Frandroid spoke with the marketing manager of Nothing and co-founder of the brand. He returns to the recent leaks of the Nothing Phone (2), the evolution since the release of the Phone (1) both within the company and on the quality to be expected from the young brand.
Are the Nothing Phone (2) leaks believable? To this simple question, Akis Evangelidis, co-founder of Nothing and former OnePlus, in the same way as the very media-friendly Carl Pei, gave us a simple answer. “All I can say is that they are fake. It won’t be like that. These are fake renders. »
We are almost relieved. Indeed, the renders published by OnLeaks showed a phone very similar to the first, but additionally sporting rounded edges and a curved screen. According to the head of Nothing, we should not take at face value these visuals and these specific details.
But then, what to expect for the Phone (2)?
Of course, we took the opportunity to ask Akis Evangelidis about the future of the Nothing Phone (2) by asking him why he started showing the video recording LED as the first element?
“It’s just cool”laughs the co-founder. “I really like the evolution of LED, it looks a lot more polished, it’s also softer in terms of design, and I think it’s a good representation of the general improvement you can expect on the Phone (2), about having a more refined design. But it didn’t go much further. We just needed a nice teaser to release. » He adds : “As a new brand, we can’t compete on budget, so we have to play along.”
Why insist so much on the word premium when you were already saying that the Phone (1) was premium?
The brand has fun repeating constantly to tease its second smartphone that it is premium, even though according to Carl Pei, the Nothing Phone (1) was already premium.
Ever since we started Nothing, we’ve always had that expectation, from the perspective of the end product. So I guess that’s the reason why we categorize the product as premium by default. So I think with the Phone(1), to the extent of our abilities and resources at the time, it was the most high-end smartphone we were able to bring to market.
The co-founder explained to us at length that since last year, the brand has evolved a lot. “Last time, we were trying to build a business at the same time we were trying to build a product, which is a lot of challenges. We didn’t have an expert for each particular point in the development of such a product, unlike now. »
With more than 750,000 sales of the Nothing Phone (1) on the counter, it has doubled its engineering team, going from 200 to 400.
The more we improved our internal capacities, the more we realized that we could do much better, plan better, do things much more in advance. Our goal was also not to find ourselves like last year, five months before the launch and realize that we would not be able to create our own software in-house.
So the fact that Nothing considers both of its phones to be premium is “more related to our operations and our capabilities in terms of the best product we can deliver. And I think what was premium for us a year ago as a company is very different from what’s premium today and what we can do. »
Why release a smartphone per year after all?
When the Nothing Phone (1) was announced, the brand was all fired up to explain that it wouldn’t do anything like the others. The founder is distinctly remembered criticizing brands releasing one phone a year without any changes. Except that Nothing seems to have left to do the same thing.
“We never made a commitment not to release one phone per year. » What Nothing criticized was above all “the iterations that don’t make sense, that just come out to stay relevant in the market. And here we think the Nothing Phone (2) is an iteration that really makes sense. »
Akis Evengelidis then gives some details on the future of the Phone (2): “When we compare to where we were a year and a half ago, when we started working on the Phone (1) and what we can bring there, it’s actually a big improvement. Everything should be better, starting with the camera, through the battery, the screen to the software experience… Every interaction with the Phone (2) is clearly a step-up from the previous generation. »
The brand tells us that it has taken particular care with the software part this year. Indeed, when the Phone (1) was released, it had been forced to outsource the development of Nothing OS, which is no longer the case today. Nothing OS has basically been rebuilt from scratch and should add more richness to the stock Android experience.
The switch to Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is bigger than it looks
Incidentally, the young brand’s marketing manager insists on the importance of the chip change, which might seem anecdotal. In our conversation, he recalled that when he switched to the Nothing Phone (1), with a 7-series Snapdragon, he didn’t immediately realize how much he was losing compared to a flagship .
But by going back to a Snapdragon 8 on the Nothing Phone (2), he now realizes how different the two series are, especially in terms of the quality of photo processing. “You can process 4000 times more data than on the 7 series, all the RAW HDR algorithms for example will be able to be much more robust. »
Why didn’t you make that choice straight away? “It would have been dangerous to go as far as the premium experience for a first product, it would have been a bit naive. And the processor is a big chunk of the cost of a phone. »
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