Nothing CMF Phone 1 review: Fun, bold budget phone

Ever since features like replaceable batteries disappeared from smartphones, we’ve been begging for someone to bring them back. Some have tried, like the LG G5 with its Friends modules or the Fairphone 5 with its ten interchangeable parts, but neither made a lasting impact. Now, a new device has entered the modular market: Nothing’s budget-friendly CMF Phone 1.

On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer — pack a budget Android phone with some decent specs and make it stand out with interchangeable back panels and accessories like a kickstand. In practice, the CMF Phone 1 doesn’t make life so easy, at least not for someone like me in the US. It’s a phone I’d love to recommend to absolutely anyone looking for a fantastic budget phone for less than $200, but there are some things you need to know before picking one up.

Right out of the box, the CMF Phone 1 looks and feels like something new — especially in the Light Green or Orange finish. It has a certain industrial flair to it with four screws around the edges and Nothing’s classic dot-based branding on the back panel. In some ways, I think the CMF Phone 1 reminds me of the ill-fated Rabbit R1, but in a much more practical, modular sense than that of the aforementioned square, overcomplicated AI companion.

Unlike some of Nothing’s other designs, where the industrial inspiration is there for aesthetics, the CMF Phone 1’s screws have a purpose. Yes, they unscrew so you can take the budget-focused device apart — well, partly apart. It’s not quite as exciting as a truly replaceable battery, but the CMF Phone 1’s four removable screws allow you to remove and replace the back panel to change the color of your device as well as add an optional vegan leather case to it. You’ll, of course, also have to remove the button-shaped Accessory Point in the bottom right corner and the SIM tray on the bottom edge, but those extra pieces allow you to mix and match colors to make your Phone 1 even more unique.

If nothing else, this is what I love about the Phone 1 — I can make it different every day. In addition to those alternative backs I mentioned, you can also pick up practical attachments like a kickstand, a lanyard, and even a card holder to replace your wallet. All three of them attach in the bottom right corner of the Phone 1, which means you can use them — possibly even more than one of them — in addition to whatever back plate you’ve chosen for the day. It really is a neat setup, and it gives Nothing’s most affordable phone a way to stand out from most of its budget-minded competition.

However, there’s a problem with the CMF Phone 1 if you’re not an international buyer: It’s practically impossible to get any of the accessories here in the US. Yes, technically, the phone is only available stateside as part of a beta program (which we’ll get back to later), but that doesn’t mean it should be available at all if you can’t take advantage of one of its key selling points. Oh, and the phone comes without an NFC chip — something I never thought I’d have to say again after Motorola finally added one to its Moto G lineup.

Right now, the best someone stateside like me can do is look at the splash page for the CMF Phone 1 over at Nothing.tech, see that it has an interchangeable design, and, well, that’s it. You can’t reach a product page to grab a different case, the card holder, or anything else without a very quick 404 error. Users abroad might have a bit better luck — I was able to view the entire selection of accessories on Nothing’s UK site — but it doesn’t give me a great feeling about the state of the beta program in the US.

If you can get your hands on the accessories, you’ll find they are a little tricky to swap in and out. I realize that Nothing’s choice of flat-head screws for its CMF Phone 1 was probably done with durability in mind (I guess?), but I’ve yet to swap a single screw without the included screwdriver slipping out of the groove about half a dozen times. Once I got all the screws out so I could change the black plastic back panel, I had to spend another ten minutes or so trying to wrestle the piece itself off the phone — not ideal. Also, the card holder attachment uses different screws altogether, trading the flat heads for small orange knobs that you have to tighten by hand.

And then, there’s Nothing’s choice of materials. Unsurprisingly, given the affordable and replaceable nature of the Phone 1’s parts, almost everything about it is made of plastic. Granted, the frame and the interchangeable accessories are fairly stiff plastic, but it’s plastic nonetheless. That means if you drop it onto a concrete sidewalk while cheering at the Philadelphia Marathon — even one covered in leaves — you’ll probably come up with some damage. Ask me how I know.

