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
