Nothing Technology, Ltd released the Nothing Phone (1) in July 2022. What sets this phone apart, and is it really going to transform smartphones forever? (Spoiler: No it is not).
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with my Heart Radio and how the tech are you? You know? A few weeks back, I talked about the fair phone as a sort of gateway topic that could let me talk about a lot of serious challenges that the tech industry and we as consumers face if we want to try and be ethical and responsible with our our tech purchases and strategies. So in that episode, we talked about environmental and social issues, and we covered things like sustainability, and we covered things like human rights because there are a lot of different steps in the supply chain where that's a real issue. And today, due to a listener request, the listener actually downloaded the I Heart Radio app, they went to tech Stuff left me a nice little voice message asking if I could talk about this. We're gonna talk about a different smartphone and what sets it apart from other devices in its category. Uh, it is not going to be nearly as heavy as the fair phone episode was because we're not gonna dive back into all the human rights stuff and sustainability stuff. To great extent, but I hope you will learn some interesting things along the way. So the phone we're going to talk about today is the Nothing Phone, specifically the Nothing Phone open bracket one, closed bracket, so the Nothing Phone one. Uh. This phone actually shares a couple of superficial similarities with the Fair Phone and one important non superficial similarity. So for one thing, it is not going to be sold in the United States. Neither the Fair Phone nor the Nothing Phone will be sold here in the US. So if you are in the United States, I'm sorry this phone is not going to be available. I can't get it either. So um, but you know, listen to the episode because there's some important stuff in here. And by the way, it's clear that it's not gonna be sold in the US because the f c C, the Federal Communications Commission, didn't certify the device, and that as a requirement if you're going to have a cellular device operate on United States networks. Superficial similarity number two. Both Fair Phone and the Nothing Phone one rely on a version of the Android operating system, and we're gonna talk more about you know, Android OS and how it appears on more phones in a little bit in this episode, now one less superficial. One important similarity between the Fair Phone and the Nothing Phone is that the Nothing Phone also takes a pretty cool approach when it comes to at least some of the material in the phone itself. So the Nothing Phone has an aluminum case that is then coded with gorilla glass. So when you look at the Nothing Phone, it kind of look like it has a clear case, and then you're looking into the the aluminum uh casing itself almost like you're almost like you have stripped the shell off of another smartphone. It has that kind of cool esthetically industrial look I think. Anyway, the bit that's important is that the company says they use recycled aluminum to make those cases, which is following that sort of ethical sustainability approach that Fair Phone uses. So I wanted to call that out because I think that's really cool. I think that's a great thing to do, is to rely on recycled materials rather than mining for new ones. But really that's where the surface similarities kind of end between the Fair Phone and the Nothing Phone. So the Nothing Phone isn't really meant to address sustainability or ethics issues in the text fear the same way the fair phone does. It doesn't push his hard in that in that regard. But boy, howdy, the marketing for the Nothing phone has been, i'll say, pretty aggressive. If you just pop on over to Nothing Technologies web page, you'll get to read some of that marketing and you'll see stuff like quote less distractions, more soul, just pure instinct, formed as a machine told through beautiful symbols, deeper interactions, and brave simplicity. Phone one can bring us back to us end quote. Now. I like that This doesn't actually say a whole bunch of useful stuff about the phone itself, but it feels like it's really deep and meaningful. All right. Now, Before I dive into the phone, which you know will be most the bigger part of this episode, and talk about what it does and some other related stuff about it, I want to talk first about the company behind it, which is called Nothing Technology Limited. One of the co founders of Nothing Technology is a guy named Carl Pay. Now, Carl Pay co founded another phone company called one Plus. This happened back in One plus is an incredibly successful hardware company, especially in places like India. The smartphones that one plus makes are popular among millions hundreds of millions of users. One plus does something similar to what Nothing is trying to do, which is it produces Android based smartphones that aim to market interesting features for a mid range price. So in both one plus and Nothing Technology, pays companies aren't necessarily pushing to create the flagship device for that platform, that being Android phones, but rather one that is compelling while costing less than competing phones are in the same general field. Now, Pay