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The company Nothing is the latest startup trying to break into the smartphone market. The company is run by Carl Pei, the co-founder and former director of OnePlus, and Nothing seems primarily intent on revamping the early OnePlus playbook – just eight years later. So, meet the “Nothing Phone (1)”, a device sold in limited quantities, mostly by invitation or via “Limited Partner Drops” that seem designed to create long lines. The bracketed smartphone was officially announced today to much hype, thanks to Pei’s trademark “slow drip-feed of information” strategy over the past few months.
The phone won’t be sold in the US, instead focusing on Europe, India and China. It features a 6.55-inch, 120Hz, 2400×1080 OLED display, a Snapdragon 778G+ SoC, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage and a 4500mAh battery with 33W charging power. The lower screen specs and Snapdragon 778G+ make this a mid-range phone with four 2.5GHz ARM Cortex-A78 CPUs and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A55 CPUs running on a 6nm Process based on an Adreno 642L GPU. The price of the Nothing Phone (1) – £399/€469 (about $474) – appears to be about the same as what other companies are charging for Snapdragon 778G devices.
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You get two rear cameras, a 50MP Sony IMX766 main camera and a 50MP Samsung ISOCELL JN1 Ultrawide, while the front is a 16MP Sony IMX471. There’s an in-screen optical fingerprint reader, Wi-Fi 6E compatibility, wireless charging, and an “IP53” dust and water resistance rating, meaning it shouldn’t be damaged by a few splashes, but can’t be submerged in water . The phone comes with Android 12, three years of major operating system updates, and four years of security patches arriving “every two months” rather than the standard monthly cadence.
For a new phone company, Nothing seems surprisingly to have little to say about what a smartphone should be, why you’d choose this phone over the competition, or why Nothing got into this business. The Nothing Phone 1 looks like an unremarkable device. The phone’s main (only?) selling point is its transparent glass back design, which includes a few lights and other design flourishes. Nothing calls the light system the “glyph interface,” and it looks like either an alien crop circle or “C, slash, G, exclamation point.” The lights can either flash when you get a notification, show battery status, or act as a fill light for photos.
Sales begin July 16th in various locations (details here), online sales on Nothing’s website begin July 21st.