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I had no idea that smartphones like this existed. And I've managed to secure nine phones just like this. With each one possessing an increasingly bizarre capability that you probably won't see coming. So, let's test them and rank them from S. I want every future phone to be like them to F. I never want to see this weird feature again. Starting with the side phone, which is already pretty unique because it comes in pieces. So you get most of the phone over here, but then a severed number pad right next to it. And the idea is that this lets you swap between three different forms of physical input. So the number pad feels pretty standard, but what is cool is because each of these modules is
connected to the phone via physical pins, there is zero lag when you're entering a number or clicking the home button. And then when you want to change, there's a tiny lever at the bottom. It's not actually as fiddly as it looks. And then your new module, like the keypad just kind of falls into position. Man, that's satisfying. Oh, look at this. So, it's saying I can make any of these keys trigger an action. So, record trigger. Let's press this right side button. And then I can say I want a short press of that to launch an app. And that app can be gallery. That's fast as hell. This I did not expect. And even when you're typing, I kind of thought looking at this that it would be like one of those old Nokia bricks where you
have to tap each key three times to select the letter. Whereas actually it's using smart predictive text to figure out which of the two letters on each key that I'm meaning to enter. It's perfectly picking up what I'm trying to write. And this is legit my first time typing on it. And then the final module, basically just an iPod scroll wheel. Feels like even the packaging of it is inspired by Apple. Except the funny thing about this is it doesn't actually scroll. This is just a series of nine buttons arranged to look like an iPod and it doesn't feel very high quality to use either. I can only think this was purely designed because it looks cool for marketing. Overall, I'd
say B tier for side. I can do you one better, though, because it turns out Honor has made a smartphone into a purse. Just to be clear, it doesn't go in your purse. This is the purse. So, the device is on top. It's a folding phone. And then, aside from the usual stuff, it does also come with this extremely gappy case. Can you even call this a case? Spine crossed. So, the idea is you buy and attach this chain. Yeah, I know. Incredibly, the purse phone doesn't actually come with the purse chain. What are they expecting you to do? Like hold it in your armpit for the whole night out. And then you're going to pair that with this magic wallet app, which can make the screen display an image of a purse. Wait
a second. That's crazy good. It's actually using the gyro sensors in the phone to display realistic chain effects on your virtual purse. Can't lie though, as far as attention to detail goes, the fact that your digital purse still obeys gravity is kind of impressive. I'm just curious like a Yeah. What do you think to your husband? You look very pretty. You should wear that all the time. Yeah, your screen's timed out. Oh, there's some pretty wacky options. Enable. Wow, that is busy. You'll stand out. I'm seriously impressed with the amount of styles you can pick from. There's even one that's just an honor logo. The
amount of options they've given you for purse faces is it's actually insane. Oh wow, that is stunning. I think I spent too much time with the purse. And you can even set it so that your purse stays on for a total of 30 minutes before going dark. But it's just who on a night out, for example, where you most need your phone to make sure it lasts all night so that you can call a cab at the end, is prioritizing using their phone's very limited battery to set a new moving motion purse background once every 30 minutes. Not to mention, this feels like an absolutely fantastic way to smack your phone into door handles. And bear in mind, this isn't just any old phone screen. This is a folding
screen, the most notoriously delicate surface known to man. So, I'm always glad to see companies experiment like this, but this particular experiment, I don't feel like I ever need to see again. Dtier. Give this thing even 6 months and it's going to look like a toddler's iPad. Now, we've tested a ton of minimal phones over the years, but the problems are almost always the same. To get a device that lets you truly disconnect, you end up having to sacrifice having decent hardware, the quality of your cameras, screen, battery that you would otherwise get on a more mainstream phone. And so, the Balance phone does something a little different because they've made their own minimal software and their own brand and packaging experience, even
their own case. But the actual smartphone that Balanc's entire experience is based on is unashamedly just a Samsung Galaxy S25, which intriguingly arrives still sealed. I'm kind of curious if this company is taking a Samsung phone and flashing their own software onto it, how is the original box still intact? Turns out what this company does is buys a load of Samsung phones, but then assigns the IMEI numbers to their servers. And so it's only when you first set them up and connect the phones online that they realize they actually need the balance software, and they