left one Plus in twenty which came as a surprise to some people because the company had grown into a big brand. It was incredibly successful, so why leave, Well, Pay was getting ready to launch a new company. In fact, he did it almost immediately after leaving one plus, and he secured investments from some pretty interesting folks here in the United States, which includes former Apple designer Tony Fidel Reddits CEO Steve Hoffman is one of the big investors. Twitches co founder Kevin Lynn is another, and there were more. And Pay started talking about how tech had kind of lost its way, like it lost its magical touch on us, and this would lead right into the marketing spiel for Nothing technology in general and Nothing Phone in particular. So Pay was essentially saying that, you know, in the early smartphone days, so really, when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone, consumers reacted with excitement and wonder and they just gushed about these new devices. It was something to celebrate. And if you just go back and watch early Apple iPhone press events like for the first few iPhones, especially the ones that Steve Jobs lead before his passing in two thousand eleven, if you watch those, you'll really see what pay is kind of talking about. You'll see these big reactions from the crowd over these things. Like it was this enthusiasm and joy. It came across almost as if Steve Jobs was promising the crowd that they were all going to go to Disneyland on his dime. But these days, Pay has said, folks tend to be a little more reserved and skeptical, maybe even apathetic. They're not excited about new products. They might still refresh them regularly because their devices start getting less useful as time goes on, but they're not enthusiastic about it. And Pay puts a lot of the blame on the products themselves, although I think really the blame goes on the companies that have created this this incredible rapid refresh cycle that has kind of burned us all out, Right, Like when there's a new one every single year, there gets to be a point where it's hard to innovate in a way that sets something head and shoulders above everything that came before. Right, you start to refine and you make things more powerful and faster and more attractive, But it's hard to create something that is a huge leap forward. It tends to be smaller steps, and that just tends to get us less excited over time, because we start to come to expect these things like, of course it's gonna be faster, of course it's going to be prettier. What else does it have? That's kind of what pay was saying, And um, he wanted to create a company that would design awesome devices that people would want to use, devices that could connect people to each other and include really cool features along the way. So he launched Nothing Technology, which has already come out with a set of wireless earbuds called the ear one. It did that in one and the Nothing Phone, for those who don't know it, came out earlier this year too, in July. So this is a phone now that has been on the market for a few months now. Back one, the ear one bud's got pretty good reviews. And by the way, when I say ere one is really ear open bracket, one close bracket or parentheses if you prefer. So, Yeah, the both the phone and the ear have parentheses one in close parentheses after them. That's kind of how they're designating it. Just year one so whatever. Anyway, got really good reviews. People said that the sound quality was great, that the battery life was great, that it had a really neat kind of aesthetic to it because the case is made out of a clear plastic, transparent plastic. So that was kind of set it apart from like the white air pods from Apple or things like that. And it was obvious that nothing technology was going to produce stuff of of good quality and intriguing design. So the earbuds came out and the word was then that a phone was going to follow the next year, and that happened. It launched in London, England in July. All right, so let's talk a little bit about that phone. The phone's operating system, which I mentioned earlier, is a version of Android OS, is called Nothing OS. But Nothing didn't make their own operating system. Really, what they did was create a skin, a user interface that sits on top of an Android OS core or body if you prefer. And this is kind of what Google was planning for. When folks over at Google were first developing the Android operating system, Apple was preparing to launch the iPhone. So this is like two thousand seven, and folks over at Google, we're trying to create a next generation smartphone operating system that other manufacturers can install on their devices. Google wasn't really keen on jumping into the hardware business itself. All Right, I'm gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I'll talk more about Google's approach versus Apple's approach and how that would define the strategy that these two companies made when they were getting into the smartphone arena. But first, let's take this quick break, Okay. As I said before the break, Apple was coming into the smartphone market primarily as a hardware company. That's what Apple was known for. Everyone new Apple for its Mac computers and for its iPod devices, which had become monstrous lee popular in the