Until a week ago, I was a skeptic of the Nothing Phone (1) .The relentless hype campaign orchestrated by Nothing to raise expectations around its first phone completely slipped me, and in fact I feared a tremendous slap in the face when the device finally landed in my hands.I was wrong.In fact, I feel a bit like Anton Ego, Ratatouille's unrelenting and dour food critic, suddenly catapulted back to his own childhood by tasting the recipe for the Pixar film's title.Taking the Nothing Phone (1) out of the box and examining it for the first time has evoked a feeling I haven't felt in years and have only experienced with a handful of phones in my life.Those phones are: the iPhone 4, the Nokia Lumia 800, the HTC Magic, and the Blackberry Z10.All those devices had things in common.All of them were (and are) gorgeous from a design point of view.All of them were groundbreaking in one way or another, and all of them felt like the start of something new and promising.They were mobiles with which you were excited.Deals for only 24 hours If you need to make a big furniture or home purchase, this is your chance.Some managed to deliver on that promise and their technologies blossomed into the behemoths they are now (Apple and Android).Others... Well!... Even today I keep them in a drawer and fondly remember how much I liked them at the time.Will Nothing be the unicorn of telephony that many believe it to be or will the Phone (1) end up in the same drawer of my desk where the Lumia 800 and the BB Z10 now share?That depends entirely on the decisions that the company makes.For now, I'll settle for trying to explain why I liked it so much, which is no easy task.Let's start with the design.Nothing's first phone is a solid and affordable beauty that can make a lot of noise in the Android market.Nothing's first phone is a solid and affordable beauty that can make a lot of noise in the Android market.The Nothing Phone (1) has that intangible quality that makes you hold a phone for the first time and exclaim “wow!”short.And it's not that it's groundbreaking from an aesthetic point of view.Being reductionist (and a little bastard), the company's first terminal is basically a "transparent" iPhone 13.I put transparent in quotes because the Gorilla Glass on the back does not reveal all the insides of the mobile phone naturally, but only those that are nice to see, and even those have been made up with a uniform color (white or black depending on the model).Although it is a slightly tricky transparency, it still has a lot of merit and is extremely successful.Of course, it is much more elegant than that of other transparent mobiles such as the Redmagic, which insist on putting the specifications of the phone and the Snapdragon logo on the components in sight, as if it were a Formula 1 with a methacrylate body.In fact, elegance and simplicity are the keywords here.From the screen with completely symmetrical frames to the aluminum chassis or the minimalist camera module, it is clear that everything in the visual aspect of the Nothing Phone (1) has been given a lot of thought.In a market where 99% of Android phones are clones of four basic models, the Nothing Phone (1) is a welcome breath of fresh air.But it's not just the look of the phone that gives us that first crush.It is the construction.The joints, the touch of the buttons or the texture of the finishes are of a quality of 10 that I only usually see in Apple and in a handful of very solid Android manufacturers in this aspect such as Huawei or Sony.Turned off and with a sticker with the apple logo on the back, the Phone (1) could perfectly pass for a very eccentric edition of the omnipresent Cupertino mobile.Apple has a lot of embarrassing stuff, but assembly precision is something it can generally brag about.This quality is doubly paradoxical in the Phone (1) because we are talking about a mid-range from a completely new manufacturer.The Phone (1) is not intended to be a top of the range with the latest of the latest, but an affordable phone, but very well done.Physically, I think he has more than achieved that goal.Those good vibrations of design and construction are maintained when turning on the mobile and starting to use it.Like Windows Phone Lumias or the iPhone of its day, the Phone (1) feels snappier and faster than most of the competition in its price range.The processor is powerful, but it is not particularly cutting-edge (it was presented in 2021), so I can only think that the reason for this agility is in the own version of Android that Nothing has cooked for its phones.Nothing OS 1.0.0 is basically Android 12 with a very neat and customizable visual interface.The Phone (1) does not have any Bloatware except for the existence of a gallery compatible with NFT files.I have no idea why Nothing has decided to integrate into its operating system a viewer for Pump and Dump scams based on drawings that were already ugly 20 years ago on DeviantArt.Other than that, Nothing OS 1.0.0 looks like a more stripped-down, prettier version of Android than OnePlus' Oxygen OS, but one that also seems to make better use of available hardware.Speaking of hardware and as you may have already seen in the specifications at the beginning of this article, the Phone's processor (1) is a Snapdragon 778G+ modified to accept wireless and reverse charging.It is not exactly the last of the last in power.Its performance in synthetic tests is well below that of other high-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processors. However, I have had no problem playing greedy games like Call of Duty Mobile, Asphalt 9 Legends, or Genshin Impact without noticing lag graphic or just heating.Of course, if what you are