download it and install it themselves. Sounds like a massive faf, but honestly, I think it's paid off. The phone feels much faster than any minimal device I can remember. And it's such a relief to have proper Samsung cameras as opposed to something rustled together by a company who has zero history of image processing. Feels like a good example of just leave the experts to do what the experts do best. And then layered on top of Samsung's hardware is the balance software. And this is the real deal when it comes to keeping you on track. You see all of your apps in a list with no color, no icons, no notification dots. So, it is definitely reducing the temptation to quickly pop into something
for a scrolling sesh. You get the full Play Store, too. But look at this. If I try and download a distracting social media app like Instagram, security policy prevents installation of this app. Same is true for games, dating apps, gambling apps, even like video players. I'm curious, does it even let you use YouTube then? Oh, it's got an enable button and you can't press it. It's just like having another mom. One of the other things they're trying to do here is keep you away from adult content. And the extent that they go to try and avoid this is kind of mad because even though you have an internet browser, you can't even go into
Google images just in case you stumble into some. So, I definitely wouldn't go as far as to say that all phones should be like this. But if I was seeking a way to truly lock in on life without completely disappearing off the grid, this is amazing. like it's not just adding some arbitrary restriction app that you can uninstall as soon as you have a slight lapse in discipline. Once this software is installed, there's no removing these restrictions. But if the balance phone is like a seriously strict parent, then the Ukel WP100 Titan is like the cool uncle who basically says do whatever you want because you're about to see this phone has it all.
Feels like you could lose a foot if you drop this box at the wrong time. My goodness. I love that they've added this little AI sticker on top as if they forgot to print it on the box itself and then we're like, "Oh my god, no one's going to buy this phone if we don't say AI." Well, I can't say I'm surprised, but the phone itself is absolutely monolithic. And then there's a hand strap. That adds up. A nice orange cable So, staggering feature number one, the camping light. Let's get the lights off. Okay, so this is the phone's normal flashlight. To be fair, it doesn't feel particularly lacking in any way. But then, right next to the flashlight, there's an app that you won't have seen before. camping
lights. I assume this will be brighter. Oh my god, is that as bright as our video lights? Could we actually just light our entire videos with this phone? Seriously impressive capability. Definitely enough of a step over a traditional flashlight to count as a feature. Number two, you tap this little widget on the home screen and that turns on an inbuilt projector. Blam my neck. That was quick. It's got an inbuilt fan. Wow. So, imagine we're doing a movie night for four and it's it's just a Mr. Who's the Boss video. I've actually seen quite a few phones over the years that come with projectors inside, but they
always fall down when it comes to brightness. That is extremely usable. Oh, but the other cool thing is it actually has keystone correction built in. So, as I rotate the phone around and shoot at different angles, it's correcting for that angle by itself. Did not expect to say this, but bang on. But there's one more night feature. This phone has night vision. So, open up the camera, go over to night vision. It's using four infrared lights. They basically flood the scene with invisible infrared and then it's got a sensor to be able to pick up how that light bounces back. So, what I can see is it's as good as daytime and actually runs at a decent frame rate too for
night vision. And then number four, this phone has a 33,000 mAh battery inside. Or should I say this 33,000 mAh battery has a phone built around it. You think your iPhone does a good job lasting all day? They're saying this can do up to 2 weeks of continuous use. How about we just open up a massive 10-hour YouTube video and then leave it playing. See where it ends up at the end of the video. But now on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, did you know that ZTE made a phone so portable that you can wear it? Yes, at least as far as the marketing is concerned. Not a smartwatch. The Nubia Alpha is an actual fully functional smartphone.
The fact that they've got this OLED display wrapping halfway around your wrist is genuinely impressive. Wow, that's a lot of settings I can see all at once. There's a pre-installed app here called Barrage, which I think is just displaying text of your choosing in a continuous loop. Got to say, I feel pretty cool right now. fill up one of those NPCs from Cyberpunk. Although I have absolutely no idea what message I'm currently broadcasting, I'm also thinking, is this not just like a little bit too much display because from almost every angle you look at it, something is being cut off. So realistically, am I going to really just spend half my time going like this to try and read things?