mid two thousand's. Now more recently, the more recent years, Apple has started to shift to become more services focused. That's something that Tim Cook has been leading the charge on in order to generate revenue by having Apple make more money from things like subscriptions and by taking a cut of in app transactions, so there's less of a focus on the hardware itself. I mean, Apple still makes hardware, and they still put a lot of effort into it, but the push from a revenue standpoint has really kind of shifted to services and less on how many of these things can we sell this. By the way, it's sort of what pay was getting at when he was arguing that device design had kind of lost its way. He's sort of imp lies at least in my mind. Maybe I'm inferring. I'm inferring that Pay is saying that companies like Apple no longer innovate in design the way they used to. Uh their focused too much on finding ways to make money through services. By the way, that's something that around the world we're seeing regulators push back on, right because we've seen a lot of of developers complain that Apple locks them into a system and does not allow them to use any alternatives, and that that is anti competitive. So that's something else playing out around the world right now, Well over at Google, the plan all along was to provide an operating system platform that other companies could use, because that operating system naturally emphasizes Google's other services, and that's where Google derives revenue. So Google was kind of looking at this services approach from the beginning and wasn't really keen on getting into making its own smartphones, so Google would not benefit directly from hardware sales, but down the road, the company would make bookoos of buckos because hundreds of millions of people would be using phones with an operating system that tends to guide people into using Google services. And again, Google has also gotten in trouble for this, and there have been regulators claiming that Google practices anti competitive strategies in the market. But this means there's a fundamental difference between iOS and Android, and it gets to the very core of this. iOS is only meant to run on Apple devices, right, You're only supposed to run iOS on things like iPhones and iPads and that kind of stuff. Android operating system is meant to run on whatever hardware a manufacturer wants to put it on, assuming that they certify with Google to run Android and manufacturers can tweak Android too that it doesn't have to just be a pure droid experience. They can actually put their own user interface on top of the Android operating system. They can also include their own apps as native apps on that, so that if you were to get say a Motorola smartphone versus the Samsung smartphone back in the day, you could have very different apps on the homepage on there. Also, phone carriers can get in on this too, so if you have T Mobile versus if you have a T and T, you could also have different apps pre installed on your phone and on the home page. Now what this means is you could buy two totally different Android phones made by two different manufacturers, running on two different phone carriers. And even though they're both wearing the same operating system, even if all the internals are the same, like they're using the same processor, they've got the same amount of memory, the same amount of storage space. You can have a very different look to the home page on the two different devices, and often users lack the permissions to remove some of those native apps that the various manufacturers and carriers have pre installed on the phone. So you get a phone it's got an app on it that you don't want, you never use, but you can't remove it. It's just stuck there. Now, we have a name for this kind of software. We call it bloat where so this is the stuff that manufacturers and carriers add on top of a device and users are not typically able to remove it, and it bloats the operating system. So not only might you be irritated that there's this app on your phone that you don't want but you can't take it off, you might also get mad that that app or apps are taking up space on your phone that you wanted to use for something else. Like you might think, oh, I'm not going to be able to take as many photos as I want because this app I don't want. There's no way for me to get rid of it, and I can't free up that space or free up that processing. It's slowing my phone down, and it's making the experience less enjoyable. That is the kind of issue with bloatwear. Well Nothing touts its version of Android is being free of bloatwear. They say it's more of a pure Android OS experience that is free of bloatwear, and presumably that means that you could also uninstall any apps that come preinstalled on a Nothing phone. I don't know that for a fact, but if it's truly free of bloatwear, it should be possible. Now. The company also says it uses quote bespoke widgets, fonts, sounds, and wallpapers end quote bespoke. Okay. I love tech and stuff, but marketing speak sometimes makes my eyes roll around uncontrollably in my head. I am sure it's very pretty to look at, I have no doubt about it, but bespoke okay. Anyway, One benefit that Nothing touts of its phone is that the operating system doesn't prioritize first party apps over third party apps. So what that means is that whatever you install on a Nothing phone should run just as smoothly, just as well as any native apps preinstalled on that phone, any apps from Nothing itself. They should all run at the same capability based upon the phone's technical specs, which we will get into in a bit. So if you were to install an app that had a greater requirement on the hardware than a Nothing app would, yes, that will make a difference. But it's saying we are not prioritizing our own stuff over anyone else's. This phone is yours, and whatever you put on it should run as as well as possible based on the hardware. One example they give is a Tesla app that lets you use your phone to do stuff like unlock your Tesla vehicle. Now, the company also says that the phone tracks your app usage so that your most used apps are ready to load right away. So if you happen to use something like a Netflix app right to watch videos all the time on your phone, then the Nothing phone essentially prioritizes that app so that it takes less time to pop up once you select it, and and there's less lag there. So apps that you use much less frequently are quote frozen to conserve power end quote, which I think just means it has to go through the whole loading process in order to get those active. Oh and the phone one also has a native n f T gallery where you can display your n f T s and even track their prices on your home screen, so you can display the digital things you've purchased and how much they're worth. Now y'all already know how I feel about n f T s, The fact that this display incorporates prices into it feels really a key. It just reinforces the criticisms I have about n f T S in general, so this ain't a feature that I find particularly compelling. Also, it's curious to me that there's still kind of promoting that just because I feel like the general feeling about n f T S has really become much more negative, except for that small niche group of n f T enthusiasts and evangelists. But that's neither here nor there. Now. If you flip the phone so that the back faces up, you'll see that you've got your gorilla glass coated aluminum case has the sort of industrial look because you're looking at just little panels of aluminium on the back. You'll see that as a couple of camera lenses. Um. So you also will see that if you get a notification or a call, that bright lights will light up on the back of the case in different shapes. There's actually two sets of lights. Each set has ten lights in it that can make these shapes. They are called glyphs. Nothing calls these glyphs. So one set of ten is for phone notifications. The other set of ten is for different ring tones. And you can actually tweak how these glyphs light up, and you can customize them so that the glyphs will light up one way for say, an incoming Facebook message, and they'll light up a different way for a Twitter notification. Or you can have one glyph appear if it's your mom calling you, and a totally different one appearing if it's a your significant other calling you. And you can tell who's calling or what's going on with your phone just by looking at the back of it and seeing the pattern of lights light up. I'll talk about that more when we come back from this quick break. Okay, So there are these lights, these glyphs that can light up in different shapes on the back of this phone and indicate that you've received a message or that someone's calling you. Now, I probably would end up spending ages setting up these glyphs to customize every notification I can and every incoming call that I could like in my context list, and then I would promptly forget what was what, so I would have to float the phone over anyway just to see what I was getting, like whether it was a phone call or a notification or whatever it might be. But that's on me, right, Like I can't imagine looking at one of twenty different potential patterns and immediately knowing, oh, that's a Twitter message or something. If I had actually used all of them, that is, if I only used a couple ensure, Yeah, I mean that makes it way easier. But if you're using all of them, you must have a better memory than I do, which isn't saying much if we're being honest, I can't really blame the phone for that. That's more of a failing on my part. I think the glyphs feature is kind of nifty. I mean, it's definitely the eye catching feature on the phone. It's probably the most effective way to grab someone's attention to the phone because it's different from what other phones do. This is something that sets it apart. But I would not call it a killer feature on the phone simply because it really has limited usefulness. One thing that is interesting is that these glyphs are are actually tied to specific notification sounds and ringtones on the phone. So, in other words, the way you would assign a glyph to, let's say, a Twitter notification is that you would go into the Twitter app and you would go into its settings, and you would change the notification sound for an incoming tweet to a specific sound on the list. That sound correlates to one of the ten glyphs for notifications, and so if you have sounds turned on, you'll get that specific notification sound and the corresponding glyph pattern will light up. So, in other