Nothing Phone (3) isn't coming until next year, CEO announces

The Nothing Phone (2) got official in July last year, and so you may have been expecting its successor to show up in a few weeks' time. But you'd be wrong, as it turns out. The lack of recent leaks regarding a Phone (3) was actually foreshadowing.

Today Nothing founder and CEO Carl Pei outright announced the fact that the Nothing Phone (3) is only going to launch in 2025. That's a pretty huge delay compared to the usual high-end smartphone yearly refresh cycle, and if you're wondering why Nothing chose this path, it's all about - wait for it - AI.

There's been a lot of hype around AI. Some great, some confusing. It’s great to see new companies rethinking the user experience and form factors. However, there is no doubt that smartphones will remain the main consumer AI form factor for the foreseeable future. With over 4… pic.twitter.com/ERJc7xhwBa

— Carl Pei (@getpeid) June 5, 2024

Instead of launching the phone next month and trumpeting AI features left and right, like most companies seem to do nowadays, Nothing is taking its sweet time in order to "redefine the user interface to enable a highly personalized and dynamic user experience as AI is integrated at a system level across smartphones".

The video above has more details and includes phrases like "post-app world" (multiple times even), which sounds to us about as buzzwordy as "AI", despite Pei starting off by throwing some subtle shade at competitors wanting to "AI" everything. But anyway, Nothing wants to "build a bridge" from today's app-based world to tomorrow's "post-app world" or something like that.

Either way, this announcement apparently serves as Nothing throwing its hat into the consumer AI race, whatever that means. If we were of the skeptical kind, we'd assume sales of the Nothing Phone (2) were far below expectations and the Nothing Phone (2a) is much more of a success for the company, so it didn't want to risk launching a Phone (3) that would do similarly to the Phone (2) in terms of sales.

While this way, if in the next year it does come up with some interesting UI innovations, "bridging" AI with apps or whatever, then the Phone (3) could actually become a hit. Next year. But hey, that's just us speculating, feel free to understand whatever you can from this non-announcement announcement.