Nothing's CMF Phone 1: Budget Ecosystem and Innovation

The Nothing CMF phone 1 offers a budget phone with an entire accessory ecosystem and customizable design, high-quality display, impressive battery life, and decent camera performance.

### Nothing CMF Phone 1: The Most Instantly Recommendable $250 Phone
* 📱  The Nothing CMF Phone 1 is a **$250 budget phone** that comes with an entire ecosystem of accessories, including **multiple cases, a card wallet, the Buds Pro 2, and the Watch Pro 2**.
* 🔩  The standout feature of the phone is its **unique design** that allows users to easily swap back plates using a screwdriver-like tool, creating a **customizable and functional ecosystem** around the "circle spinny thing."
* 🎨  The phone features a **120Hz adaptive AMOLED display**, a **5,000mAh battery**, and runs on **Nothing OS 2.6** based on **Android 14**.
* 🧠  Despite being powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 chipset, the phone offers **decent performance for day-to-day tasks and gaming**, with some compromises in **more demanding scenarios**.
* 📸  The phone's camera system consists of a main camera and an assist camera, delivering **detailed photos and decent 4K video quality**, but lacking in **color science, portrait mode for faces, zooming capabilities, and an ultra-wide camera**.
* 💬 " The Nothing CMF Phone 1 is one of the best-designed phones at its price point, with a **complete steal in terms of overall value**.

this is the new Nothing CMF phone one and I don't say this very often, but I think this is a genius product. CMF is a new budget sub-brand of the company Nothing, so we're talking a phone that costs £200 or $250, and it's actually a little bit crazy what these guys have just pulled off for that price. I mean, the first thing you notice is this doesn't feel like just a single product launch. This is an entire ecosystem, and it's a really fascinating one. So let's get the phone out. First, there's a lanyard, which is not something you tend to see launch with. The one case, two cases, no, three cases, a card wallet (I guess that's for the back of the phone), there's a stand, the Buds Pro 2, and then the Watch Pro 2. And it all feels very new because we've seen plenty of budget phones before, but what you don't often get is a budget accessory ecosystem like this, all designed to work specifically around that budget phone.

the centerpiece everything has well on one hand a slightly cheap thin plasticky feel to it. But then on the other hand, it's all really tastefully designed. It kind of feels like all of these products have had high-end thought and care put into them, even if the physical materials in the finish are more basic. So like these are the cmf buds 2 Pro. And even though they're very light and clearly not a luxury item, they still feel sophisticated and intentional in their design. Not like a cheap version of something that the company would rather you buy. And then the watch Pro two. Mhm, yeah, it's slick, clean. You never want a watch to go too crazy on design 'cause then it won't match your outfits. So this feels like a pretty appropriate level to me. Right, let's get into this phone. It's a thin package, so we all know what that means. Okay, so the device is on top, and below that is a generic white USB-C Toc cable, which you should be able to use to

transfer everything from your old phone and then an orange Sim ejector right heel. [Music] time and right off the bat, it's pretty clear that this is not your normal phone and it's not just that it looks different 'cause you know these cases that I showed you these are actually back plates so if you look inside the packaging they came in you'll see a bunch of other stuff like this tool which is both a Sim ejector and a screwdriver that allows you to take off these four screws on the back of your phone after which you unwind this circular piece and your plate pops off and this is a pretty big deal for a number of reasons one that repairing this phone is going to be a lot easier and I hope cheaper than almost any other phone but that part's not confirmed two that you don't need a case anymore you can actually use your phone naked guilt-free knowing that if you ever do do something stupid you can just swap the back plate out for I it's not even that

much money £29 is what they're charging for these kits, including the tools. The third thing is, it means you can mix and match. So, I really like this orange back. It swaps out the slightly cheap feeling, very scratchable plastic for a more grippy, less scratchable vegan leather type finish. And it's bright orange, so let's put it on. But then I'm looking at the orange SIM tray, the orange circle screw thing, and the silver screws that come with it. I'm thinking silver screws are pretty nice, but for the other parts, I think I prefer the black ones. So, I have just created my own two-tone finish on my phone, and that's actually sick. But the best part of this is that nothing has actually gone one step further to actually create an ecosystem around these weird screws. And I don't even know what to call this. From now on, this is the Circle spinny thing. So, if I want a phone stand, for example, unscrew your Circle spinny thing and screw the stand in. And yeah, the stand itself isn't