words, what you're really doing is you're changing sounds and ring tones. You're not really choosing a specific glyph so much as you're choosing the sound that corresponds to that glyph. So you're stuck with the pre made ring tones to choose a specific glyph for specific people. So if there's a glyph you really like but you hate the ring tone, well, you can put your phone on silent, the glyph will light up, the ring tone won't play, but you're stuck with that ring tone with that glyph. Right. You can't change the ring tone and keep that same glyph. You'll get whatever glyph goes with the new ring tone. Um, I just think it's kind of a weird gimmick more than a feature. That quote brings us all back together, all right, So let's talk about actual specs here. So the phone's processor is a WELLcom snap Dragon seven seven eight G plus. This chip set debuted last year and the seven series of snap Dragon chips are end snap Dragons high end range, but they are below like flagship level, so kind of like between flagship and mid range. So it's a good processor, but it's not top of the line. It's not the best of the best. This does, however, mean that the phone isn't gonna cost as much because the processors not as expensive. It also has five G connectivity, so you're able to tap into that. So in places that have the high density, you know, high frequency five G, you can get that incredible responsiveness on five G. The problem is that's just not available everywhere. The distance of transmission for that level of five G is pretty limited and it can't do stuff like go through walls, for example, So you will get that incredible speed in specific instances, but not everywhere. There are two camera lenses on the back of the phone. The first is a regular fifty megapixel sensor with optical image stabilization. A quick reminder on megapixels here, it's been a long time since I've really talked about megapixels. Essentially, megapixel tells you the number of dots or points of light that will make up a digital image, and this is true no matter how large the screen is. So fifty megapixels tells you that the photos you take will have essentially fifty million little points that make up that image. This is oversimplifying things, but that's essentially what it means. So in the good old days digital camera companies, back when we would just buy regular consumer digital cameras, before cell phones had decent cameras in them, they would use high megapixel numbers as sort of a metric of quality, like this phone is better because it has more megapixels. That's kind of an oversimplification because there are a lot of other factors that are important in determining each quality. It's not just megapixel count. High megapixel count is important if you plan on doing something like showing off digital images on a large screen. Right, let's say that you're taking photos on a camera and you're planning on putting those photos on a giant television. Well, you want a high megapixel count so that that image still looks good on the big screen and doesn't look grainy or anything like that. Or maybe you want to print out giant posters of whatever you're taking photos of. You want high megapixel count so that the resolution is still good when you're on this much larger format. That's where megapixels are really important. The second camera on the Nothing phone one is an ultra wide lens, but it also has a fifty megapixel sensor, so five zero megapixel sensor. There's also a front facing camera on the phone. This one has a more modest sixteen megapixels. Now I say more modest because again, I remember when consumer digital cameras were maxing out at like ten or twelve megapixels. So just having a sixteen megapixels a front facing camera, it's incredible when you if you've been around long enough to have seen how digital camera technology has improved over the last two decades, really three decades, I'm getting old, so pretty incredible in that regard. The phone is capable of recording video add up to four K resolution, which is pretty impressive. The screen on the phone is oh lad, it's organic led. It has a one hurts or fresh rate that actually is really impressive. That's one of the things about this phone that I find pretty amazing. It's better than a lot of flagship phones out there that max out at around sixty hurts. Now, in case you're not familiar with the term refresh. Essentially, this refers to the number of times that the screen renders itself. A refreshes each second, so hurts means the screen refreshes a hundred twenty times per second. For you. This creates a smoother experience when you're scrolling through the phone, or it can improve the experience if you're using your phone to do stuff like play games on it. The screen measures six and a half inches on the diagonal and has a resolution of ten eighty by two hundred, so not like super high resolution. But it's also a small screen, so you don't need super high resolution at that size. And and at how far you're away you are from the screen, you're gonna be pretty close to it. Nothing Technology advertised the screen as being capable of a brightness of up to twe knits. A knit in i T, as you probably have gathered at this point just from context, is a measurement of the brightness of light. So one knit is equal to one candela