My Pixel 6 is ancient in phone terms despite being only 4 years old, mobile phones aren't made to last, even high end ones with thousand dollar price tags are designed to be practically disposable and start to show their age after a year or two. No one seems to have made a phone that can survive being dropped on concrete. So we have to choose between putting our phone in a case that will cause it to overheat, or rolling the dice with these, sometimes, glass encased devices that will utterly shatter from the trauma of a 12 inch drop from the couch to your floor. Modern mobile phones make wine glasses look positively rugged. Don't get me started on the mobile phone insurance scam, where they charge you $20 a month to "protect your device".
I could go on forever, but let it suffice to say I was tired of this game and looking for a way out. I wanted a modular phone that was easy to repair and had swappable parts. This first led me to the FairPhone, a UK based company that makes interesting devices with modular parts.
It also led me to the Nothing CMF devices which actually do none of that but won me over with their cool design philosophy and affordable devices. I love their CMF line and I grabbed the CMF smart watch for $69 because it's an absolute steal at that price. Simple, stylish, functional, and most importantly, different, Nothing was able to sell me on their brand by scratching an itch that's always been there for me, consumer electronics are supposed to look cool and have personality. I can reach back through my memory banks and pluck out individual devices that have spoken to me over the years. Sony's original Walkman, the Gameboy Advance SP (shoutout to the GB micro!), the original iMac (hat tip new iMac, I see you 👀), Nokia's Lumia phone, The Zune (yes, it still hurts, thanks for asking), right through to the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo and Sony have made enough iconic consumer devices to be in a league apart to be honest, but I digress. My point is that I have a soft spot for companies that dare to be different and understand that tech choices are also style choices.
Tech companies often have a hubris when it comes to ux design, "It's what's inside that's important, who cares what it looks like", so that's why as an industry they need to be reminded every decade or so. Which brings me back to Nothing and why I feel like their latest phone, the Phone 3, is probably going to end up on my list of loved devices. Mobile phones have fallen especially hard into the trap of not caring about what the outside of the device looks like. 99% of the time the user is going to be looking at the screen, which is nominally just black. The other side of the phone is a complete afterthought, so make it an unoffensive color, slap the logo on, and call it a day.
Nothing turns this on its head, literally, starting with their design principle that people spend too much time looking at the screen on their phones. The original Nothing phone pioneered a glyph interface on the back of the phone, which was a series of lights that could be used to display important info, like how far away your Lyft driver was, without needing to pick up the device and open an app. I never tried it so I can't speak to how useful that was in practice, but in the latest iteration they have replaced the glyph lights with a new 25x25 minimalist display that they are calling the glyph matrix which will serve the same purpose but won't require you to decipher the meaning of the various light configurations.
The matrix ships with a couple of small apps to display things like the current time, battery life, etc. There's also a spin the bottle game and a magic 8 ball and these are being called "glyph toys". A lot of the early reviews are writing this upgrade off as a gimmick, but Nothing has created an SDK that can be used by developers to write their own apps targeting the glyph matrix and I've already written one to display the current standings in major league baseball for your favorite team. I can't be the only one who is excited about this, I expect the community to put out some interesting stuff.
Since Nothing encourages users to put our phones down and disengage in this way it frees up their designers to do whatever they wanted with the back of the phone, which has led to some really refreshing and different designs, the Phone 3 continues in this tradition with transparent case and blocky, asymmetrical layout featuring a red square that lights up when the phone is recording. It's very different, very cool, and I hope they keep it up.