I Tested the Weirdest Phones on the Internet.

These are seven of the strangest smartphones to ever exist. Each phone here has one thing about it that is completely unique. And so it's our job to find out which of them are game changers that other phones need to start copying and which of them are game overs that no one should ever try to make again.

Let's get stranger as we go. Starting with a brand new minimal phone, which is a bit of a trend in recent years, like phones that are purposefully stripped back to become less distracting. But this is meant to be the king of them.

Because while it might look on the surface like every other minimalist phone with its e- in display and its textbased user interface, this device also runs full Android 14 with complete access to the Play Store. And that is fascinating because either you could say, "Oh my god, the peace of mind of a minimalist phone combined with the full perks of a normal smartphone. Sign me up.

" But then on the other hand, if you now have access to every single app, hasn't this just become a normal smartphone? but now with a laggy black and white screen. I'm so curious.

What is Instagram like on this? It feels like just enough to be able to catch up with what your friends are up to while feeling paired back enough that I don't feel like I'm going to get lost in it. Okay, what about a game?

So, you swipe up and then you can search for apps here. I do think this physical keyboard was a good decision. Like, I'm not normally a fan of the idea, but typing on an e- in screen because of the slow refresh rate is usually one of the biggest turn-offs.

So, it's a really good way of getting around that. Oh, this is actually so cool. So, when you start typing, as soon as it realizes that there's only one app that you could be wanting to open, it just opens it.

So, PO for Pokémon and we're in. Damn, that was fast. So, this game is my current weakness.

Ah, okay. We have a bit of a contrast problem here. And while you can tune the display, there isn't actually a setting that's going to make this work perfectly.

You can set it to a low refresh rate, which makes it really clear, but then any moving object will consistently pulse like this. So, you kind of have to set it to the fast refresh rate option, but then it becomes pretty hard to read. That said, I wouldn't knock this too hard.

This is the closest I have ever seen an e- in phone feel like a normal smartphone. And they have also told me that they are working on updates to make this more balanced. And then there are also cameras.

There's a front one right in this bottom corner and then a 16 megapixel autofocus camera on the back, which is kind of trippy cuz while the photos look like this while they're on the phone, upload them to a computer and it's actually this. Not great, but not bad. So, is this a game changer?

I actually think that it is. Like, I'm not the target market for a minimalist phone. I need to be able to check our videos in full color before I post them.

I'm very attached to having a high-end camera system, but if minimalism was what you were searching for, then I really like that this lets you have minimalism, but in a way that you can decide what minimalism means to you. You have the flexibility to pick and choose what you'll let yourself do on it, and pretty much everything can work. I mean, the thing's even got a sidemounted fingerprint scanner.

Supports fast wireless charging. It's got a headphone jack. It's got expandable storage.

I'm a big fan. So, that was a niche product from a niche company. But what happens when you get a niche product from a mainstream company?

This is the Samsung Galaxy A80, and it has hands down one of the coolest hardware features of any [Music] smartphone because can your phone do this? I didn't think so. I actually remember going hands-on with this A80 at the launch event in 2019, thinking this needs to become a thing.

I mean, think about it. This system means that you just need to build one set of cameras, and you get to use that set of cameras on both the back and the front of the phone. And that makes it such a good selfie camera that this 2019 phone is still like better than my iPhone 16 Pro Max from 2025.

Doing the camera like this also erased the need for a selfie camera on the front, making this phone completely notchless, which Samsung was so proud of that they even named this the new infinity display technology. It's pretty clear why from 2019 to 2021, motorized camera systems exploded in popularity, very quickly becoming a standard expected smartphone feature. They were building and building and traction and then suddenly they stopped.

Motorized camera systems are actually generally a pretty bad idea. But why? Well, moving parts equals less protection from the elements.

Like, there's just so much more room for stuff to get inside. There's more things that can break. And actually, as a very good demonstration of this, we bought this phone refurbished.

And you can see when the camera flips around that it's not actually flipping to the completely flat state like it's supposed to. It's very slightly slanted up. The whole thing adds waiting time.

You know, it's cool the first 100 times you do it, but after that, you are just adding an extra 2 seconds every time you want to use the thing. The mechanism for this movement in itself takes up space which companies have now realized that people would rather spend on just having bigger batteries. But I think the single most important thing, a mechanism like this one that flips the whole set of cameras gets harder and harder to pull off the bigger the cameras that you're trying to flip are.

And so if you actually wanted to keep up with the camera quality of other phones, you can't realistically even pull this off. So, a pretty cool case study of an idea that you can see why Samsung wanted to try, but you can also see why Samsung decided that it needed to die. So, how do you get stranger than a phone that can change its camera?

Well, a phone that can change everything. This is the LG G5, which while still not actually the strangest LG phone in this video, is still pretty odd because this is one of the first proper attempts at a modular smartphone, which means this is kind of like a piece of Lego. Just to be clear, I have just pulled off the bottom third of this phone.

This is charging port. This is speakers. This is battery.

