the obvious joke what is there to say about the nothing phone one nothing haha
video over but the truth is i've been using this one for about a
week and i actually have a lot to say
let's start by getting it opened up oh right i forgot how their package works
you rip open the thing and you go like that and you get this which is your
accessories which is basically ha nothing
a type c to type c cable no charging brick thank you apple for that industry
trend and thank you nothing for continuing it then on the other side
we've got the phone itself there's a little sim removal tool very stylish and
really that's going to be your first impression of the nothing phone one
these guys have taken the boring black
brick and they've really added something to it i gravitated toward the white one
like i think pretty much everyone else but now that i've seen the black one in
person this is this is my first time i might like it better it's less flashy
but still unique enough that i'll probably still get comments on it boy
did i ever get a lot of comments on the nothing phone just anytime i was using
it like oh wow what's that so if you like something that is
attention-grabbing i'd say the white one is the way to go but if you want
something that's cool but more understated the black one's super cool
on the back of every nothing phone one you'll find their glyph interface which
is a series of lights that can illuminate in different patterns for
silent ringtones and notifications personally i did not find it
particularly useful i am not a put my phone on the desk next to me and
then watch out of the corner of my eye if it lights up kind of person and i
would have absolutely no hope whatsoever of remembering which particular flashing
light pattern corresponds to which contact in my address book
but if nothing else it's got style you can
also use them to light up your shot when you're recording videos other than that
i love the transparent glass back you can see the charging coil for their qi
wireless charging that goes up to 15 watts and does 5 watts of reverse
wireless charging for your earphones or whatever else the case may be and you
can also see some ribbon cables the camera module and most of the rest of
this i don't really recognize other than that about it physically
there's not a whole lot to really say lock button on the right volume on the
left great positioning for those you're very unlikely to accidentally mash your
volume buttons when you're trying to lock the phone which i mean has been a
frequent complaint for me over the years on the bottom you'll find type c charging dual sim as well as a bottom
speaker it does have an amplified earpiece speaker but from what i
experienced the stereo balance of it is extremely poor so hopefully that's
something that nothing can tune in nothing os which is their skin for
Android and something that i want to spend most of my time talking about i
bet from here you guys can tell that it's all coming out of the right side
that's that's actually quite an achievement the last thing i do need to
talk about physically though is that whether you love or hate the ergonomics
is pretty much going to come down to whether you love or hate the ergonomics
of an iphone max
notice any similarities ladies and gentlemen
nearly identical dimensions
even down to the thickness to the point where i was coming back from lunch with
Jake who happens to have an iphone 13 pro max and he's like wow it feels so
similar i should take off my case and we should put it on the nothing
phone it fits like a glove
obviously you're not going to have the same you know positions for the volume
rocker and the lock button so you wouldn't actually want to use this you
know your top microphone for noise cancellation is not gonna be exposed
but the freaking thing actually fits like it doesn't you know you gotta
you gotta work to get it up there i personally do not like the ergonomics of
the iphone 13 pro max but i'm also not a fan of the software so let's talk about
what nothing has done to make their Android skin stand out from the crowd
first of all you've got your fingerprint facial recognition both of which work
well not to mention speedily i do have one complaint when you interact with a
notification while the phone is locked by dragging it down when you drag it
back up you're not prompted for a fingerprint unlock instead you get a pin
code then you have to go back then you have to go like this
which means that you're not actually going to open up that notification you
were trying to interact with it's just little things like that that have
irked me i don't like how much space my quick
controls take up up here i prefer a much higher density interface than what
they've done here other little things they're in the interface for uh turning
your hotspot on and off you have to kind of swipe to access it that's something
that i use a lot and i would like to be able to just have be a one touch turn on
turn off thing rather than opening up the menu overall it seems like nothing
has adopted what at least used to be the oneplus approach to their software where
it's a pretty clean mostly stock Android experience and with
my personal opinion pretty nice style to it
and not a lot of extra that means you won't
find any bloat i haven't removed a single stock app from this phone you can
