Nothing’s Phone (2) will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series
Nothing’s presence stood in stark unrelatedness to OnePlus at this year’s MWC. Whereas Carl Pei’s old company, OnePlus, put on a flashy launch event for a concept device yesterday, Nothing has largely used the event to meet with vendors and other big names in the industry.
We sat lanugo with Pei yesterday, fittingly in a meeting room inside the Qualcomm booth. Among other things, the CEO confirmed that the Nothing (2) will be powered by the Snapdragon 8 series tweedle — not that the topic was overly up for much debate.
The conversation — which touches on the U.S. and India markets and the smartphone industry at large — began with a quick mart well-nigh the OnePlus concept phone. Earlier teasers of the device drew comparisons to Nothing’s first handset, the Phone (1). “People were tagging me,” Pei says, while supporting that the device’s illuminated cooling liquid is a unshared tideway from his phone’s Glyph lighting scheme.
CP: There’s [a] visitor at MWC tabbed UniHertz. A very small company. They made a stat reprinting of the Phone (1). I’m gonna go trammels it out.
TC: Congratulations. That’s a rite of passage.
We recently worked on our vision statement. It’s, “We want to make tech fun again.” So, if we can inspire our industry to start experimenting more, that still helps with the vision.
There’s experimenting and there’s copying. Are you going to go be litigious?
No. They’re so small. That doesn’t really help anybody.
The smartphone market was on the ripen surpassing the pandemic. It got a tumor from 5G and then declined again. At some point 6G will happen, but I don’t see something like foldables driving the market in a profound way. Will the market rebound? And if so, how?
The smartphone market grew initially considering there was a really innovative product that was useful to customers. Now it’s starting to shrink, considering my phone is good enough. Why should I upgrade?
It’s moreover too expensive to upgrade every two years.
Yeah. I think it’s natural that unless there’s some really useful innovation, it’s going to steadily decline. Having said that, it’s still a really big industry. It’s still very lucrative from a merchantry perspective.
So, you don’t see anything on the firsthand horizon that will profoundly momentum sales?
Not profoundly. For us, we’re trying to do increasingly and increasingly as we build up our engineering capabilities. We weren’t worldly-wise to do too much on the software side the first year. But now that we have our own team, we can start doing increasingly and more, but it’s not going to be game changing. I don’t think in the next generation, but we’re steadily introducing something new and useful, I think. But I don’t see that iPhone moment on the horizon moment anymore. Not in the next two to three years.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
There may not be one. That was the ur-moment for phones.
Yeah. I think something virtually AI might be the next iPhone, but I haven’t really figured out the application.
You’re talking well-nigh AI on the phone?
No, AI as a technology to help people in general.
Obviously there have been some applications for AI on the phone, mostly for photography.
Yeah. But AI on the smartphone has only given us like 10% improvement. The picture quality is 10% better, but it doesn’t transpiration how we interact with technology.
What are your feelings on foldables?
I personally think foldables are supply chain-driven innovation and not consumer insights.
In terms of having that initial transilience and then towers devices virtually it?
Think well-nigh it from a supply uniting perspective. Somebody invents OLED, and they can make a lot of money, considering it’s a unconfined technology. Then without a few years, a lot increasingly companies make that, so they need to lower their prices. So they need to icon out what else they can sell at a higher margin. They develop flexible OLEDs, which they can sell at a higher price. Then they go and pitch it to the smartphone vendors. “We have this nice foldable, please use it.”
In Samsung’s case, they ripened the technology in-house and built the device virtually it. As far as I can tell, they still own the vast majority of that market right now.
Foldables [don’t] come from solving consumer pain points, but it’s getting largest and better. That’s great, but it’s probably not going to be something we’re going to squint at.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
So, we shouldn’t expect a foldable from Nothing?
No.
There’s some talk of 6G at this year’s event, but it still feels pretty far off. What’s your sense on where the technology is?
I don’t know anything. I think for us it’s not where we need to leave. We just follow what the industry trend is on the network side. We need to lead where we can be different. If we ask our users why they bought the earphones and smartphone, the number one reason is design. So, how can we get stronger on that? Not just the hardware design, but to moreover transmute that to our software? So everything feels holistic. And then, how can we make our technology increasingly useful? We have the Glyph interface on the when that looks quite nice, quite interesting. But we’ve got a lot of feedback that it wasn’t that functional. How can we build increasingly and increasingly functionality that’s unquestionably usable?
In this case, you unexplored a technology specifically for diamond reasons and then started looking for use cases?
It’s a mix, considering we had a roadmap for features of the Glyph interface. But that roadmap has been executed on very slowly, considering we didn’t have the engineering needed.
How big is the team now?
We’re 410. Still very small.
How many are in engineering?
Probably 350.
The vast majority.
Yeah, unfortunately, the smartphone is a very complicated product, so you need a lot of engineers.
What can you tell me well-nigh the Phone (2)?
We’re going to be using the [Snapdragon] 8 series. Earlier, I said it was going to be a premium device. But we’ve never officially undisputed whether it’s Qualcomm or MediaTek.
Was that overly up for debate? MediaTek is good, but Snapdragon is the well-spoken nomination for most flagships.
Qualcomm has been a really good partner. From the very beginning, when we were starting the business, there was a chipset shortage, and they gave us typecasting at a good price. Today it’s different. There’s now an zillions of chipsets in the market, but they’ve been a strong supplier. And their product’s not bad, so we never really considered flipside option, expressly for a increasingly premium device.
Is there anything else you can share on the Nothing (2) front?