If I just want the battery, how we got that? And I can even put that battery into a different style of bass. So I could stick it into the Bang & Olivesson hi-fi module, which adds a headphone jack and a 32-bit DACK that upscales any audio going to it.

Or I stick it into the camera grip like so. That slots back into the phone. And suddenly my smartphone has a two-stage shutter button, a zoom dial over here, and a built-in grip for my hand, and an extra 50% battery capacity, which is pretty sick.

In a lot of ways, this modularity conversation is exactly the same as the motorized and rotating cameras conversation in that the first time you look at this, you think, "Oh my god, the ability to tune my smartphone to my exact preferences and my exact budget to be able to swap out my battery as simply as this instead of having to throw my whole phone away when it gets older. Of course, this makes sense. I mean, this is a massive part of why PCs are so desirable.

You pick the exact parts that you want. " And so it's not surprising that this idea of a modular phone almost became like the holy grail that companies were scrambling to try and make happen with even Google themselves stepping in to try to create a device in which you could just slide out the components you don't want and slide in the ones you do. But it never caught on.

See unlike a PC for which pretty much every PC case has tons of space inside so you can freely swap components even if they are different sizes with a smartphone everything has to fit exactly which creates two problems. a that how do you create one phone body that is so flexible that someone could choose anything from a camera this big to a prolevel camera this big and then if you are only going to use a camera this big why would you pay for such an expensive body that has specifically costed more because it has all the connectors and image signal processors needed to support the higherend camera that you're not even taking advantage of and then B how do you make it so such that all of these pieces they don't just become e-waste the second that a new model comes out like with this LG G5 5. Either LG decides that all their future phones are going to have this exact same dated shape, this size screen, and the exact same connectors, or these modules become useless the moment that you upgrade your phone, thus actually creating even more waste than if they just built three different versions of this phone, which each had one of these bases fixed inside of them.

And you, as the buyer would then just pick the one that you wanted. So, I think it's fair to say that the idea of a modular smartphone being something that any company in 2025 should be striving for is not a good idea. The only situation that modularity has kind of worked for is the fair phones and the CMF phones.

But that's only because for the fair phones, the swappability is not there so that you can upgrade things. It just lets you repair what you have more easily. And for the CMF, the things that you're swapping are accessories as opposed to core system components.

But the craziness is not reserved for just old phones. Like this is the new ZTE Nubia Music Phone 2. And there are two things that are kind of cool about it.

A that it's got not one, not two, but three speakers around it. And B, it's only around $90. My goodness.

Now that is how you stand out. Is it premium? Questionable.

Is it fun? Hell yes. like this.

The ultra speaker, as they call it, is designed to look like a record player. There's lighting effects specifically for when you're playing music, which are not very good, I'll be honest. And there is also a headphone jack.

This is what we're here for, though. This speaker is apparently so powerful. The ZTE says it can hit volumes 600% louder than your average phone speaker.

They are so proud of this that there is actually a setting here that turns this phone into a Bluetooth speaker that other phones can connect to. What's also very unique is that this thing has a max volume, but then specifically lets you further dial it up two more stages. So, this is my iPhone 16 Pro Max volume.

I promise this is not my playlist. Now, this is the [Music] Nubia. I'm sorry, but no, that's not it.

The thing is on max volume, and if it was even close to 600% louder than a normal phone, I would absolutely be able to tell. But it literally sounds the same volume as my iPhone, but just like worse. You can just tell that it's got so much less precision and control over how the music is coming out.

Well, that is just a massive bummer cuz in concept, I was ready to love this. A smartphone that prioritizes speaker quality and does so in a way that it's not really sacrificing on the price or the size of the battery. This still has a big 5,000 mAh cell, but actually listening to it, the illusion is shattered.

It kind of proves in a way that good sound needs more than just a big unit at the back, but also that the big unit at the back isn't really adding much. It could just be that because phones are so thin, that even though this speaker has a lot of area, it still doesn't have the depth to be able to push large volumes of air to make any kind of bass impact. So until I use a phone that executes on this idea a lot better than this one does, music phones are not really speaking to me.

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And so, as you can imagine, actually getting hold of it was like a wild goose chase of browsing forums, following up on rumors until eventually we tracked the thing down thanks to this lovely chap here. So, the Essential Phone PH1 released in 2017, headed by Andy Rubin, one of the lead creators of Android itself. The main selling points were a a largely bezelless display that was not at all standard at the time.

This was actually the phone that introduced the idea of a camera notch, funnily enough, and b a click connector for attaching modular accessories like a 360° camera. It did not do very well. It only sold about 150,000 units, which is why the company's next phone, this was cancelled, but it's just so intriguing that I knew I was going to have to find a way to get it anyways.

It's got this super weird tall thin shape which results in a probably never before seen resolution of 2160x 560. Like actually feels amazing. Like a really ergonomic TV remote and that's intentional.

This phone is designed to reinvent how we interact with our devices from two thumbs and two hands to one. What's the dialer like? It's got really nice haptic feedback.

You can tell this was designed to be a premium product. There's also a game installed called Windup Nights 2. It feels like a miniaturized version of playing games on like a triple monitor PC setup.

