Review: Nothing Phone (1)

It is rare for the first generation of a consumer tech product to be nearly perfect, but here we are with the Nothing Phone (1). It’s the first-ever smartphone from Nothing—a new company headed by former OnePlus cofounder Carl Pei—and only the company’s second-ever release, following last year’s Ear 1 wireless earbuds.

What’s not rare is for a first-gen product to have some sort of flashy feature to draw you in. Remember the Red Hydrogen One and its funky holographic display? The Essential Phone’s magnetic port that never really amounted to much (for good reason)? Or even the Amazon Fire Phone’s “Dynamic Perspective”? The glitz on the Nothing Phone (1) is extra fun: 900 LEDs underneath the glass on the rear that light up with unique patterns when notifications arrive and can act as an alternative camera flash when you shoot in low light.

Nothing calls it the Glyph Interface. It’s silly, and maybe even gimmicky. But I like looking at it. I like seeing it light up, so much so that I regularly flip the phone around when it’s on my desk to see the design. I also love the fun little sounds the device makes with Nothing’s custom ringtones and alerts. Beep boop! (Fair warning: The alarm sounds may cause you serious harm if there’s someone sleeping next to you.) 

What sets the Nothing Phone (1) apart from other first-gen smartphones is that it nails every primary function wonderfully. Take away the bright lights and you’re left with a simple, affordable, and effective phone, from the screen to the camera to the battery. It’s hard to find many faults. The only problem? It’s not sold in the US.

Price is everything these days, and the Nothing Phone (1) starts at £399, or roughly $472, putting it in league with the Google Pixel 5A (plus the upcoming Pixel 6A), Samsung Galaxy A53, and other devices from Xiaomi, Poco, and OnePlus. For the money, you’re getting mostly high-end smartphone specs, which is the same tactic OnePlus employed back in the good old days. 

There’s the exceptional 6.55-inch OLED display. It’s sharp and gets plenty bright enough to clearly see on sunny summer days. It also has a 120-Hz adaptive refresh rate, which makes every interaction with the phone feel smooth, like a knife through soft butter. It’s a respectable size—not too big, not too small—with flat edges that make it easy to hold. 

Performance is another standout. Powered by the midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+ with 8 GB of RAM, I’ve nary seen a stutter on the Nothing Phone (1). (You can upgrade to 12 GB RAM as well.) Games like Dead Cells and Alto’s Odyssey ran without a hitch, and more demanding titles like Genshin Impact performed sufficiently well. The device never got questionably warm either.  

All the other important perks are here, including wireless charging, reverse wireless charging to juice up your wireless earbuds in a pinch, NFC for contactless payments, a wonderful haptic motor for gentle vibrations, and Gorilla Glass 5 protecting the front and back. There’s an in-display fingerprint sensor I’ve found to be quite reliable, and the dual stereo speakers sound great.

This is all made better with Nothing’s slick software interface. It’s not too different from stock Android (a good thing), but the phone also ships with a set of attractive widgets. Usually, I ignore a phone manufacturer’s widget offerings because they’re ugly. Not these. I’ve adorned my home screen with widgets for a clock, the weather, and a panel to control the Ear 1 wireless earbuds when they’re connected. And while a simple, uncluttered software interface is important, software updates are equally crucial. Nothing is promising three OS upgrades (the phone runs Android 12 out of the box) and four years of security patches. It’s not as good as what Samsung offers for its phones, but it’s still pretty darn great. 

Battery life is reliable; I consistently got through a full day of use, though heavy users may need to top up before the day’s end. Just about the only area where the Nothing Phone (1) could stand to do better is water resistance. The IP53 rating means it’ll be fine in the rain (and maybe the occasional coffee spill), but a dip in the pool could be catastrophic. 

Let’s talk about Glyphs. The 900 LEDs, which only light up white and not in color, aren’t always illuminated. Instead, you can have them flash when you get incoming notifications, and you can adjust the brightness. There’s a select number of light patterns and sounds you can choose from, and Nothing says it’s considering allowing its customers to design their own patterns. 

There’s a Flip to Glyph mode (very much like Google’s Flip to Shh feature on Pixel phones) that turns on silent mode when you place the phone facedown and lights up the LEDs when new notifications come in. It’s a nice way to stay in the loop without getting too easily distracted by reading every notification.

Glyphs have one more use in the camera app, where you can use them as a fill light when taking photos of a subject close-up instead of using flash. This is neat because a camera’s flash can often produce harsh lighting and darken the background too much. I like using Glyph lighting for certain scenarios like taking low-light photos of my dog, but I’ve noticed it adversely affects skin tones and white balance. I’d have loved it if you could tune the color temperature of the light and make it even brighter than it currently gets. If that were possible, I’d probably use the feature more often.

Speaking of the camera, I’m pleasantly surprised. Too often you end up with mediocre camera systems on first-gen phones, but not here. Photos from the 50-MP main camera are colorful without being too saturated and detailed. Some of those details drop off as the sun starts to set, but Nothing’s night mode does a pretty good job of producing nighttime photos you’d want to share, even rivaling images from Google’s Pixel 5A. (The same can’t be said of the 50-MP ultrawide, which didn’t do all that great a job in daylight.)

Where it falls short is capturing movement. I took the Nothing Phone (1) to a wedding recently, and it couldn’t capture a sharp image of my friend walking down the aisle in a well-lit church. They were slightly blurry, which was frustrating. That said, the videos I took of all of us on the dance floor came out nice with respectable stabilization.

The Nothing Phone (1) is available starting July 21 in what seems like every country except the US (40-plus countries, including the UK). That’s a shame because the rest of the world outside America has so many good phones in this price category, from the Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro to the OnePlus Nord 2. The US doesn’t have a ton of good midrange Android phone competition, save entries from Google and Samsung. We could really use a Nothing phone here.

I also have concerns about those 900 LEDs. What happens when one of them burns out? With the rear design comprised of more than 400 components, I have a faint suspicion that this device won’t be too repairable. But it’s nice to see Nothing use 100 percent recycled aluminum for the frame and ensure that more than 50 percent of the plastics in the device are made from bio-based or post-consumer recycled materials.

I have secluded myself from the hype surrounding this phone, so you might be coming in with a few preconceptions. I’ve had a few folks express a distinct annoyance with the brand’s attention-grabbing stunts, which is fair. (NFTs, really?) But as I said earlier, the Nothing Phone (1) is just a simple, attractive, and affordable phone, and that’s nothing but music to my ears.