When Carl Pei left OnePlus, he started a new venture after his 2020 departure from the company he co-founded. The Nothing Phone 1 has finally been launched and has thus far existed in a cloud of Nothing-generated hype — no doubt a carryover from OnePlus. It is no true flagship, as there is no Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, telephoto camera, or IP68 water resistance. But at UGX 1.8m ($475 USD), it’s a good bargain for what you get.
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Aside from the obvious design differences on the back panel, the Nothing Phone 1’s shape and finish look like recent iPhones. The edges of the aluminum frame are straight, and the screen is rounded at the corners. One can easily mistake it for an iPhone 13 Pro Max.
The Nothing Phone 1 has an unusual back panel which has been at the center of early first looks and Nothing’s promotional materials. It features a transparent glass that reveals the guts of the phone — painted white or black depending on the model you order. This is a phone that is not suitable for a case.
The light strips distributed throughout the back panel flash in combinations called glyphs, and they’re functional and ornamental. You can assign particular glyphs to individual contacts and app notifications of the Nothing Phone 1. Glyphs are each paired with their own signature sound, a combination of old-school-tech-inspired pings and chirps with quirky names like “squiggle” and “isolator.” One begs to wonder if these are features or gimmicks.
The Nothing Phone 1 gives the retro-tech vibes through to the OS, with a dot-matrix font sprinkled throughout menu screens and used in a couple of the preloaded clock and weather widgets. The preloaded voice recording app is styled with a nod to analog tape recorders, and the alarm sounds harken back to the digital bedside clocks everyone’s dad had in the ‘80s. The provided wallpaper options are also lean and futuristic with a hint of mystery about them.
But, with one foot in the past and the other in the future, the Nothing Phone 1 lands squarely in the present. Outside of these features and some custom widgets and alert sounds, there’s not much that separates it from any number of other current Android phones. The smartphone’s take on Android 12 is a light touch, free of unnecessary pre-downloaded apps and duplicate virtual assistants. The phone’s 6.55-inch OLED is pleasant to use and offers smooth scrolling with a 120Hz screen. Its Snapdragon 778 chipset turns in good day-to-day performance with 12GB of RAM. It’s altogether a very good, very unremarkable midrange Android phone.
On the camera side of things, the Nothing Phone 1’s camera comes with a 50-megapixel standard rear camera with an f/1.8 lens and optical stabilization. It’s paired with a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and around the front, there’s a 16-megapixel selfie camera. To be clear, this phone offers is a very good set of specs for a mid-range phone with a clean interface and a novel notification system.
