Reports suggest the company has shown off its smartphone prototype in meetings with industry leaders at the Mobile World Congress 2022.
Carl Pei’s up-and-coming tech venture Nothing could be about to drop its first smartphone.
Reports suggest the company has shown off its smartphone prototype in meetings with industry leaders at the Mobile World Congress 2022, TechCrunch quoted sources as saying. Pei is also said to have met with the Qualcomm chief executive.
Pei and his company had earlier teased a smartphone. Those teasers, combined with the latest reports, now suggest that a smartphone launch could happen sooner than later.
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Founded in late 2020, the company launched its Ear 1 true wireless earbuds (TWS) last year.
Nothing has reportedly been working on its smartphone for over a year. While details around the upcoming device are scant, TechCrunch suggests that it would share a similar design language as the Ear 1 and feature elements of transparency.
Released in 2021, Nothing sold 400,000 units of the earbuds by late-January, the London-based hardware start-up said.
This, however, will not be the first time that a smartphone with transparent elements will hit the market. Xiaomi’s Explorer Edition phones had experimented with the concept previously, but added dummy parts beneath the transparent rear cover.
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The development follows after Pei’s cryptic tweet that he was back on Android and that Android 12 was nice earlier this month. The official Snapdragon and Android accounts chimed in on the tweets as well.
Pei had told TechCrunch in an interview last year that the company had several devices on its roadmap.
The entrepreneur has the pedigree to disrupt the market with already-established players. As co-founder and the driving force behind OnePlus, Pei oversaw the launch of the company’s first device to an already mature and nearly saturated market in 2014. Despite that, it broke into the US market on the strength of its flagship build quality and mid-tier pricing.
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Nothing has already raised over $70 million from high-profile investors such as Tony Fadell, GV, Casey Neistat, Steve Huffman, and Kevin Lin.