Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Fun Phones Of 2022: Nothing Phone (1), ROG Phone 6 Pro, TECNO Camon 19 Pro”.
This video is sponsored by surf shark if you’ve ever said, you’re just gon na put a case on it anyway. Well, these phones are not for you. Maybe it’s a byproduct of having been locked in a coveted cave for much of the past week, but i’ve recently recommitted myself to the belief that fun is a perfectly valid reason to buy something nope, it’s not another episode of when phones were fun. It’S a hands-on up, close look at three fun phones that you can actually buy and maybe actually use today in 2022, i’m considering moving to paris and dropping the vowels from my name to signify the abandonment of my old life and my total embrace of the avant-garde.
Okay – maybe i’m not considering that yet, but if i did, i’d have a lot in common with piet mondrian, the abstract art pioneer whose use of line and bold color means. Even if you don’t know his name, you probably know his work and it turns out the mondrian style translates very well to a phone. This is the special mondrian edition of the techno camen 19, and what at first looks like a modular collection of components, is really just a minimalist grid of stripes delineating zones of differently colored paint paint that only becomes visible when exposed to ultraviolet light. All right. Let’S take it outside see what that uv light can do. Oh wow, it’s i didn’t expect it to be so instant.
Oh, that’s! Amazing! Yup! Just like the fingernail polish or special t-shirts. You might remember this phone blooms into bold color in the sun and fades back to stark monochrome when brought back into the shade. Yes, it still works through windows or in indirect sunlight just takes longer.
And yes, it’s purely an aesthetic statement. Techno couldn’t match mondrian’s pure primary colors with the uv sensitive pigments it had available, so it reinterpreted the style with these pastel shades instead and what it couldn’t do with color. It did with packaging techno collaborated with boston’s museum of fine arts to create a mondrian-themed gift set included in the bespoke packaging, a set of techno’s sonic 1 wireless earbuds with some custom accents of their own, a bundled rapid charger, mondrian cufflinks and a beautiful handkerchief that I’D very much like to be dapper enough to pull off, there’s even a pre-installed screen protector and a clear case included.
Frankly, this presentation is much more polished than i’d expect for a gift set whose price starts under 250 us dollars, and that also goes for some of the specs on the phone. This display refreshes at 120 hertz, it’s powered by a 5 000 milliamp hour battery and the main camera is optically stabilized. It’S tough to argue with that kind of composition. Of course, the price also carries compromise. There’S a big chin beneath the lcd, along with the slight pixel discoloration around the edges, that always screams budget phone also likely to discolor is the tpu material of the clear case, which i expect will start yellowing well before the year is out. I’M not a fan of the custom ios software running atop android 12. and despite the respectable specs on the cameras, the photo and video samples i’ve seen haven’t exactly impressed. Most damning of all is the lack of true cellular compatibility for the us. This device is only being offered in select markets of southeast asia, africa, the middle east and latin america, but in a world where phone makers seem to care less and less about standing out committing to a design.
This ambitious is refreshing, especially from a manufacturer. Almost no one on this continent has ever heard about, and while we have seen color changing phones before techno deserves credit for committing to a specific artistic vision and realizing it with the help of a prestigious collaboration. It’S pretty impressive, even if getting one to work on our networks here in the us turns out to be as elusive as buying a real mondrian. [ Laughter ] call me easily amused, but i am digging this a lot wow for our next device.
Nothing says fun. Quite like gaming and i’ve never seen a phone that takes that particular flavor of fun. Quite as seriously as this now i prefer portable consoles to mobile games. So when a gaming phone gets my attention in spite of that. Well, that says something that’s what happened with last year’s rog phone 5 from asus and, as you might expect, the all-new rog phone 6 pro doubles down on that formula right from the unboxing. This product is celebrating its republic of gamer’s target customer. You don’t just open the package.
You reach the hatch like you’re cracking open a starship’s escape pod. You don’t just sign in to your accounts. You authenticate with a key card that spawns an augmented reality: mini-game that comes with a custom-made ar helmet.
Even the dull parts of the onboarding are backed by custom music. That reminds you that yeah, this phone is something really special. That music comes at you from incredibly loud dual speakers, which means it’s actually a solid shower radio, for when you stay at a hotel and the new ipx4 splash resistance means it won’t get hurt in the process yep. That is a screen on the backside and it comes with 60 animations that can run whenever the phone is unlocked or in response to charging state or phone calls. You can also program your own custom text or logos, and the screen will also occasionally show icons for your missed notifications, something echoed by the dare to play led up top which changes color if you’ve gotten a message or missed a call. It’S all wildly over the top, but i feel like a big part of pc gaming.
Culture is customizing. Your rig and asus has really done a wonderful job of giving you that same creative latitude on mobile right down to changing the fingerprint reader queue into an rog logo. If you want – and it wouldn’t be an rog phone without over-the-top accessories to go with it. A new aeroactive cooler to dissipate heat during extended gameplay and an updated kunai gamepad.
To give you the physical controls, you’d normally miss on a phone, and even if you don’t spring, for either of those you’ve always got the air triggers touch sensitive strips that, let you add virtual tap points to any part of the screen on any game. You, like much of the rest, is recycled from last year and just as impressive today, the six thousand milliamp hour battery the dual usb ports, the headphone jack, the only things i’ll caution you about are well first, the back side is just gorilla. Glass.
