Everything you need to know about NOTHING PHONE 1
This is a smartphone
that's been hyped up for quite a while now the NOTHING PHONE One. It comes from Carl Pay, who helped
found the OG flagship killer brand a few years back. Always the NOTHING PHONE 1 another revolution
in the making? Or something else entirely? The One Plus brand was all about
providing a ton of bang for your buck, even on some levels, offering flagship
grade quality.
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| Nothing Phone 1: Review |
Nothing Phone
But where it stands out
is its unique design. Sure, the flat back and sides are really similar to
iPhones, but the transparent glass is something special. You can't see the
inner workings of the phone at all. Most of it is hidden behind a plastic
cover, but you still get the impression that this is some kind of futuristic prototype.
This feeling is even
stronger when you see that the second reason the back is transparent allows
the NOTHING PHONE One's
Glyph LEDs to shine. Have you ever wished you had a set of glowing neon lights
in your pocket? Well, there you go. Except they don't light up in different
colors. Well, that's not 100% true.
Red Indicator
There is a red indicator
that can light up when you are shooting video. You can also use the LEDs as a
fill light for the rear camera if you need it in dark situations. Otherwise,
Glyphs give you information about what's going on with the phone lighting up
for calls or notifications. There's even a separate one for charging, where a
light tells you how much juice you have.
Interface Lights
So far, the Glyph
interface lights up looking bright, and they're practical on paper. But the
problem is that most of the time you're probably not looking at the back of
your phone, you're using the front. And if your phone is sleeping on the desk,
Always On Display will do the trick. To use the NOTHING PHONE 1's unique feature, you'll have to get
used to resting your phone against your face instead.
Display
Built Quality
The build quality here
on the NOTHING PHONE One
feels pretty solid. And you get IP53 rated splash proofing here too. It's not fully
waterproof, but at least it's somewhat official.
Protection & Refresh Rate
The display is a
655-inch OLED with 1080p resolution Gorilla Glass, five protections, and a 120
Hz refresh rate. The high refresh rate is adaptive, sort of. It will dial down
to 60Hz in some scenarios, such as when you have static images on the screen to
save energy.
Touch Sampling Rate
You'll also find a
responsive 240Hz touch sampling rate here. The Phone One screen is pretty good,
especially for a mid-ranger. You get equally thin bezels all around. Then
there's the big contrast, like OLED Plus support for ten-bit color and HDR Ten
Plus.
Colors here are also
quite accurate, and we really enjoyed the haptic feedback here. The panel is
bright enough, but not quite flagship-grade in that respect. We measured a
maximum of around 460 nits with the manual slider, and this increased to 660
nits in auto mode in bright conditions.
Speaker Setup
Stereo Speaker
The NOTHING PHONE One has a stereo
speaker setup, with the earpiece doubled up on the top. They scored very well
in our loudness test, but sound quality is only average, with good highs but
weak mids and bass.
Headphones Jack
One thing we want to
talk about is the audio quality we usually don't get through headphones. We
don't usually run into problems here, but the NOTHING PHONE ONE has some real issues when it comes to
frequency response. It's all over the place, and regardless of whether you're
using wired or wireless headphones. Also the crosstalk between the two channels
through wired headphones is probably the worst we've ever measured.
Things don't really look
right and we just confirmed this last week on two units in two different
continents, so I guess all devices are affected. Hopefully it's not possible
for anything to fix via a software update. Regardless, it's a very strange
problem for a company whose first product was a pair of earbuds for biometrics.
Other Features
NOTHING
PHONE One has an optical
under-display fingerprint reader. It's well-placed and accurate, and you can
get the phone with 128 or 256 GB of storage. But it is not scalable.
Interface
The NOTHING PHONE One's interface is a
very minimal skin over stock Android 12, and as a result, it feels like using a
Google Pixel phone. Everything is quite smooth and fast. A unique touch they
have done here is the font. You get these dot matrix style headlines here and
there.
Custom Widgets
There are also some
custom widgets. These include a gallery to display your NFCs and some clock and
weather widgets. There's a pretty minimal game mode that basically just adds Do
Not Disturb and Inaccuracy Prevention for your chosen topics.
And of course you get
your controls for the glass LEDs on the back. One thing we were a little
disappointed with is that there is no particular compatibility with the Note
One earbuds. You have to install their app and they work like any other phone.
Chipset Performance
Let's move on to the
chipset performance of this phone. And as I mentioned earlier, there's nothing
going for flagship-killing specs here, but they're still pretty respectable.
The NOTHING PHONE One
is packing an upper-midrange Snapdragon 778 G plus 5G, which is essentially
just the next step up from flagship-grade silicon in benchmarks. It sits just
below Snapdragon 870-powered phones, and we were able to pull off smooth gaming
and multitasking as well. And even better, the NOTHING PHONE One is pretty stable when it comes to
thermal management, and it did an excellent job in our stress test for
sustained performance without overheating the battery life.
