The official Nothing Phone is a medium ranger, backlit.

Nothing is the latest startup trying to make its mark in the smartphone market. The company is led by Carl Pei, co-founder and former director of OnePlus, and Nothing seems to be mostly intent on rereading OnePlus’ early scriptbook – just eight years later. So, meet the “Nothing Phone (1) “, a device that is sold in limited quantities, mostly by invitation or through “restricted partners “who are apparently designed to create long queues. The bracketed smartphone was officially announced today with a lot of hype, thanks to Pei’s signature strategy of “telling slow”over the past few months.

The phone is not sold in the US, but is focused on Europe and China. It has a 6.55-inch 120Hz 2400×1080 OLED display, Snapdragon 778G+ SoC, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, and a 4500mAh battery with 33W charging. The lower-end screen specs and Snapdragon 778G+ make it a mid-range phone with four 2.5GHz ARM Cortex A78 processors and four 1.8GHz Cortex A55 processors built on a 6nm process with an Adreno 642L GPU. The Nothing Phone (1) is priced at £399 / €469 (around $474) – seems to be about the same as other companies charge for Snapdragon 778G devices.

You get two rear cameras, a 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 main camera and a 50-megapixel Samsung ISOCELL JN1 ultra-wide camera, while the front one is a 16-megapixel Sony IMX471. There’s an optical fingerprint reader built into the screen, Wi-Fi 6E compatibility, wireless charging, and an “IP53″dust and water rating, which means it shouldn’t be damaged by a few splashes, but it can’t withstand immersion in water. The phone comes with Android 12, three years of major OS updates, and four years of security patches that come “every 2 months”instead of the standard monthly frequency.

For a new phone company, Nothing seems to have surprisingly little to say about what a smartphone should be like, why you would choose this phone over the competition, or why Nothing is in the business. Nothing Phone 1 looks like an unremarkable device. The main (only?) advantage of the phone is the transparent glass back panel, which contains several light sources and other design elements. Nothing calls the lighting system a “Glyph interface”and it looks either like alien crop circles or “C, slash, G, exclamation mark.”The lights can either light up when you receive a notification, show the battery level, or serve as a fill light for photos.

Sales begin on July 16 at various locations (details here) and online sales on the Nothing website begin on July 21.