Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus who split from the company last year, announced the name of his next venture: Nada. It describes itself as a “London-based consumer technology company” and has investors like iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and YouTuber Casey Neistat. It plans to launch its first “smart devices” in the first half of this year.
“Nothing’s mission is to remove the barriers between people and technology to create a continuous digital future,” said Pei, Nothing’s founder and CEO, in a press release. “We believe that the best technology is beautiful, but natural and intuitive to use. When advanced enough, it should disappear at the bottom and look like nothing. “
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What is not clear at the moment is exactly what products Nothing plans to launch. In an interview with The Verge before today’s announcement, Pei declined to offer specific details about the form Nothing’s first “smart devices” will take. He also declined to say which companies Nothing plans to compete with.
Pei confirms, however, that Nothing plans to launch products in several categories, with the ultimate goal of building an ecosystem of devices.
“Right now … the team is being built, so we want to focus on simpler categories,” says Pei, “but as our team gains skills and abilities, we want to start moving up. The ultimate vision of having everything connected in a continuous way, which can only happen when you have several categories of products connected. “
During Pei’s management at OnePlus, the company launched everything from smartphones to headsets and even TVs. Last year, Wired reported that Pei’s new company could focus on music and include making headphones. When questioned, Pei declined to confirm whether the headphones would be among Nothing’s first products. When asked by Wired, he said the company’s plans were “much more than that”.
Although there is speculation that this could point to the development of a Nothing accompanying music service, Pei says The Verge that Nothing plans to make the most of its money by selling hardware instead of software subscriptions, at least initially. “We didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about his software,” says Pei. “It definitely needs to be a good user experience if you want to monetize software.” In the long run, however, he admits that “healthy business” requires good hardware and software.
The new Pei company plans to differentiate itself by using “made-to-measure” components in its products from the beginning. Pei suggests that this will prevent Nothing’s products from looking too much like their competitors. “There is a reason why many products on the market are quite similar,” notes Pei. “It is because they share many of the same components and the same building blocks.”
In contrast, OnePlus phones have faced frequent criticism over the years for the similarities they share with Oppo phones. In a recent video, Marques Brownlee described a series of Oppo and OnePlus devices with very similar hardware, such as the OnePlus 5 and Oppo R11, the OnePlus 6T and Oppo R17 and the OnePlus Nord N100 and Oppo A53. Both brands even use similar fast-loading technologies. OnePlus has Dash Charge and Oppo has VOOC.
While OnePlus and Oppo are widely reported to exist under the same Chinese corporate giant BBK Electronics, Pei says that Nothing is exempt from such an agreement. “[Nothing is] a totally independent company owned by our founding team and our investors, ”says Pei, with his own R&D department. And despite using third-party manufacturers to build their devices, Pei says that Nothing is not just going to “re-label someone else’s products.”
But while Pei hopes that Nothing’s first products will feature “different” designs without feeling “different because they are different”, the final hope is that they will disappear in the background.
“I kind of imagine a grassy field with people having a picnic and there’s no screen, there’s no laptop screen, there’s no phone screen, there’s no smartwatch screen, there’s no billboard screen,” reflects Pei. “This is the final state.”
Border columnist Walt Mossberg referred to this future state as environmental computing in 2017. Pei admits that it may take 20 or 30 years to arrive, but says that the future his company is looking for is one in which his technology resembles … well , nothing.