Battery Life
The NOTHING PHONE ONE houses our
4500mAh power pack, and was able to achieve a decent endurance rating of 108
hours in our battery life test. The phone supports wired charging up to 33
watts via USB power delivery. You don't get a charger in the box, though. With
the proper adapter, we were able to charge the NOTHING PHONE One from zero to 48% in half an hour. It's
nothing too exciting. There is support for 15W wireless charging as well as
reverse wireless charging.
Dual Cameras
Now let's talk
about NOTHING PHONE (1)
dual cameras. On the back, there is a 50-megapixel main camera with O and a
50-megapixel ultra-wide camera with autofocus that can take macro shots. The
twelve-five-megapixel images of the main cam are quite good.
There's a lot of
commitment, detail, a large number of well-developed plants, and the pacing
isn't over the top. Colors are a bit on the saturated side, and the dynamic
range isn't very wide, but it looks natural.
Portrait shots look
great. They are well exposed, with plenty of detail and low noise. Separation
is also quite correct. Shots from ultrawide look good, with plenty of detail
and low noise, and distortion correction is also well done. While colors look
realistic, they're slightly different from the main cam, and the dynamic range
here is only average.
Since ultrawide has
autofocus, you can take close-ups with it. They are sharp enough with pleasant
colors and contrast in low light. The main camera images are excellent with
lifelike exposure and dynamic range. There's plenty of detail thanks to
balance, noise reduction, and color saturation.
Turn on night mode and
you'll get brighter exposure and punchier colors. There's more detail in the
shadows, and blown highlights are restored.
Nighttime photos from
the ultra-wide camera are surprisingly good. This again has balanced noise
reduction, more than enough detail and a natural-looking display with night
mode. Ultrawide images have brighter exposure and enhanced colors, but have
less detail and a more processed look.
Selfies
Selfies are taken with
the 16-megapixel front camera, and they're good. Sharpness could be better, but
there's plenty of detail and you also get low noise and great color, contrast
and dynamic range.
Video
You can record video
with both rear cameras and 4K resolution at 30 FPS, and electronic
stabilization is available across all resolutions and frame rates. 4k footage
from the main camera is excellent with natural looking processing, plenty of
detail and low noise.
Colors are vibrant and
dynamic range is commendable. 4k clips from an ultrawide camera are great for a
camera like this, lots of detail and low noise. Colors are a bit muted, though,
and dynamic range is average so it's a NOTHING
PHONE. Sure, it came with a ton of hype, but the specs here, aside from
the glyph lights on the back, aren't anything out of the ordinary for a
mid-ranger.
Final Review
Still, while the specs
don't blow anyone out of the water, they're pretty solid all around. And the
price is competitive too.
The only places where
the NOTHING PHONE really
falls behind are charging speeds and audio quality through headphones. Also, it
will not be sold in the US. So far. If you have it available, it's a mid-range
recommendation as far as audio goes to do something about these terrible
headphones.
SPEC
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Body |
Weight |
194 G |
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Build |
Glass front (Gorilla Glass 5), glass
back (Gorilla Glass 5), aluminum frame |
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SIM |
Dual SIM |
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Multiple LED lights on the back
(notifications, charging, camera fill light) water and dust resistant |
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Memory Card |
No |
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DISPLAY |
Type |
OLED, 1B colors, 120Hz, , HDR10+, 500
nits (type), 1200 nits (peak) |
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Resolution |
1080x2400 px |
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Protection |
Corning Gorilla Glass 5 |
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Main Camera |
Dual |
50MP, 24mm(Wide) 50MP, 114”(Ultra Wide) |
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Selfie Camera |
Video |
16MP (Wide) 1080@30fps |
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Sound |
Loudspeaker Headphone jack |
Yes with Stereo Speaker No |
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Storage |
Internal |
128GB 8GB RAM 256GB 8GB RAM 256GB 12GB RAM |
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Platform |
OS |
Android 12, Nothing OS 1.1.0 |
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Chipset |
Qualcomm SM7325-AE Snapdragon 778G+
5G (6 nm) |
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GPU |
Adreno 642L |
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CPU |
Octa-core (1x2.5 GHz Cortex-A78 &
3x2.4 GHz Cortex-A78 & 4x1.8 GHz Cortex-A55) |
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Network |
Technology |
GSM/ HSPA/ LTE/ 5G |
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Comms |
WLAN |
WIFI 802.11, Dual Band, Hotspot |
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Bluetooth |
Yes |
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GPS |
Yes with A-GPS |
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NFC |
Yes |
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Radio |
No |
|
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USB |
USB Type-C 2.0 |
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Sensors |
Finger Print Gyro Accelerometer Compass |
Yes(Under Display) Yes Yes Yes |
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Battery |
Type |
4500mAh Li-po, Non-removable |
|
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Charging |
Fast charging 33W, 50% in 30 min,
100% in 70 min (advertised) |
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Color |
|
White & Black |
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Model |
|
A063 |
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