About seven years ago, Carl Pei founded OnePlus. Afterward, in 2020, he left the company and began his own smartphone business. However, the brand known as Nothing hasn’t released a single smartphone for the time being. Instead, this company designed and launched the Ear (1) transparent earbuds. Everyone understands that headphones are not the main business of Carl Pei. So we are waiting for the first Nothing smartphone.
Back on Android
— Carl Pei (@getpeid) February 15, 2022
The first Nothing smartphone has been in the works for over a year. So that’s the right time to get news about it. Fortunately, according to the latest leaks, the handset will hit the market as soon as next month. At a recent meeting in Barcelona, Carl Pei showed a prototype of the firsts Nothing smartphone.
Honestly, we don’t know much about the upcoming Nothing smartphone. TechCrunch notes that the product will adopt a similar design language and “elements of transparency” seen in Nothing’s first product. Interestingly, the Nothing earbuds managed to ship over 400,000 units though launched in 2021.
March is going to be fun.
— Nothing (@nothing) February 28, 2022
Almost a year ago, in an interview with the mentioned media, Carl Pei noted that the company was working on several different devices. “We have a lot of products in the pipeline. Earlier this year, we did a community crowdfunding round where we allocated $1.5 million to our community. That got bought up really quickly. But as part of that funding round, we had a deck with some of the products in development. Our products are code-named as Pokémon, so there are a lot of Pokémon on that slide. We have multiple categories that we’re looking at, but we haven’t really announced what those are.”
We guess no one doubts that Carl Pei’s new company will succeed like OnePlus. But we are not naïve to think the first Nothing smartphone will be a top-end model. We tend to think it would be a mid-range handset like the OnePlus Nord. This is not about money. We mean Nothing has enough funds to make top-end smartphones. But OnePlus’ has a bad experience – it has been making only flagships and this strategy failed. Particularly, the firm has raised more than $70 million from scores of high-profile investors, including GV, Tony Fadell, Casey Neistat, Kevin Lin, and Steve Huffman.
By the way, we’d like to remind you, last year, OnePlus merged its hardware team with Oppo, its majority owner. In its turn, the latter belongs to BBK, a holding that owns other major Chinese smartphone brands such as Vivo, Realme, and iQOO.
