Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR Nothing’s CEO Carl Pei has shared his vision about the company’s expansion into other product categories.
The executive says the company will focus on AI-driven hardware experiences beyond smartphones.
He stresses the need for hardware-agnostic operating systems that will adapt to multiple hardware interfaces, such as smart glasses, humanoid robots, EVs, and more.
Over the past several months, stagnation of smartphone-related innovation has been a constant theme of discussion among experts and enthusiasts. This has prompted a slushflow of speculations about gadgets or forms of technology that could succeed the revered smartphone, and augmented — or extended — reality is among the chief contenders. Augmented reality, or AR, has garnered significant attention from tech brands, with Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Meta, and AI-powered smart glasses have witnessed considerable traction. Now, phone brand Nothing has expressed its desire to join the club.
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Nothing recently concluded its $200 million Series C funding round, which increased its valuation to $1.3 billion. On this occasion, Nothing’s co-founder and CEO shared his vision for the brand’s expansion, along with potential avenues it might explore, especially as smartphones are expected to become less relevant in the years to come.
Pei, in his press note, stressed that while technologies like AI have ballooned over the last few years, consumer-oriented hardware, especially phones, has “barely evolved.” This beckons the need to reinvent hardware while building software or operating systems that can adapt to various interfaces and to different users’ needs. “Unlike today’s one-size-fits-all solution, a billion different operating systems will be rendered for a billion different people,” the executive envisions. Over time, this OS will be transversal across all form factors: We’re starting with smartphones, audio products and smart watches, devices that people already use every day. In the future, our OS will carry into smart glasses, humanoid robots, EVs, and whatever comes next. – Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO, Nothing Pei also forecasts that a category of devices, as ubiquitous as the smartphone, will emerge soon. He points towards solutions that devices will observe more about our interaction with the real world, and will be much easier and quicker to access than our phones. Pei presumably suggests wearable devices, such as AI pins and smart glasses, which will feed more information to AI for hyper-personalized solutions to problems.
Nothing’s vision for the future does not seem surprising, especially as other brands are pegging hopes on AI-based gadgets, and particularly smart glasses. Although Apple’s entry with the Vision Pro may have seemed premature, ill-timed, and even too expensive for a novel experience, others, including Meta, have helped economize the experience, especially with products like the Ray-Ban smart glasses.
In the coming months, Meta is set to expand its portfolio with glasses that do more than feed data to the AI. Meanwhile, Samsung is set to announce its Project Moohan XR (extended reality) glasses later this month, powered by Google’s Android XR platform. These new products are expected to trigger an industry-wide shift, and Nothing is sure to benefit from it.
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