CMF Phone 1 review: Look beyond the screws – Crypto News

Apart from the design, CMF Phone 1 also looks like a very promising device on paper and has the potential significantly disrupt the sub- ₹20,000 price segment. I thoroughly tested out the Phone 1for over 10 days and here’s my take on how the first phone from Nothing’s sub-brand performed in terms of day-to-day usage.

Unboxing and design:

Inside the box of CMF Phone 1, you get the device itself, some paperwork, a USB type C to type C cable, and an orange coloured SIM ejector tool. For those who aren’t aware, CMF/ Nothing does not provide a charger with its devices and a supported 33W fast charger can be bought separately from Flipkart by paying ₹1,299.

Let’s start with the star of the show, design. The phone is available in four colourways: Black, Light Green, Blue and Orange, the latter come with vegan leather back. I received the Black colour variant of the Phone 1 which isn’t a head turner and honestly feels a little cheap but that’s kind of expected for the price range I guess.

There is a pill shaped camera cutout to the back followed by a light coloured CMF branding down, four screws and a knob. The best part of CMF Phone 1 is the options it offers, four screws can be opened in order to change the back case to a colour of your liking while the knob can be opened to attach accessories like card holder, lanyard cable and a phone stand.

While users have to rely on Nothing to get the accessories and the back cases, I am desperately hoping that there will 3rd party accessories in the future as well which will enhance the user experience by a lot. For now though, the interchangeable back cases can be bought for a price of ₹1,199 on Flipkart and CMF’s website.

Design innovations aside, there were two major issues with CMF Phone 1’s design that are a deal breaker for me. One, the back of Phone 1 has got these sharp edges which make the device uncomfortable to hold for long durations and second I noticed the camera lens on the phone has already started developing a few scratches which suggests that CMF may have cut a few corners with the lens material.

Connectivity wise, the Phone 1 supports 10 5G bands, Dual 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, GPS, USB Type-C and an IP52 rating for splash and dust resistance.

Display and software:

Another big positive for the Phone 1 is its display and software experience. Nothing has managed to pack a 6.67 inch Full HD+ Super AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate, 2100 nits of peak brightness (700 nits in high brightnes mode) and support for HDR 10+.

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the display, it’s got great contrast, punchy blacks and vibrant colours. In fact, I would go on to say it is easily the best device in this segment for media consumption purposes if not for the fact there is only a single bottom firing speaker on this device which isn’t great and easily be blocked via your hands. Plus, there are big bezels surrounding all sides which will sure let you know that this is a budget device.

However, I had no problems with using the Phone 1 either indoors or in bright sunlight. I particularly liked the extra dim option, located in the control centre, that comes in handy for people like me who are often found doom scrolling on their phones at late night.

Despite being a CMF Phone, Nothing has made no compromises with the software and the Phone 1 gets the same treatment as its more pricier Nothing counterparts. CMF Phone 1 is perhaps the only phone under ₹20,000 to come with zero bloatware apps and ads. Plus, the software experience was smooth that I refused to believe that it was a ₹16,000 smartphone (more on this in the performance section).

The Phone 1 runs on Nothing OS 2.6 based on Android 14 and Nothing is promising 2 years of Android updates and 3 years of security patches with this device. There are few interesting features in Nothing OS, including the ability to AI generate wallpapers (not as cool as it sounds), a dedicated gaming mode, and some cool widgets like quick settings, recorder (even works for calls), screen time and weather.

Although for some reason, despite packing an AMOLED panel, the Phone 1 does not come with support for Always on Display (AOD). But there is still an option to customize lock screen widgets and shortcuts.

Performance and battery:

The Phone 1 runs on the newly launched MediaTek Dimensity 7300 chipset and there is a Mali-G615 MC2 GPU accompanying it for handling the graphics heavy tasks. Mind you, this is the same chipset that is powering the much higher priced Oppo Reno 12 Pro. So, kudos to Nothing for bringing a powerful chipset in the sub- ₹20,000 price segment.

Like I previously said, this phone punches above its weight when you look at the sheer user experience it offers. All the day to day tasks, scrolling the web, switching between multiple apps and even multi tasking felt unbelievably smooth.

Moving to gaming side of things, the Phone 1 can run Call of Duty Mobile at High graphics and max frame rate while BGMI supports up to ‘HDR’ graphics and ‘Ultra’ frame rate. The gaming experience was decent with no major lagging issues or frame drops and the phone also didn’t heat up much during slightly elongated gaming sessions. While the gaming experience was smooth for the most part, I wouldn’t still go so far as to recommend this phone to out and out gamers.

Benchmarks wise, the Phone 1 had an score of 6,51, 291 on Antutu, which while being much better than Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, still lags behind MediaTek’s own Dimensity 7200 chipset. On Geekbench 6, it scored 1,035 on single core tests and 2,895 on multi-core tests. Meanwhile, the Phone 1 had a best loop score of 851 on 3D Mark’s Wild Life Extreme Stress Test with a 99.8% stability rating.

There is a 5,000 mAh battery on Phone 1 which took me around 1.5-2 hours to charge via a third-party charger. However, the charging time may be lower when using a verified CMF adapter. The battery life is decent, certainly not the best out there but it should last you day for most normal users while power users may need to connect it to a charger at least once.

Camera:

Camera performance has been amongst one of the pain points for Nothing in the past and CMF Phone 1 is no different. The 50MP Sony IMX882 sensor actually takes decent shots during day time offering bringing out a lot of details, albeit missing the colour accuracy in some shots.

It’s during the night time shots though when things start to get really complicated. While the Phone 1 does take some eye-pleasing pictures, the output isn’t consistent and contrast the clear when you pair it with the pictures clicked from the OnePlus Nord CE 4 Lite.

While the Phone 1 undoubtedly captures more details, CE 4 Lite delivers a more consistent output and also gets the colours right on most occasions. I also noticed that there is a bit of software processing going on with the Phone 1 which tends to boost the colours in certain scenarios.

The 16MP selfie shooter is decent for the most part but I noticed a weird issue here which leads to the images coming with an orangish skin tone which makes the output unusable in many circumstances. Hopefully, Nothing can fix this issue with an upcoming software update.

As usual, there is no need to solely rely on my word for the CMF Phone 1’s camera performance. Head over to the Google Drive link here to see the raw footage from the Phone 1 along with comparison shots from the OnePlus Nord CE 4 Lite.

Verdict:

CMF Phone 1 is a good attempt at challenging what a budget phone should look like and

While the design of the Phone 1 is undoubtedly a talking point and Nothing should be praised for its efforts in trying to revolutionalize how a budget phone should look like, I feel there is a need to look beyond the mere asthetics here. CMF Phone 1 actually has a lot of things going for it including a vibrant AMOLED panel, a powerful processor (for its price point), clean and feature rich software experience, an in-display fingerprint scanner and a halfway decent rear camera.

The only reason I am not going out of my way to out and out recommend the Phone 1 as the smartphone to buy around the ₹15,000 mark is the inability of Nothing to get some of the basics right. For instance, the quality of the camera lens and lack of a stereo speaker setup are certainly deal breakers for me. Moreover, camera output remained inconsistent at best and actually needs a rework to remain competitive in this price range. 

So, who is this phone for? The Phone 1 is an absolute must buy for people who like to tinker around with the way their phone looks, want a good quality display, decent battery life, an in-display fingerprint scanner and bloatware free software experience around the ₹15,000 price range.

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Published: 23 Jul 2024, 05:20 AM IST