- Okay. Even this case is a spoiler.
My eyes kind of glanced at it as I sat down here.
I don't know very much about this.
I don't want to know much about this.
This is a product called the ear 1 earphones
from a new brand called nothing,
which was started by the founder of OnePlus
after, you know, leaving one plus and starting a new thing.
This is nothing.
And I don't know what they look like,
but now I guess I kind of know from the box a little bit.
But, first of all, wow, I'm surprised that this,
Jesus, is the box.
It's super slippery, guys.
I wouldn't have expected it to have a,
a shrink wrap on it.
I thought this guy is really a salesman,
and marketing is his biggest thing,
and there's already so much hype around this device.
So I just thought it'd be wrapped a little differently.
but let's, let's check it out.
I'm excited to unbox this.
Getting kind of retro futurism Terminator vibes off of this.
Especially that ominous red dot,
very Hal 9,000 kind of look there.
How do I open you?
Ah.
Oh my God.
No.
No!
This is an awful experience, but I guess it's my fault.
Oh, I'm supposed to... okay.
The plots thickens.
(James laughs)
Did you hear that?
Okay, this is more Carl pays speed here.
Just this monolithic alien box.
No marking on it whatsoever.
Come on.
Here we go.
Ooh, and dry ice floats out of it.
Okay.
Got a little tab here for me to pull on.
That's also sealing shut this case, it's a clear case.
I don't want to get too far into that yet though.
Let's see what else is in here.
Earplugs. S slash L, small and large.
Earplug. Did they mean tips?
Okay. Cable, type C.
And, that's it.
And then there's a little box of literature.
Nothing Ear 1 safety information warranty card.
I'm not reading that.
I'm excited to look at this. This is really cool.
I like the design they used.
Just looks really cool, it's dark mode.
It's just line work and kind of a space invaders font.
Even this QR code literally looks like a space in here.
Look at that later, let's look at these ear tips,
ear plugs.
Okay, so we have some silicone ear tips,
There's two sizes, small and large.
What if you're extra medium?
And type C cable for charging,
and it is white.
And it has a weird transparent, uh,
kind of rubber condom on top of a braided cable.
I guess they wanted clear sleeving to kind of match
the clear aesthetic of the rest of the product,
which we haven't looked at quite yet.
But if they had just made it clear with wires going through,
it might have looked cheap or something.
so they went for like a hybrid,
where they've got this shrink wrap over top of braided,
which I've never seen before, I don't think.
It looks cool.
Type A, type C.
It's long enough,
but it's not like it's going to be a feature of wired,
wired headphones you're wearing or something like that.
Good stuff.
Now this.
It's got a dimple?
What is that for? Is that for opening?
It's got a button on the outside.
Prob, presumably for pairing or a reset.
Oh, I hit that and the light went green.
Maybe that's telling me battery indicator.
And... it, oh, that's a pretty good sound.
That's not bad.
It's got like a squircle kind of shape, rounded corners.
It looks like it wouldn't be too bad in your pocket.
I just want to try that.
That's good.
Yeah. That's pretty cool.
If I was like riding a bike,
it's not going to be too annoying.
I have a small inner pocket in these ones and it...
doesn't fit in there.
I think this dot, this little dimples
or divet is just for dimensionality.
It's a, it makes it a good fidget thing though.
You're not gonna fly, fling this thing across the room
by accident.
It makes it look cooler.
I like, I like the design of the case.
It is a little ambiguous as to which way it opens.
I guess that's the hinge.
So, you know, it opens that way.
And then you put your finger on that part of it.
Now here they are themselves.
Hmm. Kind of look like AirPods pros.
They got the tips that go in the ear,
then they've got this white bulb,
which has like a glossy plastic ceramic kind of look to it.
Now I had heard from a promo,
promotional video that they had a clear element to them,
which they do,
but I thought it was gonna be on the whole thing.
It's just on the stem.
On the stem it says "NOTHING ear (1)",
it's got a white dot.
It's got some like little reflective bits.
I don't know if those are functional or just aesthetic.
And then it has like a seam where the,
it looks like there's two,
these two pieces of plastic go together.
It almost looks like there's a white line
going through that seam.
It could just be the edges of the plastic
and the way the light hits it though.
And then on this side,
you can see more actual traces and circuitry and stuff,
which is pretty cool.
They definitely don't look cheap.
I've seen lots of clear, clear plastic devices
where you can see the innards,
and they kind of just look,
like it was something that was super cool in 1998.
And then now it's so basic that we don't bother doing it.
I don't think it says left and right on them,
but you can see that one of them is,
has a red dot and the other is a white dot.
I'm going to assume in this,
like right-handed privileged world we live in
that the red one is right.
I'm going to put them in, and twist.
I think that'll be the way to do it.
Oh, okay.
These have active noise canceling.
It's so convenient that there happens to be
someone pressure washing some crap outside.
Cause that is gone now.
I have no idea from looking at these
what the interface is going to be like.
I wonder if that's that stem, that's going to be capacitive.
Okay. When I took that out for a second.
Yeah, now it's on ambient mode again
and it's kind of having some transparency
so I can hear my own voice,
when I put it back in,
straight ANC.
Okay let's pair it into my phone,
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Okay, what do you think, John,
do you think I have to open the lid to pair?
Or do I hold this button down to pair?
There's the app icon with the ominous red light
and it's weird that the Ear 1 has a parentheses in the name.
