Review: Nothing Ear 1

This isn’t the Pixel Buds 2 that I broke by messing around with it, so I figured I’d find a replacement. The requirements were pretty simple:

• Supports wireless charging. I can’t stand plugging in a cable every time — it’s just not elegant.
• Long battery life, and sound quality that’s acceptable.
• Native Fast Pair support. The more native the better.

So I set my sights on the very lifestyle-y Nothing Ear 1. It had just launched in black, so I found a Macau proxy buyer on eBay and got a brand new one.

Not expensive, and it had everything I wanted.

I’ve been using it for about half a year now, so I can talk about how it feels. Short version: very much worth buying.

• Sound-wise I find it leans bright, with not much low end. There’s an official EQ, but I basically never use it.
• Maybe because I updated the firmware right when I got it, but I haven’t run into any obvious dropouts — at least fewer than with the Pixel Buds 2.
• The battery life is genuinely great. Four hours is no problem, and that’s with ANC on.
• Noise cancelling works well; you can clearly feel the noise go down.
• Wind noise reduction is OK too, though it depends on how you’re wearing them.
• Fast Pair is a gift to civilization. It’s roughly the Apple/Pixel thing: hold the case near your phone, open it, and a popup asks you to connect. Works great.
• By default you need to install the Ear 1 app, but it seems well integrated with the system, has no ads, and updates the firmware easily.
• The default touch gestures are about the same as most TWS earbuds, but there’s no single tap. I assume that’s to avoid accidental touches.
• The biggest annoyance is the double-tap gesture (pause/play). Most of the time it does nothing in NetEase Cloud Music, while it’s fine in other players. No idea why.
• The earbud battery level integrates with the system, but it seems to only do 10% steps — 90%, 80%, 70%, like that. Higher precision isn’t supported.
• There aren’t any particularly good cases online, just silicone sleeves, and they pick up dust easily once on. But that’s all there is.
• A company in India makes protective stickers for these, but thanks to the pandemic I can’t get them for now.
• They ship with a clear protective film on them, so if you go caseless there’s at least some basic protection.

All in all, this is well worth buying, especially if you can get it through a proxy buyer for under 500 yuan. It pairs nicely with a near-stock Android system, looks good, supports wireless charging, and has solid battery life. For music and podcasts it’s a good choice. The only annoyance is how easily the shell scratches, and putting a case on makes it ugly. Pick your poison.

One last thing: there’s been a lot of controversy about these earbuds online, and most of it is about the marketing. The Nothing Ear 1 campaign has also been held up by plenty of overseas KOLs as a negative example. A lot of people abroad say Nothing used special tactics to make sure KOLs gave them good reviews.

First, they gave away a ton of units to KOLs for giveaways. When you’re running a giveaway, it’s awkward for the KOL to trash the thing. Then there were “review guidelines” — KOLs were only allowed to talk about the design and unboxing, not the sound and so on, dodging the product’s weak points. There’s also the favor factor: organizing events with KOLs, handing out gifts, making them reluctant to say anything too negative.

The KOL environment abroad is a bit better than at home, but with that whole combo from Nothing Ear 1, you got the rare sight of unanimous praise on YouTube, which endlessly inflated users’ expectations — while on forums a big chunk of users complained it was garbage and worse than the AirPods Pro, etc.

I don’t get why a manufacturing company would be so bent on creating a fake image of 100% positive reviews, to the point where lots of users assume the KOLs got paid off. It seems like a lot of mainland Chinese companies, or companies that have worked with them, use this kind of marketing play to build a “looks wonderful” market reputation. What it brings is unease for users like me — when everyone praises a product like it has no flaws at all, that’s exactly what worries me.

Fortunately the Nothing Ear 1 itself isn’t bad. Given the price has been falling lately, it’s still worth buying. As a replacement for the Pixel Buds 2, it’s close to perfect.