Nothing’s first product was a set of true wireless earbuds with a semi-transparent design. Since the company began selling them globally in mid-2021, Nothing founder Carl Pei tells Inverse that about a third of sales for those earbuds have been to customers in the United States.
But when the company launched its first smartphone a year later, it was sold in 40 markets including parts of Europe and Asia, but not the United States. That’s because Nothing was a startup lacking the resources to work with US wireless carriers to launch a phone. But the company has grown substantially in the past year, and now Pei says that second Nothing phone will be sold in the US when it launches later this year.
In that same interview with Inverse, Pei says that the company has roughly doubled in size over the past two years, going from 200 employees in 2021 to 400 today. And revenue went up from $24 million in 2021 to more than $200 million during that same period.
With that in mind, Pei says it has a few major priorities for the coming year:
- Make the Nothing Phone (2) a more “premium” device than last year’s Nothing Phone (1)
- Give the Nothing Phone (2) a proper US launch
- Work on improving the software experience for its phones
- Open more retail stores (the first opened in London in December).
Until then, folks who really want to get their hands on a Nothing Phone in the US can sign up for a beta membership and pay $299 for the company’s first-gen phone… but it’s the global version of the phone rather than one designed for the US market. And that means it has limited support for North American 4G and 5G network bands.
via Gizmodo
Will we also get contact tracing spyware bloat built directly into our Android nothingburger phone too? I can’t wait to pay money for that!
Any phone with Google Play Services (i.e. anything that comes with the play store) installed will have that. You need to look into phones that have the option to have an operating system that doesn’t have google play services/google services framework, such as Lineage OS, Graphene, or /e/OS, if you want that completely off your device.
Which don’t get me wrong, is a good thing to want, because you’re (by default) sending google your entire browsing and location history if you have Google Services. That’s just more data than the contact tracing gives google and should be more immediately concerning. The issue with the contact tracing is (and STILL is, even though we’ve stopped talking about it!) the potential for panic or malicious social control if it is ever forced to turn on or abused by authorities.
My Android phone is immediately able to detect whenever I use my Pc online. I know this because the Android phone Ads notifications will suddenly start ringing the moment I use a browser like Firefox on Pc. The pc is not synced to the phone. Android / Google is definitely spyware garbage. Android is adware garbage.