Nothing Phone (2) Impressions ft Nothing CEO!

This is also the new Nothing

phone

and this is Carl paying the guy who made it. This is a unique opportunity to learn not only what this

phone

is and the thinking behind every decision, but also to truly understand the secret way the world works. Building smartphones works so I'm going to make sure we get all that information and then a couple of curveball questions at the end so just to catch you up, Nada launched its first phone this time last year, it was a range average 399 lbs. with a really unique design, in fact I have one right here, it sold quite well for its sound, almost 800,000 units worldwide, worldwide, how does that compare to your expectations, that was our expectation? , yeah, okay, he ran the company before and now they're no fun either, so this is the package you get, it's very thin, it's very stylish, it's very different, you have to remove this tab on the side to get in, which I don't love, it destroys the packaging, but then Inside, the good thing is that you can tell that

nothing

has spent time creating the experience.

You get some manuals that almost look like apples. A Sim Eject Tool that is completely clear and the same goes for the USBC cable. I like this, it's really cool to see a bit of personality in the accessories too and then the phone comes in white, which is in this box, and gray instead of the black the last phone came in, which I think is A good decision. Lighter colors tend to hide fingerprints better. The first question I have in mind is a big change in terms of correct pricing. The first company launched at £399 in the UK.

This is five seven nine. I mean, in my opinion, when I see a series of phones, I feel that most companies have something like this. they decided what they are and they stick with it, while you're up 45 in price, what's that about the first year we built our previous device? It was a very different time for us as a company, our team was very small and looking for a flagship wouldn't really be realistic in terms of our capabilities, but we always knew that the second one would be a more premium experience. You were warming up with the fan one.

We are always warming up. There is a long roadmap ahead. It's actually a good segue into talking about the design itself, so you could say this is what put Fern Nada on the map properly and you've taken it a step further with this phone. Which way would you say is better? The glyph interface was quite limited. in the movie, but that wasn't because we didn't have a vision of where to take it, but we didn't really have the resources, yeah, to create those features, so I would say for the phone as well the glyph. The interface is much closer to that original Vision.

We wanted to allow people to focus more on where they are in their daily lives, the people they interact with rather than always being on the screen, which is actually very important to me personally. I've recently set up all sorts of mechanisms on my phone to avoid getting lost in apps because they're getting better at connecting them, but I still have one question on my mind because while it was cool that

nothing

for one could use its glyph interface. Being a flashlight and showing you the battery percentage while you charge it never seemed like more than just a party trick to me, so what makes this not a hack, the hardware part, isn't what necessarily makes it better, but It's the fusion of hardware and software and for Phone One users watching, you'll get many of these features as well.

I would say some of the main features for the glyph interface are what we've turned into this Cliff as a segmented glyph so that we not only have intermittent initial progress, we built support for some third-party apps, especially food delivery and ride-sharing. , so that when you request these Services you can see how close it is to you without checking your screen. I've already become the type of person who sticks my iPhone like this, but actually does it knowing that okay, my ubereats order is here. It's cool, we made something called essential lift notifications for the apps that are really important to you, but you can do this as an example. stay persistently I really like that I think this is a super interesting tool to help you organize your life.

I'm just imagining setting up my own phone nothing too. I'm choosing just a few contacts and notification types I would use. I consider it important enough to make this Flash and therefore I demand that I check my phone instead of giving every notification that power on my part also has a side note on the design the fact that the back glass now it curves all around it's an A plus move, it keeps it from feeling like an iPhone clone like the last one arguably did and legitimately makes it eight times more comfortable to hold, it's integrated this same design philosophy into the shape in which the phone works, as well as with the phone 2, just the one we're thinking of.

How apps have hijacked the entire smartphone experience. In 2008 the App Store was launched. It seemed like a lot of people were just concentrating on how to build really sticky apps. How do you maximize the amount of time spent on each? Yes. so you can sell more ads or sell more data and a lot of smart people in the world were working on that, in the meantime the mobile operating system itself allowed it because you know that big tech platforms also make money along with the developers of applications we want. To start making apps a bit weaker, we created this monochrome design language.