It just looks like when you save a second copy of a file
with the same name.
By tapping continue, you're agreeing to our privacy policy.
God damn it.
I have located the button.
Continue to hold the button until the light begins to blink.
I would say that's blinking.
Fine. You can have my contacts, whatever.
Alright, meet Ear 1.
Double tap to play and pause.
Triple tap for next,
tap and hold switches
between noise cancellation and transparency.
That's fine.
Slide on stem volume up and down.
I like that a lot.
That is it.
See, why isn't there just a single tap?
Sometimes I could see the argument of like,
you don't want an accidental hit, but,
I don't know, man.
I should be able to just customize it in the app.
And maybe you can, I don't know.
I don't know what this is showing me.
Is this showing me some kind of tutorial here?
Here?
Oh, there's two options.
Is this a slider, or is it just binary?
There's light noise cancellation
and maximum noise cancellation.
Maximum noise cancellation.
How does that sound versus light?
You know, when you have like, Robaxacet
and there's just like space in your head
and you're kind of like speedy.
That's what maximum is like.
Light is a lot more chill.
And then there's an equalizer.
Okay, there's just presets.
Balanced, more treble, more bass, and voice.
Let's just stay with balanced.
Again, I wish they could do this in software so easily.
I just wish they gave us a graph
with all the frequency responses
and I can just move sliders, so.
It's not harder. Just give it to us.
So that's the here?
What about touch?
Oh, okay. I can actually customize this a bit.
Left ear, triple tap.
I can make it the next song or the previous song,
or make it do nothing.
Tap and hold,
I can make it noise cancellation or do nothing.
So you can't customize the double tap action,
that is always going to be playing pause.
But you can make it so that triple tap is next,
I would say on the right ear,
and then triple tap is previous on the left ear.
That makes logical sense to me. I think I would do that.
Now. What's this up here doin'.
Device details. In-ear detection,
automatically play audio when earbuds are in
and pause when, when...
when what? It doesn't say!
It's just cut off.
Find my earbud.
Ring your buds now to help locate them.
Let's see how loud that is.
(earphones ring)
Ooh.
I mean, how loud is that when they're in the couch though?
I hear them.
Okay.
New firmware update available. Oh boy.
Wow. What is this?
I updated the firmware.
I guess I need to connect again,
but there's a little bit of a clipping
or text wrapping happening there.
Is this supposed to be a battery indicator?
It looks like that text is kind of cut off as well.
And it also looks like I got 1% battery.
Hopefully that's on the case, not the earbuds.
I want to just listen to these things, finally.
Cause guys, these are $99.
I'm pretty confident that this is probably
the industrial design wise,
This is probably the, like,
coolest pair of headphones you can get,
or earphones you can get for $99.
Truly wireless with ANC.
and they look like this.
That's that venture capital baby. Subsidized.
Let's see how they sound though.
It sounds pretty smooth.
The song almost do has a cow bell,
cow bells just like ringing out.
It's pretty clear.
I got to listen to something I know inside and out though.
How loud are we talking right now though?
Here's the thing though,
everything sounds good at medium to high volume.
These don't sound awesome when they're loud.
I'd say I'm at about 80% right now,
which is about as loud as I want to go.
They go loud enough, but.
Oh.
They get distorted when they get that high,
but lower down, they sound pretty good.
They don't sound overly bassy right now,
but let's put on something bassy and see.
What's your go-to base song?
Hold on, I can't hear them in front of transparency.
Hello?
Oh yeah. Okay.
I feel like it's only transparent on this one ear.
Wait, can I do that on this ear too?
No, it turned it off.
It's global. It's global.
Let me just do this.
Pause. Okay.
Childish Gambino, bonfire. Okay.
This is explicit John.
I think it dropped,
but it doesn't go low enough for me to be like, whoa,
I usually do California love.
I don't know why this became one of my trap,
test tracks, but now it is.
Nothing wrong with that.
If you listen to this track,
there's a guy in the back going
(fumbles lips)
and there's like a, you know, the DJ air horn
(mimics air horn)
what predates the DJ air horn is the, is the DJ whistle.
The rave whistle, or hip hop whistle.
A lot of whistle in the song.
That's really good.
I don't have to like,
press really hard, or like drag it, or push it into my head.
I can just gently swipe it, and it goes up and down.
1, 2, 3,
1, 2, 3.
The touch interface works.
I haven't had any, what's the opposite of a false positive,
a true negative, no, false negative.
I don't know.
I haven't done the ones where I hit it, and it does nothing.
That hasn't happened to me yet, which is good,
'cause that's really common.
And then you have to like get used to it.
This is easy to use right away.
Yeah, okay.
I recommend these for all genres of music.
They sound pretty good.
Just don't go much louder than medium to high.
As soon as you go quite loud, they get distorted.
These are sweet for 99 bucks,
these are going to be really popular.
I think this is a great entry point for this new brand.
I think this is gonna make a pretty big splash
on the, onto the scene.
I feel like they're not gonna let many people down.
They live up to the hype for a $99 product.
I, I think these are going to be pretty popular.
I like them. I would use these.
If you liked this video,
you might like to watch me review the one plus ear buds,
which I hated. I hated them.
Check it out.
These are better. That's probably why the guy left.
He probably saw my video and was like,
I can't be associated with this company anymore.
I had to start a new one.
I got to make James happy. I'm out of here.
Nothing Ear 1s. Check them out.