THE WORLD'S FIRST TRANSPARENT PHONE ARRIVES

Relying on the planetary success of transparent headphones called simply ear (1), the company Nothing is most likely preparing for the premiere of its first smartphone in April.

After seven years at OnePlus, the company he co-founded, Carl Pei left his parent company in 2020 and founded Nothing. Although not without flaws, their (for now) only product, Nothing ear (1) headphones have experienced great global success with over 400,000 units sold, despite the high price.

We can't say that we didn't expect the next device of this company to be a smartphone, and if rumors from this year's MWC fair are to be believed, Carl Pei has already walked the prototype of his new phone this year in Barcelona, ​​and we can expect the premiere next month. 

According to sources who have direct connections with the mentioned company, Nothing has been working on its smartphone for more than a year. Pei used the largest mobile technology fair in the world to show its product to representatives of key companies in this industry, such as the giant Qualcomm.

There really aren't many details about the phone for now, except for the notes that the design will be similar to what we saw on the headphones in terms of transparency. Carl Pei himself said in an interview last year that Nothing has several devices in its development plan, whose code names are named after Pokemon, but nothing more about which devices or device categories are involved.

Pei is one of the major persons responsible for the success of OnePlus and their initial phone, which was nicknamed " Flagship killer " and managed to break into the US market as a completely unknown brand in 2014. In 2021, OnePlus merged its hardware team with Oppo, owned by BBK Electronics, a conglomerate behind the big players: Vivo, Realme, and iQOO.

Is the market ready?

What goes hand in hand with Nothing is the fact that the smartphone market has been in a period of stagnation for several years, without any major shifts in any field, including the number of units sold. Of course, the pandemic has had an impact on creating such a situation, especially on the global shortage of chips and holes in supply chains that continue to cause serious problems for manufacturers.

On the other hand, in the last two years, the producers have played it safe, without many trips, adjusting their existing products, licking them a little from all sides. This had a significant impact on the middle class of devices, which, thanks to optimization, became better and more affordable, while the highest class suffered the greatest burden of problems. 

The new flagship models are uninteresting, average, with only a few improvements over the previous generation. Take a look at all the latest generations of the best Samsung and Apple phones and everything will be clear to you.

A double-edged sword

This market situation can be good and bad for Nothing phone. If they present a middle-class model, they will have to have top performance and a fantastic price if they want to fight with hundreds of new great models that appear every year. On the other hand, the flagship category requires a little more than a transparent phone and it is much harder to forgive mistakes, so this may be one of the most interesting premieres this year. 

Of course, if it doesn't turn out to be just an April Fool's joke.

We should not forget two very important things. Nothing managed to make a lot of interest and excellent sales with its first product, which is certainly not without flaws. Also, if you remember, some of the key players in the smartphone market were LG and HTC, giants that failed to withstand market pressure and gain the trust of customers around the world with their innovation.