From the Editor's Desk: Let's talk about the "Nothing phone"

Apoorva Bhardwaj is a source.

Carl Pei's startup, Nothing, is working on a phone that will be available in the first half of the year. It makes sense that one of the five products it is planning for is a phone.

Pei is a co-founder of the company and has the experience and connections to bring such a product to fruition. Nothing signed a partnership deal with Qualcomm in October. The Andy Rubin-founded brand that had planned a range of smart home products, but only released a single device, was gobbled up earlier in the year of 2021. In recent weeks the company brought on board a former head of design at Dyson, Adam Bates, in a move that would set it up to handle more complex design challenges.

Pei is back on the phone and enjoying it.

Alex Dobie is from the Android Central.

There are many pieces needed for a Nothing phone to come to fruition. There are many ill-fated products from brands who thought they could break into this notoriously challenging industry. Nothing should succeed where the likes of RED, Amazon, and Facebook have failed.

Nothing has more cachet than a brand. The company has an impressive list of tech-celebrity investors, with co- creators of the iPod and iPhone, Tony Fadell, and Kevin Lin among them. Carl Pei, the man who became the public face of the company in the West, has been included on 30 Under 30 and 40 Under 40 lists.

Pei is well-known to many of his 367,000 followers on the social networking site because of his time at the brand, which has pivoted with whiplash intensity over the past year. After becoming a darling of smartphone enthusiasts, the company merged back into its parent company, and it looks like it's just another big electronics brand. It has faced software difficulties that paint a stark contrast to the early days of OxygenOS, a simple, clean software platform made to appeal to tech-savvy customers.

The idea that technology should just get out of the way is what the brand values of the Nothing phone seem to align with, making it the spiritual successor to the old OnePlus.

Alex Dobie is from the Android Central.

A hypothetical Nothing phone would be different through design, perhaps bringing the translucent look seen in the Ear(1) buds to such a device. This is something we have seen from brands in the past, but neither brand built its identity around it. The Mi 9 has fake components behind its clear back panel, and neither executed on it particularly well. It could also take after a novel approach to the display. The abandoned Gem, Essential Phone 2 and 3 concepts are not owned by anyone.

There is a source of the Android Central.

The path to success is less clear in terms of making a good phone. The likes of Apple, Samsung, and even the hardware division of Google are not tiny. The major challenges remain around key areas like image, and while partners like Qualcomm can offer solutions in a lot of places, doing the legwork to have the bare bones of a smartphone ready to go is the main challenge. A high-end phone has a lot of engineers dedicated to computational photography and image tuning, and the likes of Apple, Apple, and OnePlus have huge teams of engineers dedicated to that. Nothing would need to find a partner that could bring its camera system up to speed. Portrait mode and night mode are features that are table stakes in 2022.

Then there is the supply chain. The introduction of the invite system to balance supply and demand was necessary when the first couple of phones were produced by OnePlus. Key components are likely to have been bought up by the big players years ahead of time, leaving little wiggle room for new entrants. It's not likely that an ODM partner would be needed to turn around an Android phone.

A Nothing phone would not need to sell in large numbers or be one of the best phones in the world to be seen as a success. Nothing has a lot going for it in terms of brand value and awareness, but the technology and supply chain odds are against it. Even a modestly-successful Nothing phone is far from guaranteed, but if it happens, it will definitely be one of the year's most interesting devices.