looking for is a mobile specifically dedicated to games to maximize graphic quality, this is not the droid you were looking for (nor does it want to be).Again, I would say that when it comes to performance, component integration is key.The model that I have tested, by the way, is the one with 8GB of memory and 256GB of ROM (UFS 3.1).The 12GB version should run even smoother thanks to that extra 4GB.It is impossible to close the usability chapter without touching on one of the functions that most attracts the attention of the Nothing Phone (1), and which paradoxically is the least usable of all: the glyph interface.The back of the Phone (1) hides a whopping 900 microLEDs that run through the guts of the phone in a series of whimsical strokes.The user is supposed to be able to configure those light lines with different patterns to serve as a subtle notification system.The problem is that right now you can't do much more than assign different preset patterns to specific contacts as if they were visual doorbells.You can't, for example, define patterns for notifications coming from a certain app like Slack, Telegram or Discord.In fact, and to be ideal, the interface should allow the user to draw their own patterns and associate them with specific channels or chats within an application.In this way (I'm talking about my specific case) I could make that huge path with a vague G shape light up when I receive work notifications in Gizmodo, that Instagram notifications light up the path that surrounds the cameras, or that Whatsapp only light up the little dot below.I need a lot more options, and the current version of the glyph interface doesn't have them right now.Without those options, the glyph system remains a very unusable curiosity.By the way, a demonstration button is also missing that allows all the lights to be turned on at the same time in a fairground plan.I know.It's not an elegant choice, but it's crucial from a brand word-of-mouth standpoint.When someone who knows your phone sees it for the first time, the first thing they want is for you to show them the little lights, and right now there's no way to show them all at once without diving into settings while muttering excuses and explanations.The good news is that all these shortcomings can be perfectly fixed with a software update.The Phone's screen (1) has an extremely warm color temperature, especially compared to the bluish light of AMOLEDs.Accustomed as I am to Samsung screens, it surprises a bit, but you soon get used to it and, in fact, its colors are more natural and comfortable to look at.Nothing ensures that the Phone (1) has a brightness of 500 Nits with peaks of up to 1200 in situations with a lot of ambient light.In the tests we have done with a calibrator, the brightness reaches 495 Nits.There is no problem in looking at the screen in bright sunlight as long as you do not combine dark mode with small print or pretend to play a gothic horror game on the beach in the middle of August.The screen runs at 60 or 120Hz depending on the content and has 240Hz touch support for games.I haven't found a menu that allows me to choose the frequency manually, but I don't need it.Normally, my fingers don't get along with the fingerprint sensors.The Nothing Phone (1) is a notable exception.Not only does it recognize me the first time every time, but it does so quickly.A discreet ring of white light marks the place where we have to put our finger.Facial recognition is not as agile, but it has a function to recognize us with a mask.Of course, I miss a second front camera that allows the user to be recognized in the dark.Sound-wise, the Phone (1) has two dual stereo speakers.The one above is hidden at the edge of the screen.while the bottom one rests under the classic grille.They don't sound bad, but they don't sound good either.They reverberate a lot if you crank them all the way up and lack a lot of punch in the low end, but this is something I consider to be a pretty minor bug on mobile because there just isn't room for much else.On the positive side, the three-dimensionality of the sound is very good, and the speakers behave better separating music, sounds and voices in movies, series or video games, than in music playback.The battery of the Phone (1) is a 4,500mAh with fast charge of 33W and wireless of 15. The charging times specified by OnePlus are 70 minutes with cable or 150 minutes in wireless.It's not bad, but there are many mid-ranges that already far exceed these specifications.The Phone (1) lasts all day without messing up its hair (a day and a half actually), which leaves it in the middle of what is considered normal.The Phone (1) has only two cameras.Nothing justifies this with a certain slyness by saying that the vast majority of mid-range phones that have a third camera do so just to say they have one and that a 4MP macro camera is basically useless for practical purposes.I could not agree more.In fact, the macro mode that the Nothing Phone (1) simulates using the wide angle puts in evidence all the phones with a supposed macro camera that I have tested in the last year (many of them from OnePlus).The Phone (1) has the following cameras:It doesn't look like much on paper, but the results are excellent to the point that they remind me a lot of the photos the Pixels take in terms of color matching and warmth.The good news is that, in good lighting conditions, the Phone (1) takes very satisfying photos.The best news is that this quality is maintained and even improves in night photos.Here are some examples.In addition to the color and the wonderful warmth of the photos, another thing that has caught my attention about the Phone's cameras (1) is the autofocus.It