09/09/2022
Design & build: I see what you did there
If the flat glass and metal frame give you serious iPhone 13 vibes, you’re not alone. The Phone 1 costs a third of Apple’s priciest handsets, but it does a good impression of them from the front and sides – just with a hole punch selfie camera instead of a notch. It feels pretty premium in your hand, too.
The frame uses 100% recycled aluminium, and the whole thing is IP53 splash and dust resistant. It’s not guaranteed to survive a dunking like some pricier flagships, but will survive a brief rain shower. An IP rating of any kind is a rarity in the sub-£400 class.
The under-display fingerprint sensor sits a little too close to the bottom of the phone for our liking, but is quick to pick up your digits. Fingerprints in general are a problem for the glass, though, which is quick to pick up smudges and smears.
The iPhone comparisons go out the window when you flip Phone 1 over. The rear panel is completely transparent, showing off hardware elements like the wireless charging coil, and the head-turning glyph LED lighting. You can’t see any internal circuitry, like you can on Nothing’s Ear 1 headphones, and the effect isn’t so in-yer-face on our black review unit as it is on the white version. Still, it demands attention like no other mid-tier phone.
We’ve seen phones with ‘see-through’ effects before, though. It’s the glyph lighting where Nothing’s handset really stands out. More than 900 tiny white LEDs light up whenever you get a notification, pop your wireless earphones on the charging coil for a spot of power sharing, or plug in a charging cable to show your remaining battery.
The lights are perfectly synced to Nothing’s bespoke, minimal ringtones, and the rapid flashing can be quite mesmerising. Each chiptune sounds almost industrial, or a throwback to early naughties feature phones. Lay the phone screen-down and it’ll mute itself automatically, leaving the glyph patterns to let you know if a call is from a close contact.
You can dedicate certain alerts to individual contacts through the settings screen – but only for calls. For general notifications you have to change things on a per-app basis. Maybe this is a limitation of Android, but it’s fiddly.
At the moment it feels like there’s real potential for glyphs to be a different way to use your phone – but only if Nothing expands support. We’d like to see the option for per-app notification alerts, and even a companion app for making your own sound/light combos. Maybe tie the brightness to the ambient light sensor, too – it’s particularly dazzling by default, and has to be manually adjusted