Oh man, not comfy. Maybe that's why they added gestures. So apparently if I just Ooh, really responsive. Damn. Although, come to think of it, do I just look like I'm consistently swatting a fly? Have I lost the one gram of aura I had? You can't do that for very long. It does have all the smartwatch health tracking features you'd expect. You can call and you can send texts, but there isn't anything resembling a proper app store here, which I guess makes sense. I can't imagine they've made Genshin playable in a 1:10 aspect ratio. What about the camera? That is not flattering. Why is it upside down? I'm definitely using the watch the correct way they intended. And the shutter button is in the right
position. Is this how you let people know that you're calling from a Nubia Alpha smartphone? Technically, this product has already failed. It was released in 2019, and I don't think many people bought one. But the question is, do I think a 2026 reboot could have a chance? Not for me. Probably not for most people. I'd go se. But then again, for someone looking for a digital detox device, the kind of person who would be interested in the balance phone where you can't really do much anyway. So, at that point, why not just have the most lightweight, seamless form factor, too. Don't judge me, but I bought a phone from Tik Tok. For some reason, there was a moment a few months ago where my entire feed was suddenly randomly filled
with people using this supposedly transparent phone. Completely clear phone spotted in San Francisco, it says. And the device actually sold out entirely after going so viral. So, it's here. And obviously, it's every bit as stupid as I thought it would be cuz here's the phone and it's a block of acrylic. But really, it's the note that comes with it that has me truly worried about us as a society. Hand it to a child and watch their mind light up. Rub it for comfort when you're anxious. As a prayer, softly recite the apps that you aren't opening. Is this the right time for chat? Are we cooked? Genuinely though, if this is some sort of joke that I'm just not privy to, fantastic. If people
are actually unironically buying this phone to help them, we have some big problems. Either way, I hate Tik Tok. F. So, here's our next Tik Tok phone. I wish I was joking. The Eco Mind One is one of the most funded phones on Kickstarter of all time. Largely fueled, I imagine, by reams of Tik Toks with millions of views because it has a rather unexpected form factor. Surprisingly good unboxing experience, though. [snorts] It comes with a case. Pretty big help. I can't think of a lot of phones with the dimensions of a sticky note. Not one, but two glass screen protectors, cuz even they know you'll screw up the first
one. Then the phone itself. Ooh, they've even got a custom SIM ejector. Got to respect little touches like this. But here's the meat and potatoes. If the last few phones had something strange about them, then this thing is like layers upon layers of weird. So, it's a square for starters, but honestly, I thought this would make it super hand friendly. It's actually surprisingly uncomfortable. And the power button is so far down that you basically need to hold the thing up here if you want it to be reachable, which combined with just generally how much wasted space there now is when you're watching videos or playing games is a good reminder of why this is not a common site. Then there's this camera.
Yes, camera single. So, you can take photos of what's in front of you as usual. But then if you want to take a selfie, you pull the camera around. To be fair, if it took amazing photos and videos, then being able to use this one camera on both the front and the back would be a blessing, but it doesn't. Well, hey, at least it stops at any angle, so you can take a nice shot of the ceiling. Great news for J. Jonah Jameson. But the single most bizarre and by far coolest thing about this is that if we hold this button down, we can slide on over from stock Android to Ekko's own AI operating system.
They're saying that for all the AI tools you see here, even though they need internet, this phone gets you that internet for free. You don't need Wi-Fi. You don't need a SIM of your own. And they're supporting this across like 60 countries. And they seem like pretty great AI features. It feels very tailored to students. So there's a chatbot that gives you access to chatgbt, deepseeek, gemini, and claude. AI study is really interesting, too, where you take a photo of your problem, and it's pretty well designed to suggest how you might go about solving it without actually solving it for you. And then AI notes, which incredibly is the
prettiest notes app I've ever used, and it ain't close. So I do think other companies could learn a thing or two from Ekko about interface design and this whole internet features included business. But then again, you could also just use Sale, our sponsor, to download a data package for whatever country you're going to on whatever phone you're using already in like 30 seconds. You might pay like $10, but then it means you don't have to use a square phone with a weird rotating camera. And I just really like that SY lets me organize my life because I can buy the data now, but it only activates and starts getting used the moment I land in that country. So, I'm going to give the Mine One phone
a B tier on balance. And with the code boss, you can also get 15% off any s eim plans. Now, if you thought that modular side phone we saw at the start was cool, then the techno atom modular concept phone that I've managed to get in this box is about to blow your mind wide open. I feel like I've just discovered the holy grail of consumer technology. Oh my gosh, there's a power bank attachment, a speaker, a 4.9 mm super slim phone. Well, this doesn't feel like a 4.9 mm super slim phone. Oh, well, of course, we've got a full-on dedicated mirrorless camera module in here, so the labeling system clearly failed. Where's the actual phone, then?