Normally, I’d brush off that damage, knowing that it happens, but it has more of a snowball effect on the CMF Phone 1. I, unfortunately, dropped my phone at such an angle that the plastic protecting the display and the frame itself pushed into each other a bit, making it harder to remove the black backing I have attached and replace it with a different color now that it doesn’t sit perfectly. Thankfully, though, the 6.67-inch Gorilla Glass 5 display escaped unscathed. And no, putting the CMF Phone 1 in a case probably wouldn’t have helped, as any case I used would have blocked me from using the accessories.

Whether you spring for the CMF Phone 1’s fun accessories or not, you’re still getting the light, clean Nothing OS experience, which is worth the price of entry on its own. It’s just as much a piece of the design as the accessories themselves, offering the right mix of dot-based widgets and accents while skipping the bloatware that usually bogs down affordable phones. Of course, the black and white dots might not be for everyone — they’re occasionally hard to differentiate at a glance — but I can’t help loving the personality. It’s almost as much fun to swap the widgets and fonts in and out as it is to treat the CMF Phone 1 like a hi-tech Erector set, especially when so many other flavors of Android feel very similar.

While I’ve come away from my time with the CMF Phone 1 a bit less impressed by its accessories (and their lack of availability), its hardware under the hood somewhat won me over. Like Nothing’s other launches, it packs a mid-level MediaTek Dimensity chipset inside its plastic shell, this time backed by 6GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage at the base configuration — yet another feature that’s largely disappeared from modern flagship phones.

If you need a little more punch, you can grab the Phone 1 with up to 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which might be enough that you don’t have to worry about said microSD slot. Either way, you’ll be backing the Dimensity 7300 chipset, which sounds close to the Dimensity 7200 Pro that Nothing used for both versions of its Phone 2a. Those phones, of course, offer a bit more than the CMF Phone 1 in terms of clock speed and optional RAM — not to mention price — so I was curious to see how Nothing’s new budget offering would keep up.

More realistically, though, I was curious to see how the Phone 1 would fare against similarly priced competition like Motorola’s Moto G 5G (2024) and Samsung’s Galaxy A15 5G, so I set it up for our standard gauntlet of CPU and GPU benchmarks. Unsurprisingly, the CMF Phone 1 had no problems outpacing its budget foes, breezing past offerings from Motorola and Samsung with ease. It stayed ahead of the respective Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 and Dimensity 6100 Plus processors in our main CPU test and put in a good shift against the Nothing Phone 2a, coming out on top with higher multi-core performance even if it didn’t keep up on the single-core front.

The CMF Phone 1 also thumped its affordable Android rivals when I fired up the graphically intensive 3DMark stress tests, nearly tripling the output of both the Moto G 5G (2024) and Galaxy A15 5G. Better yet, it stayed rock-solid across all 20 runs of the test, suggesting that even if the CMF Phone 1 doesn’t stack up like a top-end gaming phone, it should still deliver decent performance in lighter titles and should be able to maintain its level for a while rather than tailing off after a few minutes.

In real life, though, the CMF Phone 1 feels even better against most of the budget-focused Android market. Its punchy (for the price tag) chipset is paired with a huge 6.67-inch, 120Hz AMOLED display that’s brighter and sharper than Motorola’s LCD and Samsung’s own 90Hz AMOLED option. While I couldn’t use the CMF Phone 1 away from Wi-Fi (for reasons I’ll get to), it handled my needs as a lightweight gaming phone for Pokemon TCG Pocket and Royal Match just fine. I also used it as my portable soccer studio over Thanksgiving, setting up Paramount Plus to keep up with the Europa League games while the rest of my family stuck to American football, glad to have the Full HD resolution while picking out players during Roma’s last-minute draw against Tottenham.

For the most part, that lightweight reliance on Wi-Fi meant that the CMF Phone 1’s 5,000mAh battery could last me several days between charges. It wasn’t constantly hunting for reliable mobile service (because it wasn’t going to get it), so the passive battery drain was minimal. Of course, to find out how the Phone 1 would handle sustained usage, I put it through our trusty drain test and found that it could once again keep up with the Nothing Phone 2a. Actually, the CMF Phone 1 beat its light-up sibling in quite a few of our use cases, from the simulated Zoom call to repeated camera snaps, and both Nothing devices lasted hours longer than the Galaxy A15 5G and Moto G 5G across most use cases.

