Official Nothing Phone 1 design details announced, including transparent case

In March this year, former OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei announced what we had all been expecting: his new company, Nothing, would launch an Android smartphone this year. However, aside from the device’s name, Pei left a lot of details to mystery.

Now, we have a few more breadcrumbs to go on. Pei and lead Nothing designer Tom Howard sat down with Wallpaper to discuss the design process of the Nothing Phone 1. During the interview, the team gave away a few crucial details about the device.

Continued reading: If the Nothing Phone 1 isn’t cheap, it will fail

Nothing Phone 1: Design details

First, as expected, the Phone 1 will have a transparent design. This means the phone will aesthetically match Nothing’s only other hardware product, the Nothing Ear 1. Pei talks about how important this is:

One of the issues we saw with the tech industry was that nobody had a consistent way of designing products. Apart from Apple — you can see their coherent vision. But if you had a table full of products from another manufacturer, you don’t really see that. From the very start, we wanted to have a very distinct and iconic design language of our own.

Howard adds to this sentiment by elaborating on how tricky it is to create a transparent smartphone that doesn’t look silly. “There are over 400 components in a smartphone, assembled in layers,” he said. “We wanted to celebrate the ‘good ones,’ the things we thought were really interesting to emphasize.” Of course, this means re-layering parts, which adds difficulty to creating the phone.

One of these aspects, Howard explains, is the wireless charging coil. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Nothing Phone 1 will have wireless charging, but it’s interesting Howard pointed this out during the interview. It isn’t unreasonable to assume the Phone 1 would have this feature, though.

Unfortunately, Nothing did not actually show a photo of the Nothing Phone 1. All we got was the sketch at the top of this article, which shows an early design schematic of what the company is going for. For now, you’ll just need to use your imagination, at least until the phone launches at some point this summer.