right out of the gate the cmf phone 1 has got me well a little confused I am
familiar with the concept of budget-oriented sub Brands like honor or
red magic or OnePlus it's just that nothing does well nothing to hide their
Association putting their branding right on the side of the box and is nothing
really such a premium brand that they need a sub brand I'm not saying they're
bad products I'm just saying it feels a little bit like walking into an Ikea and
finding ffp furniture for people branded
products next to the IKEA branded ones what really was the difference here one
difference is of course the price the cmf phone 1 starts at just
$200 and I've got to say getting this in my hands I don't believe it everything
about this device from the design to the materials is deceptively premium feeling
I mean this is made of plastic but it's
not the kind of thing that I would notice if wasn't a materials nerd and I
was just using my phone like a normal person even the bezels are yeah they're
on the bigger side compared to the latest Flagship devices but they're
perfectly reasonable this my friends is a 120 HZ variable refresh rate 1080x
2400 AMOLED display on a flipping $200
phone they even advertise Peak brightness of 2,000 nits meaning this
should be great for watching HDR content unfortunately our lab didn't measure
anywhere near that high but at over 12200 nits that's still enough to blow
out our top down camera and make for a very acceptable HDR experience and even
the speakers are surprisingly good or rather I should say speaker since
there's no Amplified earpiece speaker but that's the kind of thing you expect
to find on a budget phone and honestly I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit because we haven't even looked at the
exterior one of the coolest things about this device is that this plastic backing
which has this really cool kind of industrial look with screws on it is
also extremely functional instead of buying cases for the phone one you
actually replace the entire back with
any color you want which is the C in cmf
which stands for color material finish that is such an Innovative idea and one
that I can fully get behind because it has the maybe unintentional consequence
of also making it easier to swap out the battery just because you can swap out
the battery doesn't mean that you're going to get five to 10 years of
uninterrupted service out of this thing because they are only committed to two
years for major Android updates and three years for security updates which
is very much on the low side compared to competitors we're going to take a closer
look at this after a mention for our
sponsor oh no dearest Mr Sebastian a
thread was published on your subreddit titled let's get D Brand's attention to
sponsor lineus to dye his hair blonde again dbrand wanted to bring it back I
thought they were going to sponsor me to D it again on the show or something I'm
down dbrand come at me yeah yeah yeah it's going to be a big bag of money or
I'm not doing it though cuz my wife is not going to be into it today your
evasive maneuvers will be ineffective before we Fork over a big bag of money
we'd like to engage in the ageel tradition of try before you buy inside
this box you will find hair bleach use it to dye a small portion of your hair
right now on camera does it have to be on my
head why don't for this portion I use the self camera on the nothing phone
sorry excuse me the cmf phone 1 the rear camera is a 50 map Sony affair with an
assist camera that helps with portrait bokeh effects and the front camera is 16
megapixels from our experience photos are okay they're not the sharpest but
nothing does manage to pretty reasonably balance skin tones as well as overall
color accuracy as for video though because both the rear and front camera
lack Optical image stabilization of any kind you'll find you're going to end up
Focus hunting a little bit and in general they're they're not really great
they're good enough they're better than almost any laptop especially when you consider how challenging these
conditions are but Belle you want to do the honors use it to dye a small portion
of your hair this isn't even going to show up on camera you're just going to
make me look like an idiot everywhere
else listen this is what dbrand would want that's why they trusted me with
this look dude dude the instructions say
small want you to know I care deeply for this company and I would do anything to
uh keep us going keep sponsors happy okay um dbrand asked for a sample of
what the dying my hair blonde sponsorship might look like and asked
for a small part of my hair to be dyed blonde I entrusted Belle and he did this
okay why I got a little out of hand I
tried to massage it in and the circle just got bigger and
bigger oh my gosh
you thanks hun
serious yeah L they pay
more anyway let's take a look at the exterior of this phone on the right side
we've got a lock button on the top we've got a microphone for noise cancellation
on the left we've got volume rockers or one rather and then on the bottom a USB
type-c port that mono speaker I mentioned before as well as our tray for
the SIM card before we go any further I want to swap this out and see how long
it takes and I'm going to use my LTT Precision screwdriver oh I love this
okay okay first of all yeah that's super nice it comes with a Sim removal tool
and everything you need to remove your old back plate so that's all fine and cool but it comes with a new little
knobby P the point is that you can leave
your old colors as accents no way it has
micro SD expansion and dual SIM what doesn't it have hey there we go okay
it's like a leverage Point that's the internals of the phone
stick how much are these accessory TOPS
oh so cool like look if I want to have
like a a black release knob and a black
SIM tray I could do that boom accent
I I love this now I just wish that I
could have it on a phone that has NFC so
while they manage to match or even beat
some mid-tier phones in other ways like for example offering 33 wat charging
that manages to get to 50% in just half an hour it lacks wireless charging which
is kind of an obvious one but it lacks NFC and with the prevalence of mobile
payments these days I just don't see how
that cannot be a deal breaker for so many
people you know it's the kind of thing where I wouldn't even be that mad if
everything else about this phone wasn't so darn enticing like even just the
texture of this back super nice and in spite of the plastic back they've
actually managed to have decent enough cooling that the gaming performance
matches the nothing 2A which is a device
that costs up to like what about $150
more H there's just so much to like here
even the fingerprint sensor was really good in our testing making it just an
almost complete package at such a reasonable price this is one of those
ones where I guess I have no choice but the cop out conclusion where I say I
can't recommend this one it really does just come down to NFC it's got 5,000
milliamp battery it's gonna get like
almost two days but I want to see a next gen that resolves that one issue at
nearly the same price give it to me for
$28 and like I won't just recommend it I'd fliping I'd flip and buy one of
these I mean with that said it's not like I obviously have the most
Discerning taste in phones subscribe to ShortCircuit quick
Biga closure on this uh this is what it looks
like yeah D brand the W show is tomorrow
you will be the sponsor for the rest of this