CMF Phone 1 review: Motorola meets its match

As someone who preordered the original Nothing Phone on day one, one of the biggest disappointments about the all-but-inevitable follow-up is that it moved things in a more premium direction. Don't get it twisted. The second generation Nothing Phone has a lot to offer. However, the brand's biggest strengths hit much harder in the mid-range market than the premium one.

While Nothing itself has moved up in the world, the company has kept itself in the cheap tech conversation through its CMF line. Initially, this comprised of accessories like headphones and wearables like smartwatches. Now, Nothing has finally sought to return to its roots with the thrifty and trendy CMF Phone 1.

Like the Nothing Phone before it, the pitch here is that budget friendly doesn't have to mean bad-looks. The CMF Phone gets tantalisingly close to being the budget phone that sets a new bar for the category. However, when the biggest competition is made by Motorola, it's no surprise that it comes up a little short on a few key fronts.

While it doesn't have the kind of curved edges you'll find on the Moto G85 5G, the screen on the CMF Phone 1 is hardly a sloucher.

The front of the device is built around a 6.67-inch OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate that offers up to 2000 nits of peak brightness. The bezels are more tidy than tiny but on the whole, it's a very nice screen made nicer by the sub-$400 asking price. 

As far as features and perks go, the list here isn't super long but what's on it is meaningful. The CMF Phone 1 is IP52 rated against dust and splash damage. It doesn't have wireless charging but it does support fast charging of up to 33W. You don't get a headphone jack, but you do score some expandable storage.

Flip the CMF Phone 1 over and you'll find an aesthetic that's entirely unlike anything else in the budget smartphone niche. The sides of the chassis are made of hard plastic. The back is vegan leather. In addition to being able to take a hit, these material design details afford the CMF Phone 1 a feel-factor that's a little nicer than you'd expect given how affordable it is.

As for colors, the CMF Phone 1 is available in black, green and orange. Regardless of the shade you select, you'll come away with a snazzy set of buttons that contrast against that color of the chassis.

Intriguingly, that's not the only way to customise this particular cheap Android smartphone. Akin to something like Motorola's defunct MotoMods and whatever HMD is up to nowadays, the back of the CMF Phone 1 supports a range of modular accessories both official and fan-made. The former includes stuff like a lanyard or card holder. The latter includes more eccentric accessories, but you'll have to get yourself a 3D printer (or a friend with one) to try them out for yourself.

In any case, the back of the CMF Phone 1 is also home to the device's humble dual-lens camera. That setup consists of a 50MP main lens and a 2MP depth sensor. In practice, this setup delivers surprisingly solid snaps. The hardware here is a step below (and a few lenses) short of what you can find in the mid-range nowadays.

Still, so far as daylight photography and budget smartphones are concerned, I came away satisfied with the CMF Phone 1 more often than not. The night mode was less impressive and often struggled to maintain focus, but that weakness is unlikely to be much of an outlier when it comes to devices that cost this little.

Under the hood, the CMF Phone 1 is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 5G processor, 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of on-board storage.

These numbers aren't likely to blow you away if you're used to what a flagship device might offer. However, if you're more at home with hardware that exists at this end of the market, those are pretty respectable scores that put the first CMF Phone on the board without too much trouble. Being able to double your storage for an extra $50 is a decently good value upsell and starting at 8GB of RAM rather than 4GB or 6GB makes for a baseline that's a cut above a lot of other budget-friendly devices.

Out of the box, the CMF Phone 1 also runs on the latest version of Nothing OS. This is the same Android skin you'll find in the rest of the brand's devices. While it isn't as clean and minimalist as the software found with the Google Pixel 8a, it's a lot slicker and less bloated than something available through Samsung or Motorola.

As for the performance, I found the CMF Phone 1 to be a bit of a mixed bag. While the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 5G inside the unit was surprisingly game when it came to gaming, it struggled in more everyday scenarios. Star Wars Hunters, League of Legends: Wild Rift and Diablo Immortal were all surprisingly playable.

Unfortunately, the UI of Android itself would often lag and struggle to keep up when it came to multitasking. Sometimes even just basic apps like Facebook Messenger proved to be a bit of a sticking point. That sluggishness was the one major disappointment I had with the CMF Phone 1. I can change up my gaming habits for a review device. I'm not going to avoid using the myriad messengers apps at my disposal in 2024, nor should I.

Fortunately, in terms of battery life, the 5000mAh cell inside the CMF Phone 1 proved to be something of a silver lining. It massively over-delivered on my expectations. I'd sometimes get through a day with as much as 70% of my battery remaining. This is less of a two-day battery and more of a two-and-a-half-day battery, which does make up somewhat for the iffy performance.

Burned down from 100% to zero using video streamed over WiFi, the CMF Phone 1 lasted almost exactly 20 hours. That result puts it above the likes of the Google Pixel 8a but below what you'll get from the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion and Moto G85 5G.

Nothing have gotten impressively close to replicating the breakout success of the first Nothing Phone for a new segment of the market with the CMF Phone 1 but when you're competing with Motorola, good enough doesn't quite cut it. Still, if you're in the market for an affordable smartphone, the CMF is definitely something that should be on your radar.

Who knows, maybe Nothing will clean up some of the performance through software updates. Much like the Nothing Phone, it feels like the best is yet to come for the CMF Phone 1.