We’ll have a much stronger focus on software. With our engineering in-house, there’s a lot increasingly we can do. We have a increasingly robust roadmap, both in terms of diamond and how we can make it increasingly useful.
Given the value of time and money that went into R&D, will the diamond be similar to the Nothing (1)?
In terms of forfeit it will probably be similar.
And in terms of diamond language?
That I can’t really scuttlebutt on.
How did the beta go in the U.S.?
It went very well. We’ve washed-up over 2,000 already. We shut it down. It’s unbearable to get feedback for the beta. I think we did 2,500 surpassing we sealed it and it’s not plane a new phone.
It’s half a year old, but it’s been much harder to get in the U.S.
Yeah, but it doesn’t really support all the bands in the U.S., either. So you sometimes get 4G, or sometimes you get no signal.
A limited release like that does serve the purpose of drumming up excitement. But given that the phone was once released in other parts of the world, what’s the purpose of the beta in the U.S.? Is it variegated from the feedback you get in Europe?
We wanted increasingly users to requite feedback, and U.S., Europe and India users are different. I think the U.S. consumer is increasingly focused on the experience, whereas Indian consumers increasingly focus on the functionality, the full-length set and the specs.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
What’s the difference between wits and functionality?
U.S. users would be worldly-wise to talk well-nigh user wits bugs, or what didn’t work, versus “Hey, why don’t we have this thing?”
Why didn’t it launch in the U.S.?
Engineering resources.
For the bands?
Okay, actually, two reasons. One is to add spare bands in the U.S. [but that] increases the forfeit of the product for all our regions virtually the world considering we have a single SKU. So if we add everything we needed for the product, it became increasingly expensive in Europe and India as well, but they had no benefit. And the second is our internal engineering. We just didn’t have unbearable engineering to support the variegated certifications that we needed to deal with some of the carriers.
Are the bands similar in India and the U.K.?
Yeah, basically.
India is a huge market — the number two in the world. Is that why it was one of your first countries?
There was a strong unification for OnePlus in India. From a consumer side, we knew there was interest in what we were going to build, and from the partner side, from the sales waterworks side, they believe in our team based on what we did in the past, so they will support us then on this new journey.
I see a good long-term potential, yeah. And then the market this year, India’s economy is going to grow by 6%. And a lot of economies are shrinking. They still have a lot of growth superiority of them as a nation. And moreover they have a very young population, and I think the middle matriculation . . . will alimony growing in size, whereas maybe in Europe, it will subtract in size.
Apple and others focus their upkeep devices on the Indian market. Did you consider doing a second variant?
We did but I think that’s the easy way, but it moreover has long-term negative repercussions. For yourself as a company, if consumers only buy you considering you’re cheap, then what’s your merchantry model? A visitor needs to be profitable. So if you’re unseemly today, then tomorrow somebody else can be plane cheaper. And then this is like the fight for whoever makes the least value of money or plane loses money. So I think we’re taking a much increasingly difficult route; we need to make our products different. And we need to create things that are useful for the customer. And we’ll know if it’s useful if they want to pay for it. It’ll be slower this way, but I think we’ll have a much stronger trademark and much stronger product in the long-term if we do this, and moreover a healthier company, in terms of profitability.
Do you have any operations in India?
We have manufacturing in India. Well-nigh half of the phones are made in India, and half in China. We’re towers a manufacturing team in India to manage the factory. We have sales and marketing over there. And we have testing for some of our software and aftersales.
The U.S. is looking to move increasingly U.S. product manufacturing when to its own market. Is that something you would pursue at some point as a U.K. company, manufacturing in the U.K.?
Probably not. I think this would need government policy support, and I don’t think the U.K. government has a plan there.
The U.S. seems to be injecting a ton of money into that.
I think India has a Made in India program, and the Middle East is starting to squint at how they can diversify yonder from oil. I don’t think Europe in unstipulated has a plan for where they’re going.
Pricing is obviously a big part of it. I see companies moving from Shenzhen to Vietnam or Mexico.
I think the U.S. is not that expensive. Real manor for manufacturing is unseemly compared to other places. The labor forfeit is higher, but the efficiency is moreover higher. So it kind of evens out.
How aggressively are you looking at APAC?
I think the China market is very competitive in an unhealthy way, as in it’s like a race to the marrow who can unhook the most value of specs and features at the lowest possible price. And I think a majority are losing money in China.
And you’d be competing with these huge companies with so many resources.
I think, long-term, all the companies will wilt rational. When people are rational, we can consider inward the market. But it’s very irrational now. And also, if you want to operate in China, you need to have flipside software team considering Google services are not there, so you need to build your own services. We just can’t think well-nigh all those things right now.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
What does your roadmap squint like? OnePlus started small and has gradually grown its scope. Are you looking to ramp up the product release undulation for Nothing, too?
Not very aggressively, considering we want to create iconic products, and we want to support the products well, in terms of software. If you make like 10 or 20 phones a year, then it’s really nonflexible to provide that level of support. It’s scrutinizingly like you get a round of consumer interest for every new product. Like that unchangingly comes. So it’s kind of like a drug that you’re fond to. You want to alimony releasing stuff. But I think if you take the harder route, the increasingly healthy route, they really icon out the product itself.
Phone-wise, a yearly undulation makes sense.
I can’t really scuttlebutt on that right now. But I think if you squint at the Phone (1), there’s unquestionably still a sustained level of consumer interest, half a year without the launch. That’s rhadamanthine increasingly and increasingly rare in this industry.
Any new product categories this year?
Yes.
Nothing’s Phone (2) will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch