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Hands-on with the Nothing Phone clone: Not so lit
The Unihertz Luna, a Nothing Phone 1 clone inspired smartphone, has been making the news rounds for a few weeks now. But we’ve all been wondering: What do those geometric lights do? Are they just pretty decorations or do they serve a purpose?
Well, I got my hands on the Unihertz Luna at MWC 2023 and went digging in for more information. The first thing you’ll notice is that this is using a lower-quality LED strip with visible individual diodes, unlike the Nothing Phone 1. The lights can get very, very bright, and the light bleed is obvious around them. In comparison, the Nothing Phone 1’s light strips are sleek and glow in a very uniform way.
The Unihertz Luna comes in white and black, but it also offers two different LED variants. One of them is white-only, and the other switches colors. I saw it light up in purple, pink, red, and blue, but it’s also supposed to do yellows and greens.
The lights can serve as a notification or music visualization. No charging animation or camera flash, though.
The issue is that I couldn’t control the color on any of the phones. Digging into the LED lights settings section, I found a brightness slider that can dim or brighten the lights, as well as toggles for the ringtone, notifications, and music visualization. You can also choose between six light patterns or keep the lights on indefinitely, but that’s about it. No manual color choice, no charging animation, and no camera flashlight. I tried to look for those options and came up empty.
The music-synchronized lights were cool, but I can’t imagine using that feature unless I was bopping with my buds at the skate park.
The Unihertz Luna comes in a white-only light version or with a multicolored LED strip.
Aside from the lights, everything about the Unihertz’ design is similar to the Nothing Phone 1. The glass back, visible circuitry and screws, flat and iPhone-inspired design, and rounded corners — all of it looks similar but bigger thanks to the 6.81-inch display.
Only the camera module is different. The square bump houses three lenses: a 108MP main sensor, a 20MP “night vision” camera, and a 2MP macro lens. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, an infrared blaster, and a 5,000mAh battery too.
Blatantly copying a distinct design may not be the brightest idea Unihertz had, but hey, here we are talking about it and its phone so the publicity stunt worked. Even Carl Pei posed with it. The Unihertz Luna will launch in March for around $300-€300 for the version sporting 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.