“They all do the same things, we want to be different”. Carl Pei is sitting at a cafe table. His company, Nothing, was born two years ago in London, now has 410 employees, including 350 engineers, and has sold more than one million products in two years. But at Mobile World Congress, the world‘s largest telephony fair, he doesn’t have a stand: “This way we save money”, he jokes.
Born in China, raised between the United States and Sweden, he is 33 years old and looks even younger. Yet he already has another successful company behind him, OnePlus, born as a niche phenomenon and grown to become the brand par excellence of smartphones with a good price but with excellent features. Today it is part of BBK Electronics, with Oppo, Vivo and RealMe.
Smartphone
Honor, Realme, TCL, Xiaomi and the others: the most Chinese Mobile World Congress ever opens
by Emanuele Capone, Bruno Ruffilli
You are a master in generating hype, interest in Nothing and its products: are you never afraid of not living up to the expectations it creates in the public?
“I never thought about it. I just know that we try to keep making better and better products”.
For now you only have a smartphone and a pair of headphones in the catalog: will a smartwatch come?
“I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro: I kept it for two hours and then gave it to my Twitter followers. I already have notifications on my smartphone, what’s the point of having them on my smartwatch too? So I thought about using it to monitor sleep, but it’s uncomfortable to sleep with such a big clock. I’d like to produce a smartwatch, but I can’t find a way to make it useful, and if I can’t, how can I convince consumers to buy it? No, no smartwatch, at least until he has a good idea.”
E i tablet?
“I think Apple does a great job with iPads, covering all price points from Air to Pro, so I don’t see why anyone would buy another tablet, unless it’s very cheap. But that’s not our strategy.”
And give
Fewer but more expensive smartphones: how the mobile market is changing
by Bruno Ruffilli
Meanwhile, however, the smartphone market is declining…
“It’s going to keep going down, because the phones we have are just fine and the new ones don’t offer anything significantly different. Why should people change, also considering the economic crisis and the decline in purchasing power? We are such a small company that we are not influenced so much by the macroeconomics, what makes the difference for us is the product strategy and the way we put it into practice. For now we are not worried at all, the mobile telephony sector is very large and needs differentiation”.
What makes Nothing different from the others?
“Technology has gotten really boring – there’s nothing really exciting here at the MWC, for example. We want to make technology fun again. In design, with original and recognizable choices, as Sony did decades ago and as Apple still does today. In the interface, with innovations such as the LEDs on the back of our Phone (1), which we will soon make more useful and more flexible. In the interaction, for example with that recess in the Nothing Ear headphones case (1) which transforms it into a sort of anti-stress to spin between the fingers, even if it then serves to keep the earphones in place while recharging. But technology shouldn’t just be beautiful, it should make life easier or better.”
So why are new phones focusing so much on cameras?
“They do consumer surveys, they ask them to choose between display, camera, battery, and the camera always comes first. I don’t know if it’s really a good strategy, for me the way to improve the camera is computational photography, because the sensors are too small to compete with real cameras. And so it seems very strange to me that so many boast of collaborating with major traditional camera brands, because I don’t expect computational photography to be their forte: they know nothing about artificial intelligence, their skills are in completely different fields. In the end, I think it’s all bullshit to fool consumers.”
Will artificial intelligence change smartphones as we know them?
“I think AI has been a big disappointment in this area so far. It improved the visuals marginally, yes, but I think the smartphone experience hasn’t changed since the Symbian days. There were app icons, home screen, lock screen, full screen apps. Today everything is faster and with better graphics, but everything is still like 15 years ago. The real innovation is finding a way to do things faster, with fewer steps and in a way that is more responsive to what we have in mind: perhaps if we used artificial intelligence for this, smartphones could really change in a radical way”.
What do you think about leaflets?
“I think it’s a real innovation, but driven more by the needs of the producers than by the needs of the consumers. Let’s imagine that a company invents the best display, and for a while is the only one to produce it. Then the competitors arrive, and then the first one has to find something new to keep the margins up. So the display becomes flexible: at first nobody knows what to do with it, then someone has the idea: let’s build a foldable phone, so we can sell it as a premium product. Nothing will not produce a foldable”.
Green Tech
Nokia G22, the smartphone we can repair ourselves
by our correspondent Bruno Ruffilli
There is increasing talk of the possibility for customers to repair smartphones themselves. What do you think?
“I thought about it a lot. I know not everyone will agree with me, but I think it’s much better to make a phone as sustainable as possible even if you can’t fix it yourself, than to make an unsustainable product and let consumers fix it. For me, the right strategy is: create technological products that everyone wants, so that they can be sold in large quantities, and then make them sustainable. Some companies focus heavily on sustainability, but have no volumes, so their impact will by definition be minimal. Sustainability has been important to us since day one, we just chose not to make it a marketing theme like many others. Then, sure, in the Nothing Phone 1 the entire central aluminum frame is recycled, more than half of the plastics inside are recycled. I believe this is the real way to make an impact and for future products this year we will take a big step forward in terms of sustainability, but without focusing on repairability”.
MWC 2023
For Qualcomm, the era of satellite on mobile phones is about to begin
by Andrea Nepori
He’ll have a good word for 5G at this point as well.
“Today nobody would buy a phone without 5G, unless it’s super cheap. It’s just a tick box in the feature list, but it won’t change the world. In hindsight, perhaps it was an overrated technology: a 5G smartphone is just a little faster than before, and if you have a modern smartphone, at least for now.