Nut Pro review: More innovative than iPhone, the most worthwhile Hammer phone to buy in five years

How to integrate the almost paranoid spirit of craftsmanship into products that can achieve higher sales? After five years of establishment, Hammer seems to have finally found the secret.

As the wave of new phones in the first half of this year draws to a close, the launch of Nut Pro is undoubtedly the most watched and talked-about product. It continues Luo Yonghao's unique product attitude, and this time the uniqueness gives more consumers reason to pay for it.

What kind of design gave Lao Luo the confidence to make a joke for three hours?

The Hammer conference on May 9 was definitely the most "creative" mobile phone conference this year. Luo Yonghao hastily announced the appearance of the phone at the beginning, which earned him nearly three hours of criticism.

However, it was not until the last half hour that we realized that it was all a scam. The real Nut Pro, in terms of design, would not be an exaggeration even if it was called Hammer T3.

The sharp-looking Nut Pro has swept away the previous confusion in product appearance of the Hammer M series. Some people say that this phone is the Android version of the iPhone 5 Plus. In fact, in general, the tribute to Sony, the leader in industrial design, is more obvious. Of course, this is not a derogatory term. Good designs often lead to the same result.

The perfect fusion of metal and glass materials, the screen border that is narrower than most mobile phones of the same price, the antenna design that does not affect the overall beauty of the product at all, and the logo performance that cannot be better, all of these reflect the brand connotation of a design-driven mobile phone company.

Unfortunately, the thin red line version of Nut Pro in our hands is too low-key, so that it is difficult to distinguish it from the black version in most cases. The newly added bright red and gold color scheme will obviously be more dazzling.

The Nut Pro also features Luo Yonghao’s more rational thinking about mobile phones. For example, the symmetrical volume buttons that most people may not have understood have been removed, and the round HOME button no longer looks like it was pried off the iPhone. Its material and raised height are exactly the same as the front of the phone, and the pressing feedback is also more outstanding.

The inevitable problem of cutting hands due to the sharp design that Luo Yonghao loves is indeed obvious, but this is actually a philosophical issue that design and grip feel cannot be achieved at the same time. Hammer and Sony insist on design first, while Apple and a large number of domestic mobile phone manufacturers that imitate Apple have expressed compromise.

On this issue, you can choose to put a back film on the Nut Pro to offset this feeling, otherwise you can only make the phone smaller like the iPhone 5. If you don't want to do that, then just buy those round idiots that are all over the street!

What kind of system gave Lao Luo the confidence to play for several hours at the press conference?

At the press conference, Luo not only performed crosstalk, but also let the audience watch him playing with his mobile phone for an hour or two. The purpose of all this was to showcase the new features of the Smartisan OS system that comes with the Nut Pro, including the improved One Step, Big Bang, and the newly added Idea Pills.

Lao Luo spent a lot of time demonstrating One Step 1.5 and Big Bang 2.0, but in actual use, you may feel that the new Big Bang is 1.5, and One Step is more worthy of the major update of 2.0.

For ordinary users, Yibu 1.5 better connects browsers and map apps, and the one-step map recognition and address navigation hits the user's pain points, greatly simplifying the operation steps.

In comparison, Big Bang 2.0 explodes the text in a paragraph more thoroughly, exploding it again and again, and even "cutting it with a kitchen knife", giving people the feeling that everything is shattered in front of their eyes.

Luo's idea is to redefine the way people edit text on mobile phone screens. This is actually consistent with the original intention of using 3D Touch on the iPhone to turn the keyboard into a touchpad. However, a mobile phone is a mobile phone after all. Although Hammer has done better and more usable than Apple this time, it is still impossible for media editors to replace MacBook with Nut Pro. There is no doubt about it.

There is another important issue. Luo Yonghao spared no time and energy to tell you how to use One Step and Big Bang at the press conference, which means that these two things require a certain learning cost. Obviously, not everyone is willing to pay this "first time", so the pill I will talk about next may be more attractive.

This pill is the Flash Capsule.

After turning it on, just like using Apple's Siri, holding down the HOME button and speaking is the entrance to the flash capsule. The difference is that Apple wants the machine to be able to talk to you, while Hammer records your inspirations.

It has to be said that this is a rigid demand for smartphones that most people are often not aware of. The thought capsule turns the phone into a notepad that can record any thought. For example, if you suddenly think of going to the supermarket to buy oil, salt, sauce and vinegar on the subway, you can swipe from the right side of the screen when exiting the subway, and the thing you suddenly thought of on the subway will come back.

It is placed between the operating system and the user, existing independently and as a tool, and supporting simple marking and classification, forming an ultimate note-taking or memo app, and you don't need to type.

At the same time, Flash Capsule uses a 97% speech-to-text accuracy rate and retains the original sound of the speech, making this tool truly usable.

Lao Luo did not simply hype up the so-called AI, artificial intelligence, and the concept of making machines understand you. Instead, he used voice interaction to solve and explore actual needs and only did the most accurate recording work. This is a very calm and smart approach. We all know that no one would be stupid enough to let the current language assistant do even small things like setting alarms. Siri's approach is not feasible now.

Therefore, as a rising star in the domestic Android customized system, Smartisan OS has expressed an unprecedented spirit of adventure since 1.0. This time, Luo Yonghao with the Nut Pro can be said to have further slapped the faces of other "older" friendly companies.

Smartisan OS, which is labeled as a pill, is a pill that is really recommended for you to use.

What have competitors done? You can still see those split-screen apps that you will never open, those artificial intelligences that only exist in PPT, or those operations that are completely difficult to use due to the borderless and curved screen design.

Is it because competitors didn’t spend time exploring user needs and operating logic? Yes, they spent too much time looking for well-known football and basketball players to endorse their products, which was basically a trade-off with making good products.

Lao Luo used a nut to break the dilemma of mobile phone homogeneity

The storm of homogenization in the smartphone industry has come much faster than in the PC era, so much so that we almost think that the bosses of domestic mobile phone manufacturers sit together for dinner every night, and the owner of this restaurant is Tim Cook.

During the company's most difficult period, Luo Yonghao also took advantage of Apple's food. Fortunately, with the Nut Pro, the hammer that broke the homogeneity in the mobile phone industry has returned.

I don’t want to talk too much about the configuration of Nut Pro, because at its price point, its performance is completely sufficient. It already has an excellent screen quality, a 16nm processor, and a 3500mAh battery that provides long-lasting battery life, and the newly added dual cameras make up for the shortcomings in photography to a certain extent.

What we want to say is that when every mobile phone incorporates similar internal components, should they also look and feel similar in use?

The Nut Pro is undoubtedly an outlier. It will surprise you wherever you look and make you wonder, “Ah, mobile phones can do this now?”

After all, don’t people have the same expectations for the next iPhone? But don’t forget that the starting price of Nut Pro is only one-fifth or one-sixth of the current iPhone 7.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.