Nothing Phone 1 Announcement:
As per Verge’s article Carl Pei, a former Oneplus employee, wants to take on apple’s walled garden this summer. For those of you who don’t know, walled garden is basically Apple’s ecosystem. Nothing will launch its debut smartphone this summer. Its CEO and former oneplus co-founder Carl Pei announced during a live stream. It’ll be called the phone 1, will run on android, and be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. In otherwords, the best processor that you can get on an android phone.
Nothing’s Design:
The phone will be the company’s second product following the release of its ear 1 true wireless earbuds last year. There’s a teaser available on Twitter that suggests that the phone could have a series of light strips built into its back while a previous report claimed it could feature transparent design elements like the company’s earbuds.
That’s the kind of approach that I like. When I first saw the ear 1 headphones, here’s what came to my mind. Unique. Here’s a price comparison between Airpods Pro, Galaxy Buds and Ear 1 at the time of writing this article:
- AirPods pro are $250.
- Samsung’s galaxy buds are about $200.
- Nothing’s Ear 1’s are just $100 bucks.
They have a transparent design where all the internals are visible to the naked eye and the left and right ears are separated by the white and red dots. They come with all the bells and whistles such as touch volume controls, active noise installation, charging cable, and small and large ear tips. The medium ones are already on them. It’s in a nutshell, a possibility for their phone to have a similar design language.
One thing to note is the fact that they were able to show the internals of the product ear 1 and still make it look good. You can’t see any of the glue holding all the parts together. No wires that cause you an eyesore. It’s just “Nothing”. It’s a clean-looking product even though it’s transparent so this is one direction the new phone can take when it comes to the design language. The other one is light strips according to the teaser. Some lights are on the back of the phone. Either way, I can’t complain.
Nothing Phone 1’s Pricing & Specifications:
In terms of pricing and specs, nothing wasn’t ready to talk about specs or price during the interview. Pei was being coy about what function these light strips could even serve in the final device. Could we be looking at a new take on the notification light which was once a standard issue across numerous blackberry and android phones because if you recall, there was a time not too long ago when basically every single phone out there or most of them had notification LEDs on them. Some were orange, some were green and some could change colors. but it was the norm. It’s not that anymore so are we seeing a comeback of that trend? Who knows?
Nothing OS:
In terms of the software, the CEO is more forthcoming. Nothing has released a series of images of the nothing OS. Like the name, the images don’t reveal much about what the software might be able to do but Pei is keen to emphasize that its look very consciously lines up with the rest of nothing’s branding. The interface is a sea of black white and red that leans heavily on the dotted font that nothing uses for its logo.
Those colors remind me of Oxygen OS and that’s by far my favourite variant of the android skin. It’s super minimal, super bloat-free and it’s just smooth. It’s the best kind of experience, well at least it used to be. From the looks of it, they’re actually going for something very similar. They say that every byte of code that they write is going to serve a purpose and so that’s always good.
Sound:
Pei’s also very into the sound of the phone. An area, he thinks is overlooked, is “Our sound design is really cool” he says, “so definitely check that out”. Sound to me personally is a very important feature in your smartphone. The content that I consume daily, I consume it over the internal speakers in my phone and that to me needs to be of crisp quality. There has to be no compromises on it so the fact that they’re focusing on that and actually are making claims that it’s actually going to be pretty cool is great!
Nothing’s Goal:
Nothing’s CEO says that their aim here is less about competing with other android phones like those OnePlus like when he was part of the company. Instead, his desire is to compete with apple and the broad ecosystem often referred to as its “walled garden” Pei talked about Apple’s impressive universal control as the kind of feature he’d like to see nothing’s products eventually be capable of. What I personally like about Apple’s ecosystem, is the fact that regardless if you have multiple apple devices like the watch, the phone, the mac, you know they just work together! They just simultaneously, without any complications, without any prior setups or anything, just work together. The devices love each other. They can communicate and that’s the goal of nothing over here.
That’s what they’re trying to achieve. To come out with devices including their ear 1 wireless, headphones, the phone that they’re coming out with and all other devices that they might come up with in the future to be able to work with each other as natively, as freely, as easily as apple’s walled garden ecosystem. Whether or not that’s going to be something that’s easily achievable? I don’t know. It would be very nice to see something like that for team android.
Conclusion:
Nothing’s phone 1 is going to be an android phone that we have to wait and see if you’ll be needing in your daily life. An android phone that you do, however, need in your daily life is clean phone. Clean Phone is the only choice if you want to stay on top of what your kids are looking at on their phones. It has all the features a parent and a guardian could possibly want! You can easily pick and choose which apps and games your child can use, you can monitor SMS and phone call usage, you can control how long and how often your kids can use apps or the internet, you can check their call history incoming or dial calls, you can view their SMS history inbox and outbox included and you can manage their screen time over! Over 1,000 users are using clean phone.