of my phone to try and figure out who's calling when the front of the phone will literally tell me why? Try to guess my battery percentage here when the phone shows me the exact number with one tap on the screen. And then as a light source, it's not completely useless, but it's not nearly as bright as your flash, so it only works in low light and it only works when you're about 10 CM.
Away from your subject. I don't want to grill it too hard, this phone already has a good feature set for its price. But I'm just saying the lighting system is not much more than a party trick. So that just leaves us with the battery and the cameras. And the battery is pretty straightforward. It's a 4000 500 million power cell. I'm getting just over 6 hours of screen time on an average day. It's pretty good, although equally nothing to run home about given that the vastly more powerful iPhone can pull in 7 hours.
Do you know what though?
The lack of the charger in the box is a bit disappointing because this company has actually specified which type of charger they want you to use. And so by not including it. They're basically saying, here, buy it separately. But it's really the camera that's the big question mark smartphone cameras are they're more and more all about the image processing algorithms. And so the obvious question is how does a company come out of Nos and try to catch up to brands that have spent the last 15 years refining their image processing software? Well, you don't really. I wouldn't think of this phone as an iPhone 13 substitute as much as that is what it's aiming for. It's putting a little bit too much pressure on it, it can't match the iPhone's reliability, and it does have some rough edges, as you kind of expect from a company that's just starting out. But when you start comparing it to similarly priced phones, then it holds up much better shots, has a gentle natural background blur, the phone's rather good at those really high dynamic range scenarios, and it's also generally consistent with reality when it comes to color.
Night mode is quite impressive too. The phone does take a good 5 seconds to capture, even in times when others might take two, but I would take that if it means a better output. Plus, while that lighting system is mostly useless, it does help out for the close-up macro shots where you need every bit of light you can get and it turns us into an excellent camera for that. My only two grievances are the ultra-wide camera where there is a noticeable dipping quality when you move from the main camera, and also the fact that it's just quite a basic camera experience. You don't get hundreds of different modes and features to play around with, which is one of my favorite things about most Android phones. OK, so nothing phone one. Is it a threat to Apple? No, not really. Right now this is no more of a substitute to an iPhone than any Samsung or Xiaomi phone. It just looks more like an iPhone. That's it. If you don't mind a simpler, less feature-packed software experience, this is a really refined alternative to budget Android phones. It's a nice way of being able to pay just a little bit more and to get something that's had real attention put into the experience of using it.
And that's what's got me excited about the future. While this company is not challenging the iPhone yet, if they can carry on focusing on what the user really wants instead of spec sheets in two to four years' time, they might well follow through on the marketing heights.
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