It's actually quite funny that this is a feature because on my own iPhone I set up a triple tap to do exactly that, yeah, and that's basically your home screen, so when you set When you turn on the phone, you can choose to set the home screen like default Android which is bright and colourful, or Nothing's own skin which focuses on being a little soft and not distracting. I'm a big fan of the Nothing Phone concept that it brings to you. Take back power over your apps and remove app tags, but until you've used them properly, it's very hard to say if that will make your phone less exciting or just make it harder to find your apps, so subscribe if you want to see my full content. check out where we all come in on all that stuff you can take all your android quick toggles and turn them into widgets so if you can do more in your OS on your home screen you won't have to use apps as much as you used to.

It's very telling just to have these widgets, but there's a next step and a next step in evolution to keep making things more and more efficient. I will say that initial

impressions

from using this software are solid, it feels really smooth, I mean, it's smooth, but on all phones. It's fluid nowadays, but it's fluid combined with all these little animation options that feel thoughtful, like how double-tapping the screen will lock the phone with an almost Looney Tunes-like animation that focuses on wherever you've pressed twice in terms of the screens. You've gone from a 6.55-inch, 700-nit maximum brightness screen to a 6.7-inch one with a snappy 1600 lens, that's right, it's a huge jump in brightness.

The main reason for this screen jump is that it is a much more iconic level. display for me the most interesting thing is ltpo which means we can dynamically change the refresh rate from one to 120 hertz with just one hertz increments from the front. Every phone feels like it's looked the same for the past five years. phones are getting boring, I mean that's one of the reasons we started this company on the hardware side, we're getting closer to a very mature state of the smartphone form factor, if we're really going to innovate , it has to happen in software services and perhaps alternative form factors, how would you say this screen ranks compared to other phones on the market?

I think that's a great improvement for the phone screen, it's still 1080p in terms of resolution, yeah I think that's fine. I still use all the phones where I get the option. It's still at 1080P and I'm above average in terms of how much I would care about those things, but I still can't tell the difference. I really like the fact that you stuck with these symmetrical bezels. It feels like a really small thing. like a slightly thicker bezel on the bottom and I can see why most companies say oh okay no one is going to notice, but it really bothers me when that's not the case, we had a lot of fierce debates internally, There were actually two sides if we did it.

If we went for symmetrical bezels we could have made the side bezels even thinner so technically it could have increased the screen to body ratio even more yes but you wanted symmetry yes all the right choices okay let's talk cameras , so the phone had two 50-megapixel cameras. It also has 250 megapixel cameras. Am I right in thinking that the main camera has been updated? That's correct, so on the hardware side we went for a slightly better sensor for the main camera, so this one had the Sony IMX 766 and this is the 890, that's correct, but I think most of the improvement is on the software side and on the tuning side, what Carl is saying is that because the phone 2 comes with a more powerful chip than the phone wanted, more in a minute, when you take a photo here, it can merge. stitch together several high quality raw images to get the final result, unlike what most phones do which is merge a bunch of compressed jpeg images to get the final result, so why did they choose not to download ? sensor in this route of the phone has many design consequences.

I mean, one of the reasons why a lot of phones are starting to look similar again with these round camera modules is because they want to hide the really big one-inch sensors, but I don't think it's worth it now, I'm not with this okay, personally, I didn't think big cameras look bad or have a design cost, if anything they make your phone look more capable and therefore cool, and I mean the way I am. Looking at it, even if there was a situation where camera quality came at the cost of design, I still think the priority should always be function over form, but that's the way nothing is positioned, they're kind of of design. -led brand, so you think camera hardware matters less and less, you're saying improvements are like 90 software and that's why I think it's kind of interesting to partner with legacy camera brands because they're all hardware companies or lenses or sensors. companies like Zeiss, yes, but they don't really have any knowledge to help you improve a tiny smartphone camera, so yes, you're pretty far from being like Hasselblad next door unless they've built a really strong AI team , yes that's fine. this fan uses the Snapdragon 8 plus gen 1.

It's a flagship chip, but it's from last year. How was that decision made? I think when we make product decisions it's always about the user benefiting from cost versus performance or not just performance but also things like heating and battery life, so we found that this is the optimal processor for us to use a phone at this price. Also, we don't want to be the first to use new platforms, we prefer to use something more stable and reliable. So the battery life went up, so it was 4,500 on just one, now it's 4,700 milliampere hours on both. What was the reason for that change?