see there's just no random crap on here but it also means
that you might not get the same richness
of experience that you would expect from other skin makers and a perfect example
of this is screen shotting so let's take a quick screenshot here and i'm going to
go ahead and share this okay that's a pretty normal looking share interface no
problems there what if i wanted to edit it before i share it oh my god i have to
click a thing before i can crop it then
wait what now save copy
i can't share it directly i can't click this to open up my photos app so now all
of a sudden it's a tedious multi-step process to
take a screenshot crop it to whatever you want or draw on
it and then to send it to someone we can compare this to samsung for contrast
nothing also has a similar scrolling capture feature which is really cool but
here i can draw on it quickly crop it and my share menu is
still there it's definitely a better experience we'll talk about software
more in a moment because it's kind of the most important part of the phone but
first let's touch on the hardware it's got a snapdragon 778 g plus which is
about what most people will ever need we are long past the point where flagship
chipsets are actually necessary in a smartphone to have a good experience
you're able to record it up to 4k 30 with that chipset you can play pretty
much any game that you can throw at this thing it supports a 120hz variable
refresh rate on its 1080 by 2400 6.55
inch display which in my opinion is pretty much the sweet spot if only it
wasn't for these squared off freaking corners it'll do 1200 nits peak
brightness in HDR which is about all that you're going to need and i just
didn't notice any kind of
slowdowns i mean slightly weird behavior in the animations sometimes when i drag
up from the bottom with the gesture navigation it's like i don't know a
little bit weird sometimes because i'm really tempted to do it the iphone way
and kind of drag it in a j shape you can see actually right now it's not even
registering is telling me how to do it like not an idiot but that's just down
to their animation design it was never the smoothness of the interface of the
phone it's available with 8 or 12 gigs of lpddr5 memory and 128 or 256 gigs of
ufs 3.1 storage meaning that at the
price which is starting at 399 pounds and then it's 499 pounds at the high end
i mean we might actually have you know
a new one plus back i mean i guess that was
kind of the point right i guess we should talk a little bit about nothing and where they came from the founder
carl pay was one of the founders of oneplus and
if i had to guess based on the direction oneplus has gone since his departure and
my first experience with nothing os with the nothing phone one i would say that
he was the one who made oneplus good i mean
i'm not trying to be a hater or anything but look at this
double-click to open the camera app
obviously the way oppo does that with
the the the draw you draw a c on your off screen it's it's asinine
i would be open to nothing adding you know more options for quick launching
the camera i'm not saying that just because i prefer to double tap the lock
button means that absolutely everyone should prefer that
i'm just saying that it's a lot quicker than basically anyone else's way of
doing it including apples okay so i have to lift it up to wake
long pressed this no i shouldn't have to look at the device
that should do it especially since it doesn't already do anything else you're
not even using it sorry sorry i got all angry again for a second the haptics of
the nothing phone one are outstanding the iphone actually reminded me of that
because up until now apple was one of the only one to really get haptic motors
right usually one of the first things that i do when i pick up an Android
phone is turn off the vibration when i'm typing but in this case you can even
just tell from the sound
it has a really nice tight feeling to it
it doesn't feel like you guys know what i'm talking about
right a very a very apple-like feel and i'm
surprised to find that in such a reasonably priced device since we're
talking about the camera the best thing i can really say about it is no
complaints you know it really doesn't seem like whether we're talking screen
color calibration or the camera that nothing has overcooked anything i don't
know that they're necessarily delivering the absolute finest image quality in the
market but there was never a situation with the nothing phone where i felt like
oh this is really holding me back and they've certainly got the hardware
behind it they're using a 50 megapixel sony imx 766 sensor for the main shooter
and then their wide is using a 50 megapixel samsung jn1 sensor you've got
optical and electronic image stabilization on the main and then just
electronic image stabilization on the wide which is
pretty much what you'd expect again this is not a flagship tier phone with a
flagship to your soc and flagship trimmings it's got a 16 megapixel imx
471 in the hole punch camera which i honestly didn't use this will be the
first selfie i'm taking with the nothing phone yeah it's a little processed um
not the greatest let's see if we can hold it a little
more still but studio lighting is kind of a best case