It's so wide and it's actually shockingly playable on this screen. But bear in mind that this game has been specifically optimized to work on this phone. You would not be able to expect that just any game you download will work fine.

How do you type on this thing? Messages. New message.

Oh my goodness me. You see this? It's a completely diagonal keyboard, which is really strange, but actually in a way kind of intuitive.

It uses the vertical height of the phone way better than a standard keyboard layout would. But it still makes sure that every letter is within the natural arc of your thumb. Why is this actually good?

And then as far as like general navigation is concerned, you swipe up from here to go back and then you swipe up from here to go home. I did not expect to like this nearly as much as I actually am. Now obviously use something like this and you would run into a very obvious content problem in that unless the entire population suddenly decides that they want to start producing videos like this, most media that you consume is only going to fill a tiny portion of your screen.

There is something in this. This ultra tall screen feels almost designed for efficient feed scrolling. It gives your thumb tons of room to maneuver but without being so wide that it can't reach all parts of it.

But I wouldn't call it game changer because I think for the vast majority of people a better phone would just be one that's a little bit shorter and a little bit wider or in other words just a high-end compact phone. If you are even slightly trypophobic that irrational fear of things with patterns of holes in them this is not the phone for you. This is the Nokia 9 Pure View and it kind of looks like a spider face.

Why? Well, because this is a penta camera system. Also a 2019 device, by the way.

Like, was there something in the water that year? But it's stranger than that because unlike every other phone that has multiple cameras, where those multiple cameras are each designed to be different to give you access to different levels of magnification, the multiple cameras here will each capture almost an identical photo at the same time every single time you press the shutter button. Three of them are monochrome sensors which capture no color and focus solely on light and detail.

And then two of them capturing color. And then all of that data from all five cameras is merged together into one supero which will have extreme levels of dynamic range because each camera is shooting at different levels of exposure. So the phone has a very complete understanding of what your scene looks like.

It should have very balanced colors taking the info from both color cameras and 1,200 layers of depth to allow for full refocusing after you've taken your shot. And so, as you would probably expect, this can take incredible photos with pretty much a limitless ability to edit the shots after. But it wasn't a good phone.

Having five of the exact same lens means you don't get an ultrawide camera. You don't get a zoom camera. It was the first time that any smartphone company was doing anything like this.

So, it's pretty buggy. And most importantly, the lack of processing power at the time meant that every photo was essentially combining 60 megapixels of raw data and took a full 10 seconds to process. and the phone got really hot doing so.

But here's what I think is really interesting about this. I think the concept here should not be disregarded. In fact, I could totally see how a 2025 reimagined version of this could become the most prograde camera on a smartphone today.

We've got way faster chips now that could process photos like this and wouldn't get hot doing so. And we've got AI that would be way better at extracting the most detail and dynamic range out of these multiple separate images. I would say that this failure of a phone actually has the potential to be a gamecher.

I think what it was trying to do was just ahead of what the tech at the time was able to pull off. But nothing is weirder than what LG has done with the wing. In a world where every phone looks like a glass rectangle playing it safe, LG said, "Screw it.

We're going to be a helicopter. Let's see if there's actually any merit to it. " I have never actually seen or used this phone in person.

The entire concept centers around this. That's freaking cool. This literally looks like something I would have doodled as a child thinking I'd revolutionize smartphones.

And in theory, this is a great concept cuz in one phone that's, you know, a little thicker and a little heavier than a normal phone, but not by much at all, they have managed to fit two displays to do two things at once. We are very much in the generation of the second screen experience. Who doesn't want a movie playing up here with a little bit of shopping action happening on the bottom over here?

Can I just sit here opening my Pokémon packs? The answer to which feels like a very resounding yes. Oh, this feels good.

That is weird. But it does. It's true.

It's true. It's not just the ability to do two separate things. Like there are plenty of instances where you can just use the second screen as kind of an assist to either give you controls to operate what's on the main screen or even what they've done in Asphalt.

Use the second screen as a mini map which is extremely unique. This is the craziest thing. So let's say I'm in the middle of messaging someone.

I open up the keyboard on the bottom screen. I flip the whole phone over and you give it like a second. Your main screen is going to become your full size keyboard.

That is special. and like actually tangibly makes the typing experience way more comfortable. So, the way that I'm looking at this is this whole idea of one mini screen, one fulls size screen is very close to what you would get on a flip smartphone.

And for some people, I would actually say this could be better than that because unlike a flip phone where you can only use one of those two screens at once, here you can actually use two. However, the hurdle that you would run into is not the flip phones, it's the bigger fold phones because those are very similar to this in terms of body size when they're folded up. But it's just because they open with a hinge instead of a swivel, they're more space efficient.

And so their main inner display will just have more space to do stuff than actually both LG Wing screens put together. Plus, even though it's definitely not as cool as this, I would definitely trust a hinges long-term reliability more than a swivel mechanisms. So, I like this.

I like it a lot more than I thought I was going to, but its functionality has been basically absorbed by the big foldables. So, it's just not needed. See if we can make it fly.

It's got wings.