per square meter. A candela refers to candle power. So now you're saying that's not really giving me an idea of brightness. Well, let's put it this way. The noonday sun has a brightness of about one point six billion knits, so you know, just think, okay, well, what would twelve knits look like then? Now, according to ultra Vision LED Solutions, the average television has a brightness of around four hundred fifty knits, so significantly brighter than that. Right, it's almost three times as bright. But then you don't typically take your brand new TV outside into bright sunlight, but you do take your smartphone out there. So that explains why phones need to be brighter than televisions, because in sunlight, if it's a dim screen, you can't see anything on it. However, I should add that a review of the phone one that was published by The Verge revealed that the actual max brightness was closer to seven hundred knits and that Nothing Technology had clarified that the company had eased off on the brightness in order to preserve battery power. That you know, if you were blasting at twelve knits, you're draining the battery much faster. But that a future firmware update could remove this kind of throttle feature and allow you to go all the way up to twelve hundred. So maybe by the time you hear this, the max really will be twelve knits anyway, according to the review even seven hundred knits was more than sufficient for upgrading the phone indirect sunlight without a problems, so there's no real issue here. It's it seems like it's pretty good in that regard. While nothing technology says. The phone one has a battery life to support up to eighteen hours of use, the Verge reported that the phone's charge was pretty much drained after a single day's use, not like twenty four hours, but just like using a phone in a typical day. However, the reviewer does say that they tend to put their phones through heavy use scenarios, so you should imagine someone who's on their phone frequently throughout the day, but at by the end of the day the phone was pretty much out of charge. The phone supports thirties three W wired charging, so it can go back up to around fifty power pretty quickly, like within twenty minutes or so. It can also charge wirelessly with a g charging station at fifteen W. It's slower than if you used a wired charger, but it is capable of charging wirelessly, which puts it in a pretty small subset of of of medium and smartphones It can also reverse charge other devices like those earbuds I talked about at five W so you can actually wirelessly charge your earbuds from your phone if you want to, which is again nifty is not something that you typically see in mid range phones. Uh. It does not include a charger itself, so you would actually have to go out and buy the cable and plug and everything uh separately, but that's not that unusual in in devices that are sold in Europe. All told, the base level Nothing Phone one comes in at three pounds, which is about four bucks right now due to the British pound being weaker against the US dollar than I've ever seen in my life. That will get you a phone with eight gigabytes of RAMS and a hundred twenty eight gigabytes of storage space, and you can upgrade to a twelve gigabyte RAM and two hundred fifty six gigabytes storage version of the phone one. That one would cost four nine pounds are around five hundred fifty bucks American again due to that exchange rate. So this puts the Nothing Phone into the category of mid range smartphones. It's not priced as a budget phone. It's more expensive than budget phones, but It's also half as expensive as the flagship phones that are out there now. I have not personally used one of these phones because I'm in the States, but my impression based upon what I have seen, is that this is a good mid range Android smartphone. Now, some features that you're just not gonna find in most other mid range phones on the market, like that reversible charging feature. The glyphs are a really nifty idea. It really does make the phone, you know, stand out, but it wouldn't be a practical feature for someone like me. I would think they were pretty, and then I would never worry about them again. I would just as soon keep my phone face up so I can see what notifications are coming in, rather than sit there and say, huh, that is a blinking see which of the which is the things that I assigned a blinking C two I wouldn't remember. So in short, my first impression is that pay is following a similar playbook with nothing technology as he did over at one Plus. He's creating smartphones and accessories that includes some nifty features at mid range prices, and I think this is awesome, but I also think it falls far far short of the marketing messages we've received. I don't see the Nothing phone as transforming smartphones in general. Um, which is again that's kind of the hype that was around this phone before it was launched. There were outlets out there saying that, you know, if we're to believe what's being said, that Nothing phone is going to change everything, it's not. It just isn't. Um. It's a good phone, but it's not going to transform smartphones. Uh. It's a good phone and a good price pretty much, full stop. So I think the other takeaway we can keep in mind with this episode, it's one that