Nothing Phone (1) Review

The Phone (1) was a mid-range phone that people queued for, which tells you what the design was worth. The transparent back with its five zones of white LEDs, the Glyph Interface, flashed for calls and notifications, showed charging progress and doubled as a fill light, and for the first few months owners actually used it before it settled into a party trick.

Beneath it the hardware was a careful budget: a Snapdragon 778G+, 8 or 12GB of RAM, a 6.55-inch 2400 x 1080 flexible OLED at 120Hz with even bezels on all four sides, 4500 mAh, 33W wired charging with no charger in the box, and 15W wireless charging that no rival at the price offered. The aluminium frame and Gorilla Glass 5 felt like an iPhone 12, which was not an accident.

Nothing OS 1.0 on Android 12 was near-stock with a dot-matrix font and a set of widgets, buggy for the first months before settling into one of the nicer Android builds. The 50MP Sony IMX766 with OIS took good daylight shots and inconsistent everything else; the 50MP Samsung JN1 ultrawide was the usual soft mid-range companion. IP53 meant rain and nothing more. Nothing promised three Android versions and delivered them, with Android 15 arriving in 2025. It never went on sale in the United States beyond a 2023 beta programme, so the price here is the 399 pound launch price converted to about $475 at the July 2022 rate.