anything particularly special. It's not breaking new grounds in Material Science, but if you decided that you want a phone stand, then what better way to have a phone stand that doesn't need you to apply a sticky pad onto your case, but instead physically screws into your device itself. It feels way more secure and also way more intentional, like your stand was designed specifically for your phone. You want a lanyard, say, thing, and I feel very confident that it's going to support the phone because it's bolted to it. Or like there's no MagSafe wireless charging baked into this phone, right? You can't just slap one of those Apple wallets onto the back of this and expect it to hold, but screw this CMF wallet enclosure in like this, that's very secure, and now you have your magnet to be able to attach your wallet on top of, and this thing can hold like three cards. This whole thing reminds me very much of a mentality that I discovered in India. It's called jugaad. It means uh, Frugal Innovation inventive ways to use what

you have to achieve things that would normally require more resources, because just by properly thinking this through before building it, this company has genuinely achieved a really high level of functionality without making it cost them anymore to build this thing. You're actually getting something here that you can't get just by paying through the nose for a higher-end device. Like, nothing has managed to make something that gives their $250 phone a tangible leg up over my $1200 $1 phone, and that is absolutely amazing. My mind is kind of working at the possibilities. Like, I'm just thinking, as an example, what if you use this screw and this screw to add a permanent lens attachment to your cameras, you know, instead of those ones that you have to clip on and anything more than a light breeze will remove for you. Now, I would personally be a little bit worried about things getting inside. They have managed to get an IPX2 rating, which is basically very minor water protection and nothing for dust. And I think it's somewhat telling that that's

the max rating they could get because yeah anything designed to be taken apart this easily is obviously not particularly well sealed. And also as cool as the circle spinny thing is, I do find it a little bit uncomfortable just because it sticks out. But let me be very clear, all in all, for the price, this is one of the best-designed phones I've ever seen, which I'm only half surprised by because the entire name of this sub-brand CMF very literally stands for colors, materials, and finish. It's actually the rest of the phone that surprised me more. So let's talk about it. If you're winning with design at $250, then where are you losing? Well, it's not the screen. This is a 120Hz adaptive AMOLED full HD Plus display. It's very smooth, it's sharp, it's punchy. This thing can display HDR 10 plus content, which is a luxury that you could only get by paying over $11,000 like literally 2 years ago. They've pre-installed a screen.

protector, which I always rate. And this right here is an in-display optical fingerprint scanner, which is well, it's fine. It works, even the brightness, which is one of the first things to go, is actually pretty good. The company's advertising a 2,000 nit peak brightness, but you'd only achieve that in very, very specific situations. More typically, this thing can go up to a max of 700 nits in normal brightness, and then 1,000 nits in ultra-bright outdoor environments, which means that in the absolute worst worst-case scenarios, you might have to squint a little bit, but you'll pretty much never struggle to see it. The only thing I would complain about, and I am being quite nitpicky here, but the bottom bezel is slightly thicker than the other bezels. And this is particularly interesting because I remember having a conversation with Carl Pei, the CEO, when he launched the Nothing phone 2. He was basically explaining how much extra effort, cost, and engineering is required to just push this bottom lip down a tiny

little bit to even it all out, and he made the decision to still do that on those more expensive nothing phones. But now we're looking at a phone, which is basically half of that cost. I guess he's decided to let some of those design ideologies slip a little bit. Fair compromise though. I still can't think of a better screen than this for $250, so surely you compromise on battery then. No, the phone has a 5,000 Mah cell. The chip is actually based on the very efficient 4 anim process. The software skin is very light, no thanks to the thousands of apps I've installed on top of it. And I also noticed they set the phone to dark mode by default with all black icons, which is good because this AMOLED display will turn off anywhere it's displaying black pixels to the point where there is no doubt in my mind that I will be gracefully carried through the day by this thing. Like if I just pull up my battery settings now, it's saying I've had 4 hours of screen

