My review unit with a healthy 12GB of RAM handles daily tasks without a problem - the phone feels very responsive, and apps load quickly.
Don’t expect to be able to import a device and toss your SIM card in it - Sascha Segan at PC Mag tried it out on a couple of US networks and didn’t have much luck. The Phone 1 uses a midrange Snapdragon 778 chipset with 5G connectivity. The under-display fingerprint sensor is reliable and quick it rarely misread my fingerprint, even with wet hands or in direct sun. It offers 1,200 nits of peak brightness, which keeps it usable even in direct sunlight. The Phone 1 screen sticks to that top refresh rate most of the time, too, making for a very smooth scrolling experience. The Galaxy A53 5G matches its 120Hz refresh rate, but the OnePlus Nord 2 manages just 90Hz, and the Pixel 6A will include a standard 60Hz screen.
On the more conventional side, Phone 1 includes a 6.55-inch 1080p OLED with an adaptive refresh rate up to 120Hz, which are great specs in the mid-tier class where high refresh rates aren’t too common. It’s a perfectly average-looking phone from this angle. Once the battery is sufficiently charged, you need to turn them back on manually in the glyph settings menu. They’re also disabled automatically when the battery is low. If you’re going to be outside in direct sunlight, you might want to keep the brightness cranked up otherwise, they’re very hard to see - unfortunately, the brightness doesn’t adjust automatically to reflect ambient conditions. You can adjust the brightness, and I turned them down to about 30 percent. The glyph lights are also very bright at their default setting. And there’s an unadvertised bonus feature: if you want a young child to look at the camera, they will definitely do the trick. It’s a nice option and a bit less intense than using the flash, though with a cooler tone. You can also use the glyph lights as a fill light for the camera. It’s neat but a little more distracting than just tapping the screen to check the charge level. When the battery is charging, the little exclamation mark on the bottom of the back panel illuminates periodically.
There are a couple of other uses for the lights outside of notifications. Was that “squiggle” or “beak”? Is the big blinking “C” an email or an Instagram DM? The system worked best for me when I set specific glyphs for one or two important apps rather than a bunch of different glyphs for different apps. Glyphs also require some memorization to recognize the difference between certain light patterns. Probably because there’s another part of the phone that lights up and tells me what kind of notification I’m getting: the screen. I’m sure that’s a habit I’d be able to change without much trouble if I gave it some time, but it hasn’t happened in the couple of weeks that I’ve been using the phone. Personally, I didn’t exactly find it transformative.įor starters, I’m in the habit of putting my phone down with the screen facing up when I’m not using it, so I didn’t see the glyph flashing most of the time. With some time and a little fine-tuning, this is a feature that some people might find genuinely useful, especially if you want to triage notifications without details flashing across the screen. In theory, it’s a less obtrusive way to have your phone tell you whether a notification is worth interrupting whatever you’re doing - a modern revival of the good-old-fashioned multicolor notification LED (remember those?). You can set a glyph for any app notification that lets you assign a custom notification sound - one glyph for work emails and a different one for personal emails, for example, or separate glyphs for Instagram likes and comments. To do this, you need to head to that app’s notification settings, where you can reassign the notification sound to the glyph of your choice - this changes the alert sound, but it also means you’ll see the corresponding glyph even when the phone is silenced. You can also assign different glyphs to different app notifications - even different kinds of notifications from the same app, depending on the app. You can preview the glyph pattern and corresponding sound in the settings menu.