Nothing Announces a Smartphone at the Heart of an Ecosystem

Nothing is Carl Pei’s latest venture after leaving the OnePlus smartphone company in 2020. Now employing 300 people in six countries, the first product, wireless earphones called ear(1), were very well received for their design, audio quality and price. The ear(1) are transparent and have sold over 400,000 units at a reasonable GB£100.

The ear(1) was always intended to the be the first in a range products and in today’s Nothing presentation, Carl promised a revolutionary new smartphone, the phone(1) at the heart of an open ecosystem. The vision is interoperability in the style of Apple without the walled garden, attitude and price.

The new phone will be powered by a Qualcomm processor running Nothing OS. This Android-based OS will be fast and smooth, and stripped of bloatware. Hardware and software would be brought together as one, and design elements would be consistent across the phone. If it all sounds a bit familiar, it’s not terribly different from the vision for OnePlus before it snuggled up to Oppo.

That’s pretty much it. There was no unveiling of the device itself – all that was revealed is the pictogram on the right. The phone(1) is expected to go on sale in the summer.

And if you are thinking that this is all pie in the sky, it’s not. They’ve the financial backing to go with it to the tune of US$140 million and backing from the likes of Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, Sony, BYD and Visionox.

To get a taste of what’s on offer Nothing will be offering, the Nothing OS launcher will be available from April for installation on select existing devices.

I’m looking forward to it.