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Carl Pei’s Nothing launches the Phone 1, with sub-US$500 smartphone competing with premium brands Apple and Samsung

  • The London-based company has launched the smartphone it teased for months, which Nothing said undercuts premium handsets with similar features
  • The US$475 price is less than half that of top-tier devices from Apple and Samsung, but it runs a lower powered Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+

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The Nothing Phone 1 has made the Glyph Interface, composed of a series of LED lights on the back, a key selling point, offering a distinctive design that runs on a mid-range Qualcomm processor. Photo: Nothing
ReutersandMatt Haldane
Swedish tech entrepreneur Carl Pei launched the first smartphone from his new company Nothing on Tuesday, hoping to crack a fiercely competitive market with new features and an eye-catching design.
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Pei co-founded smartphone maker OnePlus in 2013 and made it a rival to Apple and Samsung by offering premium features at half the price, and becoming the top seller in several countries including India.

After leaving Shenzhen-based OnePlus in 2020, he founded Nothing last year with backing from the likes of Tony Fadell, designer of Apple’s iPod, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.

London-based Nothing says its smartphone, the company’s second product after last year’s Ear 1 wireless earbuds, offers 18 hours of use with every charge, and two days on standby, and that it can reach 50 per cent power in just 30 minutes of charging. It also said the phone has an array of remote features including being able to unlock the doors of a Tesla car.

The phone’s price starts at £399 (US$475) for 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128GB of storage. An extra £50 brings the storage up to 256GB, while the model with the same amount of storage and 12GB of RAM sells for £499. The company said it is cheaper than premium phones with similar features, but the lower price is partially the result of more mid-range hardware, including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+ chipset.

Before the launch, Nothing publicised its “Glyph Interface” on the back of the phone as a main selling point. The interface consists of a series of LED lights in the shape of a made-up symbol, with the lights flashing in different patterns to alert users to notifications, phone calls and more. The bottom light also serves as a battery charging gauge. The unique design was to ensure that “even if [people] don’t see that Nothing logo, they know it’s a Nothing product”, Pei said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.
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Other phone specifications include a screen with a 120-hertz refresh rate, two 50-megapixel cameras, one of which has an ultrawide lens, and a 4,500mAh battery with 33-watt charging. It also includes wireless charging at 15 watts.

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