I’m probably not going to buy the Nothing Phone (1). But I’m not doing it because I don’t like the brand. Or that I don’t like the device itself. I mean, I haven’t even held one in person. I’m not doing it because I’ve spent plenty of time with Nothing’s previous product. The one that started it all.
The Nothing Ear (1) is supposed to be the headphones to launch the company’s vision. A product that encapsulates Nothing’s desire to be different and create tech that inspires and excites once again.
I thought it was a cool idea. But when I saw it in person, and got to try them out for the first time—that’s when I was well and fully excited for what they had in store.
Being able to stand out in a segment of the market with such explosive growth and design diversity must not have been easy. But if different was what they were going for, I think they did it—and they did it without losing that sense of familiarity where anyone would look at one of these and immediately recognise what kind product it was and how to use it.
This sense of design holds true throughout the experience. There are no pre-recorded voice lines announcing pairing modes or complicated app settings, everything was just just beeps and boops all wrapped up in a really simple modern theme.
This simple approach also extends to the way it sounds. It doesn’t sound like its trying to do anything too complicated, the sound signature to my ears was neutral—there was detail where you needed it and nothing sounded like it was overpowering anything else.
They sound a lot like AirPods Pro to me and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
Because the earbuds don’t sit too deep in your ears, I think they’re one of the more comfortable TWS headphones I’ve tried in a long time. My ears aren’t evenly shaped so it’s hard to find ones that fit well—the new Sony WF-1000XM4 for example don’t fit.
But the Nothings, they were great. Coupled with a solid battery life and small charging case, I was just about to give it a rave review until one side started intermittently refusing to charge. It didn’t matter how much I wiggled it, or cleaned it, or readjusted it, sometimes it just flat out refuses to charge. And that’s really bad when I put both of them in a case, thinking I’d have a fully charged pair of headphones to use only to find out one side is dead.
I liked them so much that I was OK to forgive the occasional disconnections and interruptions I’d get when listening to them. But when I can’t rely on them to always be working, that’s a little bit scary. And I’m not the only one, nor are these the first pair of Nothing headphones I got the chance to use. Before this I had the white ones, and now that those are with my colleague Najib, he’s reporting connectivity and charging issues too.
It’s difficult to pair even with the app, and you’d often find yourself only connected to one side. And that makes using these a bad experience.
Then you see the condition of these cases. I’m not sure what kind of plastics Nothing have used, but the case was pretty much entirely scuffed from day 1. That’s not a good look especially on something this transparent.
Which brings me back to the brand new Nothing Phone (1)—I’m just not convinced of the company’s ability to produce a phone that will last years when in my experience their headphones have barely lasted one.
Even now you don’t have to look too hard to find reports of users facing green tint issues on their brand new nothing phone’s screen. Or that guy whose glyph LED adhesives have started to come undone. Or the dead pixels. Or the specs of fibre and dust that’s getting under the phone’s panels. Yes, Nothing has responded to these issues though what they’re saying doesn’t really say too much either. And with things like these we won’t really know whether that’s true or not until some time has passed.
But for me the most worrying thing in Malaysia is what happened when we asked them about service centres and after sales support because what they effectively told us was that they’re “working on it”. How can you already be selling a phone in 2022 but not have an after sales network already established? That seems kinda wack to me.
And that’s a bit of a shame because I was honestly quite interested in the Nothing Phone (1). It does look quite different and I can appreciate it when phone makers try something new. But I think it’s important that before you get swept up in the hype of it all, before you buy into the whole culture that they seem to be selling, that this is still a smartphone.
A smartphone is probably the most important commodity of our world today. You need that thing to be reliable—even if it’s sometimes a little boring.