we all know, but it bears repeating. Marketing can be deceiving. In fact, marketing frequently is deceiving. Maybe it it uh exaggerates things, Maybe it couches things in language where the language doesn't really mean anything, like you can't quantify it. That's how Nothing phone was, Like Nothing phones, marketing was all about this, these these feelings and these abstract concepts that you can't tie to specific metrics, right like, how do you measure how deep your experience is? There's nothing to measure. So that's something that you should always keep in mind when you encounter that kind of messaging it's just like, does this actually mean something? Is it? Is it something that you can quantify, or is it just there to kind of get your interests? And that's it. Um. Sometimes marketing lies by omission, right, Like they'll leave out important stuff that if you knew, would very much change your perception of the device. So it's just good to remember that when we encounter marketing, any kind of marketing, we should kind of keep a skeptic hat on. Whether that marketing trying to sell us a product or a service, or an image of a brand or just an idea. We need to approach with some critical thinking. Don't just dismiss stuff. Don't just say, oh, they're marketing it, so there must not be anything to it. That's not the case either. It just means examine those claims carefully, ask what they actually mean. Maybe they don't mean anything, And that's just good to know before you go into it. Uh yeah, always important to keep that in mind whenever anyone is trying to market stuff to you, or as Wesley from The Princess Bride would say, life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something. All right, that's it. Thanks again for this request. I would thank you by name, but you didn't leave it in the message, so I don't have a name to thank But it was great to be able to look into this I and there nothing fune to kind of gone over my head, largely, I think, because again, it's not a United States based phone, right it's based over in the UK, and it's going to be sold in Europe and places like that, but not here in the US. And I missed it because of that, which is a shame because obviously there are tons of really important text stories playing out all over the world, not just here in the United States. It's just very easy for me to miss those because they don't get as much coverage here, and if I don't know what I'm looking for, I'm not going to find it. So thank you for that suggestion. It was really interesting to dive into this and to look into it. I think that nothing technology as well as one plus are doing something important. They're creating these mid range phones that really are competitive and have these interesting features in them. I just feel like they are being marketed in an unrealistic way, which is a shame because I think that they could stand just fine on their own. I look at these and based upon what I've read and seen, Uh, they look great, I guess. In order to really stand out against other phones that are in that same pricing range and against higher end phones that are touted as flagships, you've got to do something. But it just I don't know. I get a little antsy when I encounter marketing messaging like that. That's it for this episode. I haven't done an episode where I focused on a specific technology like this, like a specific product, in a very long time. UM. I tend to avoid it, but I don't mind doing them. So if you have suggestions for a specific product you think I should really take a look at and say, what is it that makes this product what it is? How does it stand apart from others in this category, I'd be glad to do that too. I don't do reviews, so if anyone's out there thinking, oh good, I can get them to review this product, I represent I don't do those, so don't We're not going to do any reviews. It will be more of an objective look at these sort of of of devices and kind of a dive into the history and development of them as well. But if you want to leave me any kind of message whether it's a suggestion or you have a question or anything like that. There are two ways to do it. One is to do as I said before. You download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download, it's free to use. You navigate over to the text stuff page. You can just use the search for text stuff and go there. You'll see there's a little microphone icon on that page. You click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length if you like. You can even tell me if I can use the message in a future episode. I'm all about opt in, so I'm not gonna use I'm never gonna play a voice message unless the person specifically says I'm totally cool with you doing that. In that case, I will include it in an upcoming episode, which is fun, but yeah, I would never do that without permission. The other way to get in touch with me, which doesn't involve talking into anything at all. I know that can be kind of and an anxiety trigger for a lot of people. No judgment, it can. It totally does for me and I do a podcast. But the other way you can get in touch with me is to use Twitter, the handle that we use for the show. Is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tech Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.