Nothing Phone (1) tested for durability
Nothing designed its first-ever smartphone to look different and that’s visible right from the packaging, which “opens like a pack of bubblegum” and features a transparent SIM ejector. The phone itself is unique enough to attract you immediately. Zack took his own sweet time to check out its aesthetics and those 900 LED lights at the back. But we are here to see him put the Nothing Phone (1) through his torturous durability test, so we’ll jump directly into that. The torture begins with the scratch test on the display, which comes with a pre-applied plastic protective film. As expected, the screen starts scratching at a Level 6 hardness on Moh’s scale. That’s the usual score for smartphones with a glass display. The Nothing Phone (1) comes with Gorilla Glass 5 both at the front and the back. The display is an OLED panel, which is evident from Zack’s lighter test. The pixels go completely white when exposed to direct fire from a lighter, but they mostly recover. The Nothing Phone (1) gets a metallic (aluminum) frame all around, including the physical buttons and the SIM tray. The latter has a rubber ring around the opening to keep water out. But as Zack notes, the handset is only rated IP53. So you’d want to keep it away from water.
A metallic frame that almost gives in
Finally, we reach the pinnacle of Zack’s durability test — the bend test. The Nothing Phone (1) holds strong when bent from the back. But bending from the front, we hear some “weird sound” that suggests the internals are moving. There’s also a visible deformation along the antenna line. But nothing catastrophic as it remains in one piece. As Zack concludes, the Nothing Phone (1) “narrowly escapes” destruction. “This has probably been the closest a phone has been to breaking without actually breaking,” he adds. Nothing needs to work on to strengthen the antenna line of its future phones. You can watch the full durability test below.