on time, and I'm still on 60% battery, so I'm currently on track for this thing lasting 10 hours of screen-on time on this charge. Which am I ever going to need more than that? Only weird thing is, even though the phone is stupidly easy to take apart, you still can't actually swap the battery out yourself if you decided that your existing one is getting old, which feels like a missed opportunity to me. And the charging situation is okay. There's no wireless charging, and the wire charging is up to a pretty mediocre 33 Watts, but since you don't get the charging brick to achieve that wattage, I imagine most people will be operating under that. But the important thing is the battery life, and the battery life they have nailed. And you're not compromising with the software either. This phone runs nothing OS 2.6 based on Android 14, and I love this software skin. It's light. It doesn't interfere too much with what stock Android already does well, but where it does, it's little thoughtful things to

either make your phone more aesthetic, or make it less distracting. There's an AI generator tool for wallpapers, which is quite limited in options. It would be nice if you could at least specify the color you wanted, but equally, it does churn out reliably good results. They never seem to look too AI-generated, if you know what I mean. And you're getting that with 2 years of major Android updates and 3 years of security updates, which is no doubt a big part of where money is saved compared to the more expensive nothing phone 2, for example. It's not a bad level of support; it's pretty standard at this tier. It's just, it's nothing spectacular. But it's the chip inside this phone that, for me, was the biggest wild card. I had no idea what to expect. The phone's got 6 GB of RAM on the base model and 128 gigs of storage. Interestingly, expandable storage with up to a 2 TB SD card. And it's paired with a Mediatek chipset, the Dimensity 7300. And the reason that I

didn't know what to expect. Is well, at least on paper, the Dimensity 7300 is actually less powerful than the 7200. Which someone please explain the math to me. But anyway, this is what that looks like in practice. So this is the latest game from Hooy, the company who made Genshin Impact. And providing I'm on game mode, which you can access by just swiping in from the left, I can play it at a pretty acceptable frame rate, hovering at mostly high settings. But even though there is a liquid cooling system on the inside, I have noticed the performance declining with prolonged gaming. So if I don't want it to get laggier, then I'll get a more stable experience if I go down to medium settings. So if you factor in that this is as demanding as mobile games get, then there isn't anything that you won't be able to play. But you will have to make noticeable compromises to how some games look. And on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't feel slow, but it also doesn't

feel particularly fast. The phone is mostly smooth, with the occasional jitter every now and again. But the thing that I notice more is every time you click something or open an app or try to load something, it takes just a little bit at a time. It's not like you're waiting around, but there's just a fraction of thinking time with each action. Would I have expected anything different for a phone at this price? No, not really. It's actually just that most of the phone is so good that it makes you forget how much it costs. And I'm actually in my mind benchmarking it against much more expensive devices. Audio is probably the most obvious downgrade I noticed. It's just a very simple mono speaker at the bottom. You don't get any kind of stereo effect using the earpiece as a second speaker, and you lose a little bit of the sophistication of your music when listening through it. But I also wouldn't go as far as to say that it's a bad speaker, and it is actually rather loud. So then what this really came down to

for me was the cameras. If nothing managed to do all of what they've done and also smash it with the cameras, then this thing was going straight to the Hall of Fame. But equally, this is where I was expecting a big noticeable dip in the phone experience, so I slowly approached that camera button fully ready to lose a chunk of respect for this device. But do you know what, these mad lads have kind of done it. So, the phone has two cameras, but it's a little bit of a weird one because the top camera is actually just an assist camera. You can hold your finger over it and still perform basically every single function of your phone's camera. The only thing that you can't do without it is add the portrait mode effect to your shots. So, if I take this photo while covering the lens, it'll look like this. If I take the same photo after having removed my finger, it will look like this. What do those photos look like? Well, very nicely detailed. You have plenty of room to zoom in further, and they will still

