Nothing phone (1) long-term review

Performance, smoothness

The Nothing Phone (1) performs. Very well, actually, considering the fact that it has a mid-range chipset. That chipset, by the way, is about as fast as what you'd expect from it. Obviously nowhere near a flagship SoC. But with that in mind, it's been one of the best, if not the best mid-range SoCs of the past two years or so, so it's definitely not bad. Of course, if you want to play the heaviest games on all the top settings, this is not the phone for you.

In day-to-day life for non-gaming activities, the Nothing Phone (1) almost keeps up with the flagships around 80 to 90% of the time. By "almost" we mean it's 95% of the way there. Where it's obviously, discernibly slower, is anything to do with multitasking. And if you want to really find its limits, just use split-screen multitasking with a video playing in one of the windows, say on YouTube, and a scroll-centric app in the other window - you can pick your favorite social network here. That's when you are very vividly reminded that this is a mid-ranger working with mid-range hardware. The scrolling becomes very laggy.

Smoothness is good generally, aside from the times when you play the multitasking game too heavily, but it's obviously not comparable to any device that's used a flagship chipset from the past two years or so. Hopefully, you weren't expecting it to be. Among mid-rangers, it is one of the smoothest out there, so if you pick this one over another similarly specced handset, you won't be disappointed in this regard.

Battery life

Battery life has been overall good, but a bit inconsistent. Not very much so - we always got a full day's use out of the Nothing Phone (1) without the need for a midday top-up, but the amount of battery we finished our days with varied. As did the screen-on times. Still, these results are absolutely nothing to scoff at, although the lower-than-most capacity doesn't help the phone achieve a truly outstanding result.

Most of its competitors play in the 5,000 mAh field, the Nothing Phone has to do with 10% less, and you can feel it. We'd say its battery life is more akin to what you can expect from a flagship with good endurance, not a mid-ranger with record-breaking endurance. If that makes sense to you, then you know exactly what it's like.

Battery life snapshots

Our screen on time numbers above are based on our use case involving around 12-17 hours off the charger in a day, time primarily spent on Wi-Fi 6, with about an hour on 5G, Bluetooth always on and 1-3 hours of streaming audio to TWS earbuds, half an hour to an hour of calls (again via earbuds mostly), location always on and around 30 minutes of navigation via Waze, and overall 1-3 hours on YouTube although mostly with the screen off. As always, please keep in mind that connectivity heavily impacts battery life, so if you use your phone primarily on mobile data you'll get lower numbers, and they'll be lower still if the device is struggling to get a signal.

We've already mentioned that there's no charger in the box (hi Apple, hi Samsung). Isn't it interesting that the devices that ship without chargers are usually also the slowest to charge? The Nothing Phone (1) does absolutely Nothing to disprove that theory, taking just over an hour and a half to get from zero to full.

That's similar to what you'd expect from a mid-range Samsung or an iPhone, but there are a few competitors priced similarly to the Nothing Phone (1) which charge much faster. So we don't think this is anything to brag about. Very quick top-ups while you shower are practically pointless unless you only need a few extra percent.

There's wireless charging built-in too, which is a feature never before (or since) seen paired with this chipset, and that's nice to have, but we would have given that up easily if it meant faster wired charging. As it is, this phone has two modes of charging: slow (wired) or very slow (wireless). Neither of them is in any way exciting.

Glyph lights

Spoiler alert: this is a gimmick. It was obvious from the announcement that it would be, and it is. We don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with something being a gimmick per se, usually the logic of bashing gimmicks is that resources could have been better spent on what would perhaps be more useful features instead. And that makes sense in general.

Not here, though. There was no universe in which a (smart) startup releasing its first smartphone into an incredibly crowded mid-range market wasn't going to do all it could to make its product stand out, and this gimmick achieves exactly that, along with the transparent look of the back and the iPhone-inspired general design cues (contradictory as that may sound). This is, if you will, the Nothing Phone (1) design trifecta, and there is no other phone on the market, at any price point, to have all three of these traits.

That, of course, doesn't mean they're necessarily good ones, or things that everyone will care for. We didn't care for the LEDs much at all, to be honest, since we don't generally rest our phones face-down. Simply placing the device on its back gives us way more utility than the LEDs ever can, with being able to see notifications and read them, actually see who is calling us, etc.

But they are pretty LEDs. And shiny. And they have some nice choreography too. So if you like shiny lights, you might play with them a few times. Maybe even be positively surprised when by accident you place the phone face down and someone calls and then it's Christmas all over again. But let's face it - there's absolutely nothing that this feature brings to the table that you couldn't already achieve. And what it does do, it objectively does worse, giving you less information at a glance, not more. But it does all that in a shinier fashion. And it will draw attention to the phone when you're in public, which may be the underlying point.

There are a few Glyph-related settings. You can of course turn them on and off, pick Glyph-synced ringtones and notification sounds, and choose whether you want the lights to work as a charging meter or not.

Glyph settings

Optionally, they can come on while you're talking to the Google Assistant too, and if Flip to Glyph is enabled, when you place the phone face-down, you'll get lights-only notifications and calls. It's basically an interesting middle ground between something like a Focus Mode (or Zen Mode) and Do Not Disturb. Finally, you can set a time interval during which the Glyph lights won't go off, which might be useful for when you're sleeping.

Speakers

The Nothing Phone (1)'s speakers are very good. They may not sound as amazing as those on flagship devices, but their volume is ample. We liked that we could easily 'fill a room' as it were with a podcast without the need to carry the phone with us throughout the room. And generally, unless you're in a loud environment, you'll be able to hear what's coming out of them with absolutely no worries.

Quality isn't outstanding, but it's still better than what we saw in most mid-rangers only a couple of years ago, so keep that in mind. For listening to any type of music, we still strongly recommend dedicated Bluetooth speakers or headphones or earbuds. Listening directly through phone speakers doesn't really do justice to any genre.

To sum up, these won't let you down if you don't have unrealistic expectations from both the price point and the physical constraints at work in a smartphone-size device.

Vibration motor

The Nothing Phone (1)'s vibration motor does what it's supposed to do. This is not one we'll rave about as being almost as good as those in more expensive phones. It really isn't. It gets the vibration job done of course, but it's also very obviously a part where some money was saved in order to reach this device's price point. Nothing wrong with that in theory, but we have seen similarly priced handsets, especially from the Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco stable, with much better vibration motors.

So overall, this is a slight letdown - we weren't expecting to be wowed, but it could have been better. That said, it's not as bad as those you'll find fitted to lower-end phones. Quality-wise , in a vacuum, it's just very average, but when we bring in the aforementioned competitors, it may leave you wanting for more.

Vibration settings

That goes for the associated software too. Unlike what we've seen in other skins, Nothing OS doesn't have any sort of vibration intensity slider, nor a way to select how 'deep' the vibrations go for their three use cases. You can just turn them on and off for calls, notifications, and touch feedback, and that's it. Kind of lacking, but in tune with the quality of the motor.