3.. So don’t expect it to hold up to a fall on pavement from waist height, sorry, asus and second, the cameras still don’t measure up to the best of the competition, especially since the phone lacks a proper telephoto shooter. Oh they’re serviceable so long as you’re shooting in the broad daylight of iowa, which you can see in this footage from my recent adventure to america’s heartland learning about the technology behind john deere farming equipment, but for a starting price of 12.99 when it launches later this Year in the us, well, it would just be nice if these cameras were as useful in a gamer cave, where they’re likely to be used as out in the farm fields, where they’re, not [ Applause ].
The final fun phone i’ll share with you today is a polarizing piece of technology that, depending on your taste, is either a bold new expression in mobile design or nothing much at all. The nothing phone won right after this one of the things i never thought i’d miss about the internet until it was gone, was that it was mostly neutral. These days, your internet service provider can change your speed based on what kind of surfing you’re doing like slowing down your connection.
If you’re streaming, video or your employer can restrict certain traffic that it thinks you shouldn’t be able to access and websites can even show you different prices, depending on where you are in the world, even when that doesn’t make much sense. Well, i think all that’s pretty shady, so i’m happy to be sponsored by surf shark. It’S a vpn that keeps your browsing private, safe and yeah neutral, because that’s what the internet should be get surf shark at the link in the description and use code.
Mr mobile for 83 percent off and three extra months, free thanks to surf shark for sponsoring this video carry around the nothing phone one for a week as i’ve done and you’ll get a lot of confused folks asking what you did to your iphone. That is until you get a message yeah if you’re looking for meaning or utility in the newest smartphone from carl pay of oneplus fame. Well, stop it. Nothing does have some ambitious ideas about eventually changing the way we stay mobile. But it’s been pretty clear from the outset that its first smartphone was gon na, be much more modest, the nothing phone one lives and dies on its aesthetic. So if you’re a fan of design you’re going to want to see this thing in person, the retail packaging is very minimal. Not unlike the sleeve of vinyl single might come in hello bird. It’S nothing you see and that restrained presentation, kind of sets you up for the phone itself. What might appear flat and featureless in photos is actually an intricate lattice of layers, some of it exposed technology like the wireless charging coil the rest, a collection of textured modesty panels that help to set off the glyph interface. That’S the real star of the show: nothing strung together – 900 tiny micro leds under diffusion strips to make them appear continuous, and that means they can fire and flicker rapidly to synchronize, with the haptics and ringtones, a bunch of very retro, bips and bleeps. That remind me of the 2001 era motorola i recently showed off on when phones were fun plug the phone in and the lower glyph becomes a little battery meter top up your nothing earbuds and the ring around the coil lights up. Roll a video and the one concession to color on the whole device will flash a red reminder to smile you’re on camera.
Okay, it’s a lot i’ll admit. Even the absolute minimum brightness setting is still going to catch your neighbor’s eye at the bar. But when was the last time your phone was bold enough to call out for attention. When was the last time it was worthy of it. That’S nothing’s whole shtick. You know, phones have gotten boring and we’re here to help.
Personally, i’d have preferred the company did that with a foldable, but if i have to deal with a slab, this is the coolest one i’ve seen in a while and at 399 pounds sterling or about 475 us to start. It’S certainly a lot easier on the wallet. My biggest objection is that nothing doesn’t take the concept far enough, i mean yet the back is really cool, but the front is kind of looks like an iphone. It deserves points for the symmetrical bezel and the few tweaks it’s made to android like the oversized system. Toggles and the dot matrix style font, but when the most design forward thing about your software is the voice recorder carl told me: nothing has 350 employees right now. What are they all doing? I mean why isn’t this interface truly distinctive, instead of oddly generic, where i’m coldest on the nothing phone one has nothing to do with the mid-range snapdragon processor, which is plenty speedy or the battery life, which has actually been excellent? I am concerned about the cameras, but this goes beyond even that.
The issue is that it’s not coming to the us primarily because getting certifications for us carriers and enabling all 5g bans is prohibitively expensive. I did have luck with just tossing in my t-mobile sim and it worked okay here in brooklyn, better at least than the techno, but it certainly isn’t ideal and whether it’s even usable or not, for you will depend on your local network situation. Yup we’re fully back to the bad old days of the us missing out on the full depth and breadth of fun phones from overseas. So while it pains me to say it, the chances of me doing a full review on any of these phones are well close to nothing, especially since some other phone phones which are coming to america are, thankfully, just over the horizon stay tuned.
To see more about those very soon and if you do want to buy any of the products featured in this article, i’ll leave links for you down in the description. This nothing phone actually did pretty good at audio capture on the selfie camera. So i’m going to use it for everyone’s favorite part of the video disclosures. This video was produced thanks to review samples from techno asus and nothing, all of which were pre-production samples running pre-release software. Additional disclosure techno did license some of whatever i said about the mondrian phone. They paid my publisher for that.
I don’t get any of that and they didn’t have any editorial control or early preview or anything, but i figured you should know anyway. Everything else is the same: no manufacturer was given editorial input, copy approval and nobody furnished compensation for the production of this video, i’m back in my childhood hometown. I think i want to go. Get a taco thanks for your patience as i recover from the plague and a bunch of other distractions. The next article will be up very soon until next time, from michael fisher, who’s very happy to be back thanks for watching and stay mobile. My friends, you .