Nothing Phone (1) screen brightness currently not as high as initially claimed

This doesn’t seem out of the ordinary as the advertised 1,200+ nits peak brightness rates for all smartphones are not achievable in general day-to-day use but only in some HDR content. But with Nothing Phone (1), that doesn’t seem to be the case, even in the most niche of use cases.

Nothing Phone (1) peak brightness

Going into the story, the Nothing Phone (1) can’t go all the way up to 1,200nits of brightness. German Publication ComputerBase revealed this in a report and asked Nothing to clarify the same as it couldn’t reach the advertised peak brightness in its tests “in any scenario”.

The reason behind this is that the underlying display hardware is capable of reaching the peak, but the software is currently preventing it from moving past 700nits, said the company’s spokesperson. “The hardware is capable of reaching up to 1,200 nits peak brightness, but this is currently capped by the software to 700 nits. This decision was made to ensure a balanced user experience regarding heat and battery consumption. We look forward to hearing from our users about this and will monitor feedback closely to understand if this should be addressed in future software updates.“

From what it looks like, Nothing’s hardware, software and marketing team weren’t communicating properly on this matter since the hyped 1,200nits brightness figure has been seen in marketing documents. If the software is only capable of 700nits though the panel is capable of 1,200nits, this should be the most realistic figure to advertise. It remains to be seen whether there will be a future software update to enable the higher brightness or a toggle to allow people to enable/disable peak brightness while taking a hit on the battery life.