Nothing Phone is officially a mid-ranger, with some lights in the back

Nothing is the latest startup trying to make something of itself in the smartphone market. The company is led by Carl Pei, co-founder and former director of OnePlus, and nothing seems to be mostly determined to revamp OnePlus’ early playbook — just eight years later. So meet”none phone (1)“a device sold in limited quantities, often by invitation or via”Limited partner drops“Which seems designed to create long lines. The genetics smartphone was officially announced today with a lot of hype, thanks to Pei’s ‘slow drip of information’ commercial strategy over the past few months.

The phone is not sold in the US and is instead focused on Europe, India and China. It has a 120 Hz display, 6.55 inches, 2400 x 1080 OLED, Snapdragon 778G + SoC, 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, and a 4,500 mAh battery with 33W charging. Low-end display specs and Snapdragon 778G+ make this a mid-range phone, with four 2.5GHz ARM Cortex A78 CPUs and four 1.8GHz Cortex A55 CPUs built on a 6nm process with Adreno 642L GPU. The Nothing Phone (1)’s price tag – 399 pounds / 469 euros (about $474) – appears to be in line with what other companies are charging for Snapdragon 778G devices.

You get two rear cameras, a 50MP Sony IMX766 main camera and a 50MP Samsung ISOCELL JN1 ultrawide camera, while a 16MP Sony IMX471 front camera. There’s an optical fingerprint reader in the screen, Wi-Fi 6E compatibility, wireless charging, and an “IP53” rating for dust and water resistance, which means it shouldn’t be damaged by a few splashes but can’t stand immersion in water. The phone comes with Android 12, three years of major OS updates, and four years of security patches that arrive “every two months” instead of the standard monthly cadence.

For a new phone company, it doesn’t seem like it has much to say about what a smartphone should be, why you would choose this phone over the competition, or why nothing has gone into the field. Nothing Phone 1 looks like a normal device. The phone’s main selling point (just?) is the transparent back glass design, which has a few lights and the other design flourishes. Nothing calls the light system a “Glyph front” and looks either a weird crop circle or a “C, forward slash, G, exclamation point”. The lights can turn on when you receive a notification, show the battery level, or act as a fill light for photos.

Sales start on July 16 at various locations (Details over here), with online sales on Nothing’s website as of July 21.