World enews: Carl Pei’s Nothing reportedly plans to launch a smartphone by next month

Nothing, the consumer tech brand led by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, is planning to launch its debut smartphone by next month, according to a report from TechCrunch. The company has reportedly been working on the phone for over a year, and Pei is said to have shown off a prototype to executives from companies including Qualcomm at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

An April launch would come a little under a year after the company released its debut product, a pair of wireless earbuds called the Ear 1. The phone will reportedly contain similar design elements to the earbuds, such as using transparent components, although other details on the new device are limited. TechCrunch cites a source with direct knowledge of the company’s plans.

Pei has always been clear that he expects Nothing to expand into more product categories over time. In an interview with The Verge last January, Pei said that the plan was to eventually offer an ecosystem of different devices, and the following month, Nothing bought the rights to the Essential brand, which released a single Android smartphone in 2017 before shutting down less than three years later. Last November, a company executive in India said Nothing had five new products in development.

More recently, Pei appears to have been teasing some kind of Android announcement. On February 15th, the executive tweeted that he was “Back on Android,” only for the brand accounts for both Android and Snapdragon to post similarly cryptic teases in response. Even the official brand account for Nothing has teased that “March is going to be fun.”

A representative from Nothing did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on TechCrunch’s report.