Nothing is the latest startup trying to create something in the smartphone market. The company is led by OnePlus co-founder and former CEO Carl Pei, and Nothing seems intent on revisiting the original OnePlus playbook just eight years later. So meet “No phone (1),” the device is sold in limited quantities, mostly by invitation or through “limited partner fallsIt looks like it’s meant to create long lines. The bracketed smartphone was officially announced today with much hype thanks to Pei’s trademark “slow drip data stream” strategy over the past few months.

The phone is not being sold in the US and is instead focusing on Europe, India and China. It sports a 120Hz, 6.55-inch, 2400×1080 OLED display, Snapdragon 778G+ SoC, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4500mAh battery with 33W charging. Low-end display specs and the Snapdragon 778G+ make this a mid-range phone with four 1.8GHz Cortex A55 CPUs built on a 6nm process with four 2.5GHz ARM Cortex A78 CPUs and Adreno 642L GPU. The price of the Nothing Phone (1) – £399/€469 (about $474) – seems in line with what other companies are charging for their Snapdragon 778G devices.

You get two rear cameras, a 50MP Sony IMX766 primary camera and a 50MP Samsung ISOCELL JN1 ultrawide, while the front camera is a 16MP Sony IMX471. The display has an optical fingerprint reader, Wi-Fi 6E compatibility, wireless charging, and an “IP53” dust and water resistance rating, which means it shouldn’t be damaged by a few splashes, but it can’t withstand being submerged 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, “Nothing” seems to have surprisingly little to say about what the smartphone is, why you’d pick this phone over the competition, or why nothing should go into it. The Nothing Phone 1 looks like an unusual device. The phone’s main (only?) selling point is its transparent glass back design, which includes several lights and other design elements. Nothing calls the light system “Glyph interface” and it looks like either an alien crop circle or “C, forward slash, G, exclamation mark”. The lights can either turn on when you receive a notification, show the battery level, or serve as a charging light for photos.

Sales begin on July 16 at various locations (more here), with online sales at Nothing’s starting July 21.