Now that it’s beaten similarly priced options from Motorola and Samsung in several places, it’s time to see how the CMF Phone 1 performs on a charger. On paper, the answer should be simple — Nothing’s budget option claims that it supports up to 33W wired charging to get you back on your feet. That should be enough to beat the Moto G 5G by nearly 15W and the Galaxy A15 by about 8W at top speeds.

In practice, though, the performance isn’t nearly as close as the numbers suggest. I set the CMF Phone 1 up on my trusty Ugreen Nexode Pro — one of the best chargers I’ve used — and found that even though it spent most of its time at around 27W, it was able to finish charging a full 20 minutes faster than the Galaxy A15 5G and thumped the Moto G 5G by about 40 minutes. Based on the graph, it looks like the CMF Phone 1 was able to maintain its peak charging speed for far longer than its competitors, holding pace for about 40 minutes before tailing off.

Unfortunately, it’s time to talk about the interchangeable elephant in the room — Nothing’s poor US band support. Just like with the Phone 2a and 2a Plus, Nothing is upfront about the fact that the CMF Phone 1 is primarily available as part of a beta program. What that means, though, is that it has almost none of the bands needed for customers on Verizon and AT&T to use the phone effectively. T-Mobile customers are a little luckier, as the Phone 1 covers parts of the 3G, 4G, and 5G spectrum, but once again doesn’t support the entire set of bands needed.

As a Verizon customer, that limited support turned my CMF Phone 1 into a fancy, customizable iPod Touch. I could use it while connected to Wi-Fi and stream downloaded music to a pair of CMF Buds Pro 2 that Nothing also sent over (which are quite good — check out our review from sister site SoundGuys at the link), but it meant that the Phone 1 couldn’t bail me out if my Pixel 9 Pro died while away from a charger. So, unless you’re a T-Mobile customer in a well-supported area of the US, you will have a tough time with this one.

If you’re outside of the US, though, the CMF Phone 1 has the performance chops (and band support) to compete with Android phones both at and slightly above its price point.

Moving on to yet another area where cheaper phones tend to struggle, it’s time to talk about the CMF Phone 1’s budget cameras — er, camera. Yes, I know that there are technically two sensors on the back of this plastic beast, but we only really have to dig into one because the other is a lowly 2MP depth sensor with a maximum aperture of f/2.4. It only provides additional data and light for its more capable partner, so let’s turn our focus (pun intended) to that slightly more useful sensor.

Said primary sensor is a 50MP that comes from Sony and packs the CMF Phone 1 with a portrait-ready maximum aperture of f/1.8. Nothing is a little light on the other details about its primary camera, at least regarding sensor size and specific branding, though it does tout Ultra XDR support and AI Vivid modes thanks to its Truelens Engine 2.0. Unsurprisingly, there is not much else to say about the Phone 1’s basic camera setup, so let’s get to a few sample images.

Typically, when I put together a gallery of sample images for a phone, I’m only looking for the best ones. I usually snap away for the entire time I have a device and come away with plenty of shots I like. This time, though, I missed more shots than I hit — especially in low light. As much as I’m pleased with the look at the rainforest section of the Baltimore Aquarium after dark, I’m thoroughly disappointed by the shot of the musician in the bottom row, which was taken no more than five minutes earlier. I thought I held pretty still while snapping it, yet the text on the wall behind him is blurred, as is a bit of his hair.

For the most part, though, those misses are balanced out by the neat colors in the wider view of the main aquarium tank and the view of Independence Hall. Both show decent details throughout, with the shot of Independence Hall looking particularly crisp. The portrait mode shot of Ben Franklin isn’t bad either, as it accurately identifies the edges of his colonial suit and hair. Of course, the lesson here is that you can get some pretty good views out of the CMF Phone 1 as long as you’re willing to be a little bit patient — something that’s true of most budget phones.

Unfortunately, the CMF Phone 1’s larger camera struggles come when you try to zoom. The lack of an ultrawide camera or a telephoto sensor means that the quality drops off quickly once you move away from 1x zoom. Nothing’s lone sensor tops out at 10x zoom, which seems a bit too far, given the way that the shot of the sailboat and the seagull above turned out. Everything about the shot of the boat is a bit blurry, making it challenging to tell where the top of the ship ends and the dock begins. Granted, the seagull is a little better — you can at least pick out the bricks in the background —but the bird itself looks closer to gray than mostly white. If you’re willing to stick between about 1x and 4x zoom, though, Nothing’s lone sensor can hold its own in good lighting.