Uh oh. Oh, this bag looks promising. Wow. Oh my god, that is thin. So, let's just get some perspective here. Our um chubby champion on the side is 35.6 mm. A standard Pro iPhone, current generation, is 8.75. The iPhone Air, one of the thinnest phones on the market, 5.6 mm. So, this being 4.9 is bonkers. This is so thin they couldn't even fit a USBC port. So yeah, this is an entirely portless phone. And a pretty sexy one, too. I wouldn't mind one of these. Daddy, chill. Assuming the battery lasts longer than about 40 minutes. And the idea is there's two sets of pins, one at the top, one at the bottom. And each of them
has magnets behind them. So that like the side phone, each of these modules can snap on either here or here and be powered by the phone. So what modules do we actually have? It's lightning round time. a 3,000 mAh battery pack. And incredibly, you can stack them. So you can stack other modules on top of one or even just multiple power banks on top of each other. Something called a free link. So you attach this one to your phone and then you attach another one to your friends, your friend who also happens to have this unreleased concept device. And then the two phones can communicate directly with each other without even needing a network. Very cool idea. A speaker unit. So clip that on. This is what the phone's audio
sounds like without the unit. Yep. Pretty trash. And now the speaker is on. Oh yeah, quite a bit better. A three times optical zoom module for the camera. And this takes you from this far away to this far away. My phone looks like Bender from Futurama. And then if that's not enough, you have this entire camera system, which actually has its own dedicated camera sensor alongside a mount for this fairly unpfortable telephoto lens, which is incredibly shaky, but to be fair, also incredibly capable. definitely does not look like phone footage anymore cuz well I guess it isn't really. Then also an action camera. This has a stable ultrawide camera built in and like everything else you can snap it onto here. But the extra benefit of all this
being modular is you can also take it off and attach it to a clip like this or a lanyard like this and it will carry on shooting. So you can even wear the thing. This is one of those things where it's incredibly technically impressive. Obviously, it's buggy and these connections are not secure enough because it's a concept device. But you can absolutely see the appeal of the picture it's painting. The problem I see though is to sell a lot of these to have a custom module ecosystem that's actually viable, you need to sell a lot of these base phones. For you to sell a lot of these base phones, this has to be really good in its own right. No one's going to buy something that's so compromised it needs you to attach
extras just to get basic functionality like a normalsiz battery or ports or a good speaker or a basic telephoto camera. But then if the phone is really good on its own right, why do I need all this? The whole modular phone thing always boils down to a niche proposition. But the problem with niche propositions is then you're not going to sell millions of base units. You're starting to see the problem. So, while of course the implementation here is class, the idea I can't give more than a B2. But it turns out the Atom was not the only bonkers boundary pushing phone that Techno cooked up recently because this one changes color and it arrived in a bag as all the greatest top secret devices seem to do. Oh god, I forgot
there's three phones inside of here. I'm so sorry, Techno. Allswwell though, I think. So, the idea is pretty much as simple as you pick a color. So, if I select this blue, oh my god, this is like psychedelic. And because it's using e- in tech, whatever you set isn't consuming any battery. And this frosted coating they've added on top is doing a stellar job, too, of making this e- in display just feel like part of the body as opposed to some kind of second screen. Here's the funniest part, though. You can take a photo. So, let's say this is my current favorite pair of swimming trunks. I do capture color. The phone can draw out the key colors from that photo and you can pick one of them. So, I could match my phone to my outfit
for the day. So, let's go for this sage green. It does do this classic e- in refreshing process before it gets to the final result. But now we're there. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. This is cool. I wouldn't choose it over actually important features, but if this became like a really space efficient thing that you could implement into a phone and it meant that you could customize your phone's back just as easily as you do the front, then why not? A tier. Right, time to check in on the Chungus. This has been playing videos for 2 hours and 27 minutes. Final chance to get your guesses in. The battery percentage is 97. 97%.
After that much video and the projection and the camp light and the flashlight, you know what? Fair enough. It's a tough one to rate because is anyone really daily driving a phone that's thicker than a literal brick. But the battery staggering camping light brighter than expected projector no longer a complete gimmick. I'd go A tier again. Not a bad showing from the weird and wonderful. Actually more wonderful than weird.
