Nothing phone (1) long-term review

Color settings, refresh rate

We love the symmetrical bezels as we've already mentioned, but the quality of the Phone (1)'s screen isn't all that amazing, and we have had a couple of very, very annoying issues with it. Let's start with the good things, however.

The Nothing Phone's display tuning is outstanding right out of the box, with the Alive color setting reproducing the DCI-P3 space faithfully and the Standard mode being incredibly well-tuned to sRGB. There aren't any other customization options here, though, aside from a color temperature slider. This is basically the exact polar opposite of MIUI's approach, and we find it refreshingly simple, although you may miss having more granular control over colors.

It's a similar story when it comes to the refresh rate settings. There are two you can pick from: High and Standard. As you'd expect, the former goes all the way up to 120 Hz, while the latter keeps things locked at 60 Hz.

In our testing for our normal review of the phone, we found that the High setting actually uses 120 Hz throughout the UI and in all system apps, reverting to 60 Hz when static stuff is displayed on the screen.

You also get 60 Hz in apps that don't support higher refresh rates, as well as when playing back videos.

When you're playing a video in a pop-up window the screen goes to 90 Hz, and there are games that support 120 Hz on the Nothing Phone (1).

Display settings

In actual day-to-day use, it's obviously great to take advantage of the smoothness that 120 Hz brings to the table, especially while scrolling, so naturally we chose the High setting at the beginning of our long-term review process and then stuck with it until the end. The user experience is objectively better at a higher refresh rate, and battery life was good enough that we weren't desperate to eke some more minutes out of it every day by going down to 60 Hz.

Brightness

Brightness is just average, even for a mid-ranger. There are plenty of competitors that outdo it in maximum brightness, and that's not great. This doesn't mean the phone is illegible outside; it isn't - well, aside from a bright sunny day with the sun hitting it directly. Then you actually won't be able to make out what's on it.

The panel is also incredibly reflective, which is definitely not helping it at all. It's in fact one of the most, if not the most reflective screen we've used in our long-term reviews in at least a year, if not more. That's a problem because you constantly get reflections of other things on it, to a very distracting degree. The reflectivity reminds us of a cheap laptop screen with the same problem.

Hardware aside, the software isn't helping either. The Nothing Phone (1) has the worst auto brightness algorithm we've ever encountered on a device we've reviewed long-term. And it's not even close. It's so bad we initially thought it was completely broken. But it's not, it does change intensity, just in a very... 'unique' way. So now we're hoping this is a bug and will get fixed at some point with an update.

You will love the auto brightness tuning if you enjoy your retinas being constantly seared for no reason. The Nothing Phone (1)'s screen is always, always way more bright than it needs to be. It's almost like it's trying to brag about its screen through brightness. Put this on a table next to any assortment of other phones. In all but the brightest conditions, the Nothing Phone will always be by far the brightest.

Our conspiracy theory is that this is on purpose, since people seem to have a bias for 'brighter = better'. And so the Nothing Phone stands out again. If it's facing down, it will stand out thanks to its transparent looking back and gimmicky Glyph LEDs, and if it's facing up, then it stands out because it will blind you.

The irony is that when you actually need a ton of brightness the most, on the aforementioned bright sunny day, that's when it fails because it just reaches its limits.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you're in pitch-dark conditions, manually take the slider to 0, lock the phone, and then unlock it again in the exact same conditions - bam, brightness is now at around 20%!

We were initially bummed to see the brightness adjustment slider hidden behind two downward swipes, stock Android-style, since we knew we were in for a lot of manual tweaks to the algorithm. In the end, that didn't matter very much because despite what Android is supposed to do, on the Nothing Phone (1) our manual adjustments didn't always seem to be remembered for the next time(s) it encountered the same ambient light level. So after a few weeks, we weren't very far from where we started.

Extra dim settings

To be honest, we probably would have found the Nothing Phone (1) unusable because of this issue, were it not for the Extra dim feature that Nothing has thankfully kept in its Android interpretation, unlike some of its competitors. Extra dim comes with a slider of its own, and we basically resorted to having this always turned on in order to go easy on our retinas. This only goes to show how useful Extra dim is and why it should be in every Android skin out there.

Green tint

Moving on, there's an incredibly pronounced green tint on the bottom 30% of our unit's screen when the brightness goes down, and you use the phone in an environment with low ambient light. You definitely don't need to be in a pitch-black room to see it, however. It's more obvious on darker backgrounds, so using the dark theme does make it more visible, but the tint is actually always there, and it's the worst OLED green tint we've ever seen.

We are hoping that this issue is confined to our review unit, but a quick Google search revealed it isn't, as there are plenty of owners reporting similar things. Will you get used to it? Yes, and especially if you're not one to use the dark mode, you probably won't notice it all that much. Or if you only use your phone surrounded by copious amounts of ambient lighting. But it's unacceptable at this price, and this shouldn't have passed quality control. Blacks are black on the top 70% of the screen, and they're green on the bottom 30%. That's not something that should happen in 2023.

Clearly, Nothing saved some cash picking this panel quality, and we're not sure we agree with the logic here. The display is your interaction point with the device, if that's not high quality, you'll never get a feeling that the handset you have is either. It can have all the metal sides in the world and have them be flat to resemble iPhones, but the simple truth is there has never been an iPhone with such issues.

Always-on display, Night Light

Nothing's implementation of an always-on display is perhaps the most bare-bones we've seen yet in any device used for a long-term review. It's also very confusingly labeled "Always show basic info of lock screen" in Settings, so good luck finding it. If you do, then you can turn it on or off and schedule it, and that's it. No customization whatsoever.

Always-on display and Night Light settings

The blue light filter is called Night Light, and it's the basic option with an intensity slider and options to schedule it either to turn on at sunset and off at sunrise, or during a custom interval. That's definitely less customizable than the best blue light filter out there (the one in MIUI), but at least it's present, and, in fairness, it's on par with all the others.

In-display fingerprint sensor, face unlock

The Nothing Phone (1) has an in-display fingerprint sensor, which is mounted a bit too low for 100% comfortable usage without any stress regarding finger gymnastics. This isn't the biggest phone around, and that difference in size does make the sensor slightly easier to get to than it would on a more substantial phone, but we still would have preferred to see it higher up.

That said, its performance is great. It's not the fastest or the most accurate in-display fingerprint scanner we've ever used, but it's fast enough not to be annoying in day-to-day use, we'd say it's about 90-95% as fast as the best ones. It's also very accurate, we rarely had issues with our fingerprints not being recognized. In terms of accuracy, it's 95-97% as accurate as the best ones out there, which is outstanding performance given how much this phone costs compared to flagship devices.

Biometrics settings

There's face unlock too, and it even has a setting allowing you to unlock the phone while wearing a mask. We checked and it doesn't unlock if your eyes are closed, which is nice, but the problem is that this is the slowest face unlock we've encountered in probably the past two years. It's actually slower than fingerprint unlocking, so, given that it's also less secure, we don't think anyone would use it.