Dear Nothing team,
I loved all of your products so far, the innovative and beautiful product design, the minimal Nothing OS ui designed to minimize distraction while still being aesthetically pleasing and useful, and transparency as a core principle for you, also when it comes to how open you are about what’s going on behind the scenes at Nothing, and how you include the community. But I think you have outdone yourselves this time. I’m very sorry, but I don’t want a phone (3) or a headphone (1) to look so boldly different that it literally screams “look at me, I’m different, i absolutely want your attention!”. It seems to me that you have gone too far with the design this time, because you are trying too hard to be different for the sake of being different, and you are putting it above anything else. While the original glyph interface was both practical in some ways (i use it as a torch all the time, and the essential notification light is pretty useful) and aesthetically unique and pleasing, I’m skeptical about the glyph matrix. It’s a cool idea in theory, but i think you shouldn’t have completely killed the glyphs, from both a design and practical perspective. Sure, having some sort of small display to inform you about more details, while the phone is flipped as to not get distracted, is nice, but I think it’s a bit odd that there is an extra button now, mostly to play around, which is actually distracting, hence it defeats the purpose a bit. But in my opinion the biggest problem is removing the original glyphs, because it also kills the more or less coherent design language you had with your previous phones. And about the design, yeaaaah… I think it’s just way too much. Having a unique design is cool and all, but as i said, you sort of killed your coherent design identity from the previous phones, and also i personally find the camera layout very off putting and unpleasant, but that’s just personal taste, the bigger problem with phone (3) is that you killed your coherent design identity in my opinion, and put being different and standing out above anything else. The headphone (1) also just stand out too much design wise in my opinion, i really like the cool and practical ideas you had with the buttons, but i want headphones that still look like headphones and that don’t draw too much attention, you crossed the line this time in my opinion.
Just wanted to let you know how i think. I still respect the changes though, it’s a bold move.