works much better than that of the latest OnePlus and differentiates several planes automatically and without us having to press our finger on one area or another of the photo.The purpose of this system is to blur the parts in the background to give the photos a closer look to what they would have been taken with a traditional camera.The only problem is that sometimes it gets messed up trying to give the photos that SLR bokeh and it blurs areas that it shouldn't.Anyway, it is something that has happened to me only in two photos out of almost 100, and surely the bug can be fixed by updating.The blur in portrait mode is very good too.With the wide angle one thing happens, and that is that the Samsung JN1 sensor is not as good as the Sony that carries the main camera.As a result, the colors taken with the Wide Angle are somewhat more washed out.The difference is small and can probably be corrected by tweaking the algorithms, but it's there.It is true what Nothing says that the third macro camera of other mobiles is usually a toast to the sun, but it is also true that the macro of the Phone (1) is not as powerful as that of other mobiles.It only allows you to get up to about 4cm from the target.Of course, the color management of macro photos is fantastic and it does not get confused when focusing.The digital zoom of the Phone (1) is reasonable at 2X and we can even force it to 5X if the light is good, but from there it's more of a paste than a gotelé professional.The 20X limit is more for prying away than for usable photos.Nothing, as I said, that could not be seen coming from afar.In this sense, and despite Nothing's vocation for functional minimalism, I think that a third telephoto camera would be very useful for the Phone (1).Maybe they'll release it in a pro version, like on the iPhone.Both in portraits with the main camera and in selfies, the Phone's portrait modes (1) behave nobly and add those warm tones of the Pixel that I personally love as icing on the cake.The ability to take nighttime selfies is another rarely seen thing that elevates this category to remarkable.The night mode of the Phone (1) is very reminiscent of the Pixel in the sense that the post-processing really extracts a lot of light information from each photo, and it also does so with very natural colors.The result is colorful and well-focused night photos even in very poor light conditions.An interesting detail is that the zoom, not depending on a third camera, completely respects the color of the image taken at its original size.The Phone (1) also has night mode in portraits with the front camera, and it's one of the best I've seen lately (night selfies are usually a pending issue in most mid-range models).As for the night wide angle, it is also more than decent, although its colors are duller than those of the photos taken with the main camera.At the video level, the OnePlus cameras record at a maximum of 4K and 30FPS.60FPS can only be reached in 1080P.Slow motion is especially good too.The camera app is "inspired" by Google in the sense that its menus are minimalist and it doesn't have weird functions that end up being half-hearted like the infamous family photography modes.To conclude the photographic section, suffice it to say that the fact that it only has two cameras is not a problem at all.The Phone (1) doesn't take perfect photos (none of them do) but taking photos with it is fun, easy and very satisfying, day or night.Especially at night, I'd say.The Phone (1) is not the best Android mobile on the market in terms of specifications, but if you are looking for a good phone for around 500 euros I highly recommend it.The lights here are the least of it.The interesting thing is that it is a powerful, balanced, well-built and very, very beautiful mid-range.It is comfortable to use, its version of Android 12 is colorful and intuitive, the battery is correct and its cameras take very good photos.You can't ask for much more, and yet Nothing has found that plus that others lack: personality.At this point, I think it's fair to give the Nothing Phone (1) full marks.Not because it's perfect in every single detail (it has minor software glitches here and there), but because, for a debut film, it's extraordinarily good and usable.I think that we do not need to talk here about premium operas that were a real disaster like the first iPhone without going any further.As I said above, the Nothing Phone (1) has reminded me of the good old days of mobile phones, when original, daring, and well-made things were still being launched.In many respects – craftsmanship, simplicity, design, and a certain haughty disdain for technical specifications in favor of integrating tried-and-tested components – the Nothing Phone (1) is a lot like the iPhone.It also looks a lot like the Pixels, with the difference that the hardware here is well integrated and works well.I don't know a single Google Pixel mobile (I've tried all of them except 6) whose hardware doesn't fail like a fairground shotgun at something.I wish they would go back to the Nexus philosophy.The Phone (1) has what it takes to become the new unit of measurement of the Android mid-range, a canon that the Pixel should occupy, but it does not because it is a potato.In a way, it is the iPhone that the Android market lacked.Now it's time to see what reception it will have, and if Nothing will know how to maintain that personality in its future terminals.To be the first they do, the Phone (1) is darn good and balanced.Now Nothing just needs to launch a Phone (1) Pro with a better processor, faster charging and a third zoom camera and the rest of the manufacturers would do well to start worrying about these newcomers.