We just wanted to offer a better user experience. The phone would last a day sometimes if your day was a bit longer you would also have battery anxiety towards the end with the phone we just wanted to eliminate that. In my case, I've had days where I haven't charged my phone for two days and I'm still like that. Well, more or less well, I'm alive after two days I'm still alive. I'm not a big user. Do you use the front or the back? Well this thing charges in about 55 minutes. The listing charge is from zero to one hundred, yes, the maximum four. uh the charge was 30 watts and this one could sell 45 right yeah how important is charging speed in a phone it's important but you don't have to go crazy your battery degrades faster if you use that kind of high amp charger but you feel like it's negligible until you get past about 80 Watts yeah probably 60. 60 is probably ideal so I guess the big question isn't funny at all either who is thisphone?

What type of user are you going to buy this for? I think first of all, uh forget about all the design forget about all the differentiation, we have to build a really solid phone because a phone is not a toy, there can be really serious situations where you need to contact someone like the police, for example, so it just has to work. I know the divide between IOS and Android is growing for consumers, so I think for people who are familiar with Android or curious to try Android, this is a really solid phone. Do you see it as a bridge for people who like Android? use, but they like the iPhone as a status design symbol, we see that about 10 of our users in that cohort like good design, they have not been able to find an Android brand with a design ethos that they can accept, how see this verse like an iPhone? and in many of your launch events you reference Apple a lot, perhaps even more than other Android companies.

I think the iPhone is a really solid phone. There is an almost obvious recommendation if your friend is not so technical. Is it because it is the majority? Because it is the best-selling phone. It's the majority. Everyone knows how to use it. There is no education. It's like, uh, what Windows was like back in the day. Is it accurate to say that nothing would want to be something? so for Android, I think we should take inspiration from the first Apple, like the apple of our childhood, yes, almost like magic, with many unique ideas that try to boost the user experience, trying to create products that are better and better, which one would you say?

What is the biggest challenge in building this phone today? If you want to build a smartphone, you probably need between $200 million and $300 million in working capital because if you think about the last 10 years, there have been a couple of teams that have tried it. to create smartphones and they have all failed. I mean, you don't have to do much digging to find examples of this, like Red, the camera company that tried to make their own smartphone, but failed catastrophically, and when they failed, they made their suppliers lose too. a lot of money, all the suppliers were very nice before they said okay, we will build your product and then, you know, just pay us 30 days after we deliver the products to you, today it's like you say you can sell phones, pay us two. months in advance, delivering products, so you need a lot of money because you have to pay them before the product is even sold.

Presumably, a lot of your job is actually convincing consumers that yes, this is a great phone, but also convincing vendors that "We're really going to like this, trust us, yes, it's going to." generate volumes and it was very difficult for the fun, we had to pay people about two months before receiving the product. Normally you pay two months after receiving the product, so in a We felt that our gap was four months, like a cash gap compared to the bigger ones and then we got really high prices, about 15 more than the others, and then we had a very small team in terms of engineering software to deliver a really stellar product.

You can see why there is very few successful participants so yeah exactly sometimes people email me like hey I want to make a phone can you help me it's like please no yeah don't do it okay so I wanted to end it with a quick lightning bolt. ready, yeah, okay, what's your most used app? Email that's so cute dark mode or light dark mode what was your first smartphone the first smartphone was the Motorola a780 for Android phone it was a G1 G1 T-Mobile G1 that's the first amazing Android phone oh Yes, yes, it I imported to Europe and I loved it.

What would you say is the average screen time in a day? Probably two and a half hours if you were to use a Samsung or a Xiaomi. Which one would you choose Samsung? Excellent hardware. Excellent. software and not investing in logos, I see that YouTubers have started doing this thing where when they start having problems with someone, they get in a boxing ring and have a boxing match. If this situation ever arose for tech CEOs, would you do it? I've seen that Mark Zuckerberg has gotten very fit so probably not him um and they would subscribe to the channel hmm wait you couldn't say anything a subscription to the channel would mean everything beautiful to me.

I love it.