I’m going to start off by saying that when we were testing this, none of us had a clue what the price of the device was going to be, and I think I speak for all the testers here when I say that I’m impressively shocked at the retail price because this thing packs a punch. We were also unable to play with the modularity so I can’t give my experience with that here, but I am absolutely looking forward to trying it out.
First impressions and performance
It feels a lot like the phones from Nothing’s main range, in a good way, thanks to the optimisation the team have done on this device and the sleekness of Nothing OS. The phone is very responsive. Sure, it’s very slightly slower compared to NP2 when it comes to things like unlock speed, booting up or app opening, but honestly if I hadn’t come from an even faster phone, it wouldn’t even register to me that CMF P1 was ‘slow’er comparatively. Whatever you need a phone to do, this can do and it can do it well. Even wireless Android Auto performed flawlessly, and once the phone adapted to my usage the multi-tasking was spot on, and rarely were any apps I frequently used closed in the background, the phone being able to keep them open while delivering all the resources I needed to use for other apps.
One very satisfying aspect of beta testing a device is in identifying bugs and seeing them get quashed. The CMF Phone 1 broke this mould, however, because right from the start it was really stable. Even with the new features, while we saw improvements with them over time, they worked well and felt smooth right from the start! Many of us testers did our best to find areas which were broken, but everything was very well fleshed out so we had a great impression right from the start. And this was the most seamless set up of a phone I’ve ever done, I just plugged my NP2 into it and loaded data from there and by time the data transfer was complete, everything had ported over right down to my homescreen layout. Very easy!
Features
While exploring the settings I was constantly comparing to Nothing’s main line of devices, and quite honestly I was pleasantly surprised to find the CMF Phone 1 was actually more feature packed than anything else! Part of that came from already being on NOS 2.6, but even now that other phones are rolling out with 2.6 the CMF Phone 1 still has some unique points going for it, including the highly requested battery charge limit, which limits battery charge to 70-90% depending on the setting chosen. This was a very welcome find, and comes with a notification to remind you it’ll stop charging at x% along with a button to have a one time charge up to 100% which was very useful for those long travel days.
Another welcome find was the microSD card slot, with support for up to 2 TB. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a phone with microSD support, and only now do I recall how much I miss it. Sure phone internal memories are large enough for a while these days, but listening to lossless music and taking many high quality photos and videos really does eat up storage, so being able to keep them in the microSD card lets me leave the internal storage fairly clutter free and lengthen the amount of time my memory will last without needing to purge it. And of course, it makes data transfer much easier too in future if I move on to another phone with a microSD slot, since I can just swap it into the next phone and have my music ready to go without taking hours to transfer it all.
The CMF Phone 1 also got early access to the hidden gesture bar, a revamped tips and tricks section and the option to go into popup view straight from a notification, showing that this device was at the forefront of the Team’s mind when they were designing these features.
The only drawback I found was the lack of NFC and glyphs. I’ve come to use the glyphs regularly on P2, and suddenly they weren’t there. And the lack of NFC meant I couldn’t use Google Pay which is my primary way to pay most places, so I did still have to take around a second device to use as my wallet which was a bit annoying.
Camera
One thing this has over the NP2 camera is the option to use ‘vivid’ or ‘natural’ colours when taking photos. Natural colours are similar in palette to NP2, whereas vivid just makes them pop more. Not too much, but the colours are definitely more striking. That does come with the loss of Macro mode though, so no super close up flower shots which would have been great in combination with the vivid colour setting. The only major complaint I have here is when using the camera in low light; the detail was just not there, instead replaced by a lot of noise so no pictures of the night sky. But otherwise it is a pretty solid camera, and with expert mode still present I’m sure people can do wonders with the camera.
Battery
With a 5000 mAh battery, I didn’t often find myself running short of juice as the battery is big enough to last me all day, even when limiting the charging to 80%. This included hours of listening to audio books, navigation and wireless android auto, messaging, and a bit of gaming because why not. When I had particularly long days I was running low, but it was pretty comparable with P2a which is a device I’m still impressed with the battery life on. The 33 W charging was very useful in these situations, as it didn’t take long to get back up to full, and even just charging for half an hour got me enough to see me through the rest of the day.
Final thoughts
If I had to give me main take home feeling about this phone, it’s quite easy. It feels built to last. From the battery and storage health features, to the microSD slot, replaceable battery and modular exterior. It feels smooth, and aside from the lack of NFC I could very happily use this as my daily driver for a long time to come. And I’m not sure I can say this about any other phone on the market right now, but I feel like this is the phone to go caseless with worry-free, without being concerned over a fragile glass back cover or irreplaceable parts.