look sharp. The wide aperture and decent sensor size gets you some nice foreground-background separation and mostly flawless high dynamic range. I say mostly just because it's absolutely spot-on for big scenes where there's an overexposed sky, but it often misses the small things like a bright light bulb in your shot that needs controlling. And you know what? The video has no right to look this decent. The phone shoots 4K footage at 30 frames per second, and it doesn't feel particularly noisy, which you might expect it to since this phone's chip doesn't have the best image signal processor. It doesn't feel massively unstable, which you might expect it to, given that this camera has no optical image stabilization. And the focusing isn't jittery, which you might expect it to, given that there's no laser autofocus or anything close to it. The hardware of these cameras is nothing special for the price, but it's the attention to fine-tuning what is there that's the reason that you can record footage like this. Now, for me, there are four things that I

felt have been a bit lacking. The color science is perfectly fine with most flowers and objects, but it's faces that it really struggles with. It's not abysmal, but side by side with a top-end phone, it becomes very clear how much of that super intelligent fine-tuning that you might have come to expect that you're missing out on. Portraits which feel pretty fine in isolation, but again, next to a top-end phone, it doesn't take a detective to see the subtle nuances being lost. The zooming experience is pretty bad. The fact that there's no dedicated zoom camera combined with the lack of AI intelligence to know what to do without it means that zooming in 10 times here really does feel like you just took a photo at one times and blew it up 10 times. It's not pretty. And then finally, there's no Ultra wide camera, and I can I can kind of see why because obviously not going to have a lot of spare budget to add in a good one, and so adding in a cheap one just for the sake

of it might make the overall camera feel worse, but it is still a lacking feature. The key thing to bear in mind, though, is to compare this camera to any phone in its own price range, and I would say it's at least as good. I just want to make it clear what you're not getting. So, the long and short of it is the CMF phone 1 is maybe the most instantly recommendable phone I have ever used. We've seen this formula before: company launches a new sub-brand, company wants to generate hype for that sub-brand, so company makes the first offering in that sub-brand particularly generous. Point being, it might not stay this way, but that doesn't change the fact. But for what this is right now at this price, it feels like a complete steal to me.

Why the Nothing CMF Phone 1 is a Game Changer.

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The Innovative Nothing CMF Phone and Ecosystem

Nothing's new budget phone, the CMF Phone One, offers a surprising array of accessories and a unique ecosystem for its price.

The phone and its accessories are designed with a high-end look and feel, despite being made of basic materials, providing a sophisticated and intentional design.

The packaging includes back plates and a tool that allows for easy removal and replacement, making phone repairs easier and allowing users to use the phone without a case.

Innovative Phone Kit with Customizable Features

A £29 kit offers tools and the option to mix and match parts for a personalized phone finish.

The kit includes a unique "Circle spinny thing" that allows for the attachment of accessories like a phone stand or a wallet enclosure, providing a secure and intentional design.

The product's frugal innovation reflects a mentality of achieving high functionality without high costs, offering a competitive advantage over more expensive devices.

The phone offers a high-quality 120Hz adaptive AMOLED display with a pre-installed screen protector and an in-display fingerprint scanner.

It provides a good brightness range, although the bottom bezel is slightly thicker than the other edges.

Despite its low cost, the phone features a 5,000 mAh battery and an efficient 4nm chip, with a light software skin and default dark mode, ensuring a long-lasting battery life.

Review of a New Phone: Battery, Software, and Performance

The phone offers a strong battery life of up to 10 hours of screen-on time and runs on Nothing OS 2.

6 based on Android 14, providing a light and non-intrusive software skin.

The device is equipped with a Mediatek Dimensity 7300 chipset and 6GB of RAM, offering acceptable gaming performance at high settings but with some decline during prolonged gaming, requiring compromises in graphics for more stable gameplay.

Review of a Budget Phone's Performance and Cameras

The phone offers smooth performance for its price, with occasional delays in loading.

Despite the simple mono speaker, the audio is loud but lacks sophistication.

Surprisingly, the camera performance is impressive, with detailed photos, good dynamic range, and decent 4K video quality, despite the lack of high-end hardware features like image stabilization and autofocus.

The camera performs well with flowers and objects, but struggles with capturing faces and lacks fine-tuning.

The zooming experience is poor due to the lack of a dedicated zoom camera, and the absence of an Ultra wide camera is a notable drawback.

However, considering its price range, the CMF phone 1's camera is still recommendable and seen as a great deal currently.