There’s been a lot of buzz around the launch of Nothing’s Phone 1 this week. For months, the company’s CEO Carl Pei, who rose to fame as one of the co-founders of OnePlus, has been making big promises about Nothing’s first smartphone. “Consumer technology, how did we let it get so boring?” the CEO asked rhetorically during a live broadcast in March. “We have all experienced the gap between the future we were promised and the one we live in now.”
Therefore, the conclusion is that the Nothing will be the one to fill this void. Indeed, in its invitations to this week’s launch event in London, the company characterized the event as “an invitation to unlearn everything the industry has taught us.” In a recent interview, Pei said Nothing aims to “take people back to a time when they felt more optimistic about gadgets.” Then there is no pressure.
“An invitation to unlearn everything the industry has taught us”
That’s a level of promise I’m not sure any device can deliver, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the one to miss out if Nothing fails. Of course, there were already signs before the event that we were about to see something less like a “consumer tech revolution” and more like a “smartphone” – basically a mid-range one that won’t even be sold in the US. But perhaps the personal event will shed more light on Nothing’s revolution.
This led me, on one of the hottest days of the year, down a series of nondescript streets in London, trying to find the inauspicious place where Nothing had decided to hold the private part of the presentation on Tuesday. When you are promised a revolution, your thoughts may turn to huge stadiums, the Brandenburg Gate, or perhaps a Parisian cafe. The Nothing revolution will take place at London’s Camden design studio.
Posters advertising the Nothing event as seen in south London Photography by John Porter / The Verge
If there’s one thing Pei is good at, it’s taking every opportunity to create “edgy” marketing. Before the launch, Nothing plastered various European capitals with street posters that stood next to advertisements for local concerts and festivals. The subtext? It’s more of a cultural event than just a phone launch. I even spotted a few in my south London suburb, while on Twitter people posted pictures of posters popping up in Paris and Berlin (all helpfully retweeted by Nothing’s social media team).
As I approach the event, I run into another attendee, who turns out to be one of several thousand investors in the Nothing community who have between them poured millions of dollars into the company, according to crowdfunding platform CrowdCube. That’s in addition to more traditional institutional investors like Alphabet’s GV and other big names in tech, including “father of the iPod” Tony Fadell, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and YouTuber (sometimes) Casey Neistat.
Nothing’s relentless commitment to advertising has attracted some impressive celebrity investors. And even more impressively, the involvement of these investors continued to create even more buzz around the company. In total, CrowdCube reports that Nothing has raised over $150 million in funding across seven funding rounds. Not bad for a company that has only released a pair of pretty good headphones to date.
The Nothing investor refused to tell me how much he had invested in the company (he would only say it was less than £10,000 and more than £2,000) and was open about the fact that his Nothing shares were just one of the investments that hold. “There are certain things that are very difficult to invest in,” he says. “How often do you launch a new phone brand with pretty good people behind it?” But despite putting a significant chunk of money into the company, he seems relatively cool about Nothing’s products themselves. He admits he didn’t buy the Ear 1 last year and said he’ll probably pick up the Phone 1, but only as a second device.
Attendees mingle at the launch event. Image: Nothing
I walk through the crowd to the event space itself and see the Nothing staff mingling. There’s Adam Bates, a former head of design at Dyson who now serves as Nothing’s design director, and Teenage Engineering’s Tom Howard, who also works on Nothing’s design team—names that brought a lot of attention to Pei’s company in the run-up to the launch. Everyone is dressed fashionably but casually, and although there are one or two people in button-down shirts, they don’t appear to be employees of Nothing. Younger attendees mill about in high-fashion streetwear, while tech journalists in the crowd dress to delicately walk the line between looking professional and avoiding overheating in the sun.
I walk inside and try to tune in for Phone 1’s presentation, but quickly discover that there is no public Wi-Fi in the space. I’m told this is necessary to preserve the bandwidth needed for the live stream. It also turns out that there is no air conditioning and the heat outside means that it gets incredibly hot and humid very quickly in the design center that Nothing has converted for its launch. Someone mentions an air-conditioned room upstairs that people had to vacate before the event started. If the intention was to get them into that lower room to make it look nice and busy for the live show, then it worked – it’s lifting.
“How often do you launch a new phone brand with pretty good people behind it?”
Even beyond the lack of air conditioning and Wi-Fi, the event space is unusual for many reasons. There is no stage and no seating except for a large box made of exposed wood in the center of the room. The entire forward-facing side of the box is taken up, so as a compromise I sit facing the back of the room. This means I don’t have to touch sweaty skin with strangers, but in return I can stretch awkwardly to see the video screen behind me.
And finally, the moment of truth: the great opportunity for Nothing to show Something. The event begins. The video screen switches to showing a video of Pei sitting in a coffee shop, and… he monologues about how the tech industry has lost its way. He recited his now-familiar mantra: consumer technology used to be exciting (true) — now it’s boring (debatable). We’re told the Nothing Phone 1 hopes to change that. Its back is made of transparent glass and we are shown the now familiar light bars that can act as high-tech notification indicators. So far, so similar to what we saw last month in hands-on work from YouTuber Marques Brownlee. (By the way, you should read my colleague Alison Johnson’s hands-on experience with the phone). As the pre-recorded video continues, I’m beginning to wonder if Pei will be attending the launch of his own smartphone.
No photo: the sheer temperature of this room. Image: Nothing
Pei continues. The Phone 1 runs Nothing OS, an Android skin whose design takes inspiration from the kinds of synthesizers that design partner Teenage Engineering used to make a name for themselves. It has integration with Tesla cars and NFT gallery. Its frame is made of aluminum, not steel, and the front and back are made of Gorilla Glass 5. Meanwhile, in the design studio, I can feel my back start to sweat.
Eventually (surprise!), Pei shows up at the studio and the pre-recorded launch becomes a live event. “It’s humid and hot,” are his first words to the host. Pei is interviewed in the crowd, which continues to shuffle to make room for the camera crew. The lack of a stage means it’s hard to actually watch the interview, and in this crowded room there isn’t an active video feed that I can watch. People are filming their own videos of the event, and out of the corner of my eye I spot a journalist narrating the events while filming the event for his (presumably) foreign-speaking audience. I consider leaving the room to watch the interview on one of the large screens dotted around the event space, hoping the distance might make for a better spectacle.
“It’s hot and humid”
After Pei, there’s an interview with a Qualcomm executive and another with someone from Indian retailer Flipkart. The way the live stream audio is pumped back into the event while the interviews are taking place makes it impossible to hear what’s being said, even when you’re just feet away from the recorded content. It seems other people are also struggling to hear if the amount of restless chatter I hear around me is something to take in.
I refuse to watch the interviews, and after spotting Nothing’s head of marketing, Akis Evangelidis, in the crowd, I step back to ask him how the event is going. He asks if we can go outside to get out of the heat, but otherwise seems happy. Nearly 100,000 people tuned in to the live stream, says the former OnePlus VP. He’s reassured by that, he says, especially since so much of the Phone 1’s design and features have been pre-announced in recent weeks. That, he says, is because Nothing wanted to be able to make the disclosures “on our own terms” rather than risk that happening through a leak.
Carl Pay with rapper ASAP Nast.
“I contacted several whistleblowers,” says Evangelidis. “It is quite advanced; they know their stuff.” As we speak, the event staff is walking…
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