- 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 then you go like that, and you get this.
Which is your accessories, which is basically,
ah nothing, ah, yeah.
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, whoop, we've got the phone itself.
There's a little sim removal tool, very stylish.
And really, that's gonna 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
people 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 glyf interface
which is a series
of lights that can illuminate in different patterns
for silent ring tones 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 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 chi wireless charging that goes up to 15 watts
and does five 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 wanna spend most
of my time talking about.
I bet, from here, you guys can tell
that it's all coming outta 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 gonna 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's 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 gonna have the same, you know
positions for the volume rocker and the lock button.
So you wouldn't actually wanna 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 out 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
and 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 gonna 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 the interface for 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, 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 screenshotting.
So let's take a quick screenshot here
and I'm gonna 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, well, 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 chip sets
are actually necessary
in a smartphone to have a good experience.
You're able to record it up to 4k 30.
With that chip set, you can play pretty much
any game that you can throw at this thing.
It supports a 120 Hertz variable refresh rate
on its 1080 by 2406.55 inch display
which in my opinion is pretty much the sweet spot.
If only it wasn't, 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 kinds 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 cause I'm, I'm really
tempted to do it the iPhone way and kind of drag it
in a J shape, 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 eight 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, I mean, I'm, I'm not trying to be a hater or anything
but look at this, double click to open the camera app.
Freaked it, obviously the way APO does that!
With the, the, the, the draw
you draw a C on your offscreen 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. Like, okay.
So I have to lift it up to wake and a long press 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 is 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
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 wide is using a 50 megapixel Samsung
JN one 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 tier SOC and flagship trimmings.
It's got a 16 megapixel IMX471
and 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, 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 hand's that shaky, is it?
Do they not have slowmo video capture?
Oh, they do one. 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 tasks
switch your 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, it's a little scrape-y when you're sliding in
from the top sliding in from the side.
Oh credit for including a screen protector thought,
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 mAh power battery
and less than flagship chip set, 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 a hundred 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 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 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, dbrand.
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 (clears throat) 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.
Play the same as what you'll be accustomed to.
If you use a iPho- whoa, hi!