scenario yeah if you hold it still it's good but i don't think my hands that
shaky is it do they not have slow-mo video capture oh they do
120 only 120 FPS though
okay i mean it's little things like that that are
just probably not built
yet the software updates for this thing are coming hard and heavy so here are a few
things that i found were just a little lacking like screenshot sharing the
gesture controls are exactly what you'll be used to if you have an iphone i don't
prefer them but the reason that i'm using them is because i feel like i
haven't really been given a choice unfortunately nothing os does not give
you the option to reverse your task switcher button and your back button i
prefer the samsung orientation which is back button here because i'm
right-handed and i use the back button a lot more than i use the task switching
button so i would really really like to see
them fix that for now i'm stuck with gestures which mostly work fine except
when they're annoying and they do annoy me a little bit one
nothing excuse me has not rounded the edge of their default screen protector
here so it's a little scrapy when you're sliding in from the top sliding in from
the side oh credit for including a screen protector though it uses gorilla
glass on both front and back has an included screen protector and that did
come in handy i actually dropped it on the pavement
like an hour before we filmed this it was in pristine condition
but it handled it like a champ all it did was dent the aluminum frame a little
bit i've certainly had worse another thing i'd like to see them work
on this would be super cool nobody else actually does this but man how cool
would it be if your audio quick settings here allowed you to switch between
bluetooth devices like what would you guys give
to have quick access to switch between your car and your earpiece or your
bluetooth headphones or whatever else without
digging into your bluetooth menu there you go nothing i know you guys are
watching this video there's an idea free of charge i found some really cool stuff
in the developer options you can enable oem unlocking just like that right in
the interface it'll tell you not just what your percentage of battery
remaining is but your time remaining i
actually found the battery life was quite excellent with its 4500 milliamp
hour battery and less than flagship chipset this thing
sips power and i was easily able to get through a full
long day just as an experiment i woke up one
morning with only about 35 left because i hadn't charged it that night not that
i had started at 100 the previous day but i was like oh okay i'm gonna see how
you know if i can get through the day with this and in the maybe hour or so it's spent in my little
caddy in my car using Android auto charging a little bit i was able to get
through the day so i'm pretty darn impressed it wasn't a heavy use day but
it seems like they've done a pretty good job of just not filling this thing up
with bloat which is a big part of battery life now they pointed out this
feature where you can interface with third-party devices here experimental
features like connect to tesla and i don't have a tesla but apparently they
also have a way to read airpods battery life natively without needing like a
third-party hacky app but that is not
something that i have tried i mean let's
see here so what do i just go into the settings
i don't know i don't see anything about that that was in their notes though right
it could be something that they're adding down the road but at any rate it doesn't seem to do anything right now
there are a handful of other things i could talk about but the bottom line i
think is already pretty clear for the price
honestly it looks great and if they manage to
stay true to their mission which appears to be a nice clean non-bloated Android
interface at a reasonable price with good enough hardware maybe these guys
actually have a future in spite of all of the the naysayers out there
naysayers like our sponsor t-brand
since as dbrand puts it basically nobody is gonna get their hands on the nothing
phone they wanted you to be able to get something so they came up with this
a a themed skin a white stylized version
of their tear down skin that if you can't get a nothing phone which
you may not be able to since they are not going to be available in north
america at this point in time will mean that you can at least get
something thank you dbrand you are truly an
inspiration to us all you are truly a blessing on this world and we as a
people without dbrand my life would truly be
empty and sorrowful the something skin will be available on select devices at
launch you can get the full details over on dbrand's website at the link down
below and you can also request your device but just understand that they may
or may not be able to accommodate it because it's not just as simple as
taking nothing's thing taking a picture of it and slapping it on here they're
actually mapping out the internal components of your particular phone and
they're creating the skin out of that so there is a fair bit more work involved i
hope you guys enjoyed this longer circuit inspired by the extra time that
i got to spend with the nothing phone one and if anyone has a chance i'd say
it's probably them really the same as what you'll be accustomed to if you use
whoa hi