Surprisingly, the best camera on the CMF Phone 1 might be its 16MP selfie shooter. It’s not going to give the sensors on the Pixel 9 or iPhone 16 a run for their money, but it handled the colors and textures in my sweatshirt nicely, with only slight ghosting around the white lettering. I’m decently impressed by how it picked out the edges of my hair, too, as some cheap Android phones tend to cut curls off both sides of my head.

For video recording, the CMF Phone 1 supports quality up to 4K resolution at 30 frames per second or 1080p at up to 60fps, both of which are fine for this price tier. Nothing’s electronic image stabilization is decent, though you’ll have to stay at 1x zoom, as anything further has the same quality struggle as the still images above.

At the end of the day, I really, really like the idea behind the CMF Phone 1, especially at its very competitive price point. I enjoy swapping the accessories in and out and knowing that the hardware screws will keep them locked securely in place. I also appreciate the power the Dimensity 7300 brings to the table, especially against other budget phones. Nothing’s 33W wired charging setup is good, too, getting the CMF Phone 1 back on its feet quickly compared to affordable Android phones from Samsung and Motorola. Nothing OS is also an incredibly trendy, lean skin, too, which is a breath of fresh air when so many cheaper phones are stacked with bloatware.

There are some budget phone concessions you have to deal with, though. Its lone 50MP camera has the potential to be really good, but you have to keep it incredibly stable in low light. Once you get comfortable with some of the camera quirks like that, though, you might find that one camera is all you need. I’ve nicked Nothing’s plastic frame by dropping the Phone 1 on a bed of leaves, and the plastic back is hard enough to swap out that I’m having trouble hiding my unhappy accident. Two years of Android updates and a third year of security patches doesn’t quite match the Galaxy A15 5G in terms of long-term support, but it is acceptable for a phone at this price tier in the US.

That, of course, brings me back to the kicker for the CMF Phone 1 — it’s simply a non-starter here in the US. You can buy it as part of the same beta program that covers Nothing’s Phone 2a (£319.99 at Amazon) and Nothing 2a Plus ($417.5 at Amazon), but it’s hard to find proper support. The limited band setup means you’ll only have access to part of T-Mobile’s network, with radio silence coming from both Verizon and AT&T. Oh, and since you can’t buy Nothing’s colorful accessories stateside, you’re essentially buying a budget phone with half of its intended experience.

The rest of the world is getting a fun little phone for an excellent price, but as much as I like the idea of the CMF Phone 1, if you’re in the US like me, I think I’ll have to steer you in another direction. Thankfully, the current state of the budget Android market stateside means that’s pretty easy to do anyway, which hasn’t always been the case. Depending on your budget, there are plenty of affordable Samsung Galaxy A devices to look at or Motorola Moto G options to consider, you’ll just have to decide what matters to you.

Personally, though, I think the Galaxy A15 5G ($174.8 at Amazon) is probably the best alternative, both for its longer software support and far more flexible triple camera setup. Yes, the CMF Phone 1 beats it from top to bottom in terms of performance, battery life, and charging, but sometimes, the best phone is the one you can use most readily. Samsung’s offering also has NFC support, unlike the Phone 1.

Should you decide to go Motorola, the Moto G 5G (2024) ($179.99 at Amazon) is the closest alternative. It’s set up somewhere between the other two, pairing a pretty good 50MP primary camera with a 2MP macro sensor that constantly leaves me scratching my head. It’s nicely dressed up with a vegan leather back panel in an eye-catching Sage finish, though, which is nice. Motorola’s option is also the only one of the three to rock an LCD panel, but it’s easily the most affordable of the bunch in case you’re trying to live on a tight budget.

One day, when Nothing finally offers wider US distribution, I’ll happily recommend the CMF Phone 1 (and the Phone 2a or 2a Plus) for budget Android fans over here, but we’re just not quite there yet. For everyone else, this one is a steal.