See attached photo, there's a weird shading going through the face here... if I delete the vertices of the side buttons it goes away... not sure what's causing it though. I could probably delete button and re extrude/make... that's worked before, but would love to know a simpler solution. I've checked my normals... they look good, and I've tried merging by distance to check for duplicates... no luck.
File can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HxhLLXvO0vSYaOSbDz1GOHpPBkxLIkAA/view?usp=share_link
It's your faces, they are ever so slightly crooked and that causes the shading problems. You can see how they are wider down the bottom and the get thinner as you reach the top.
You can scale to zero in X but you have to be careful because at some point they begin to curve. Also try not to wash out the detail of the small indentation.
Got it... can you also recommend which courses to do next? I've done this and your beginner/fundamentals... I want to be proficient at modeling, and then lighting/materials/textures most likely to achieve more photo realistic results. Think modeling cars or physical products, etc... like this tutorial... Nothing gaming, VFX, or character rigging that I'll need to do.
Next Courses?
Maybe first: https://cgcookie.com/courses/blender-mesh-modeling-bootcamp
And then: https://cgcookie.com/courses/pothead-create-a-hard-surface-character-in-blender
Also, don't shy away from revisiting the Blender Basics Course and if Pothead is too advanced, watch some other modeling courses first, they often use older versions of Blender, but the principles of modeling still apply....
For Lighting, Materials and Texturing, I'd recommend the 3 Fundamentals:
https://cgcookie.com/courses/fundamentals-of-digital-lighting-in-blender
https://cgcookie.com/courses/fundamentals-of-blender-materials-and-shading
https://cgcookie.com/courses/fundamentals-of-texturing-in-blender
You'll become proficient in all of that with time and practice. I used to think that my skills leveling up of was a matter of needing to watch the right course with the right information, one which would give me a one liner tricky and that was it, do this, click here and there, and this is the trick for your renders to look awesome. In time I started to realize that it is much more subtle than that, there a gazillion choices your brain makes as you're doing an artwork, and to make each one of those a right choice is a matter of practicing a lot, developing your eye, mind, intuition, etc and that takes time and practice. So keep watching tutorials and getting hands on Blender a lot creating your own stuff. They might not look too good at first even you doing exactly what tutorials say, but in time and with practice you'll start to level up and doing awesome things.
Thanks for this, I know how it goes. I don't say this errantly... but my Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects skills are fairly advanced as I work professionally using them. I've also worked in studios with really complex workflows where we automate pipelines with these tools, so I anticipate Blender will be the same. There will be shortcuts, fooling the software into doing things it doesn't naturally want to do, etc... just takes a lot of time, and 3D is a lot bigger and more advance than the previously mentioned tools. But it does give me a framework for how to approach... thanks for the courses, I'll dig in. I agree there's no magic bullet. Just so I can get a frame of reference, I had found a guy named "moonshake3d"... his work is very high fidelity... I haven't dug into your courses yet, but do any of your courses get into that level of fidelity? See attached photo? and if not, where would I learn something like that? I need your fundamentals first no question... but just building up resources as I go. 
Wow, that is a render? That is top notch. I don't think CG Cookie goes much into realism in their courses. There's a couple, maybe HUMAN or the realistic industrial environment course. I think it's because of the wide range of topics, it's hard to cover them all. Most people need the fundamentals to get themselves going so that's been the focus of the courses for a while. For realism there needs to be a mastery of almost all the stages of the pipeline, you need to have good models modeled, good shading and texturing, excellent lighting and composition or art direction, mastery in color grading, you have to develop a keen eye, so it's not an easy topic. Still we all want to learn the secret sauce of what makes a render closer to realism, but going back to what we said before, it's hard to find that out in a sentence collapse-able way, it's thousands of tiny decision and you'll find that the people that made a realistic render, don't actually do anything that much different that what you'd do, which gets you frustrated and that is when you start to realize that it has more to do with your artistic skill and development that from what you can see on a video.
