With less than a month to go before the formal release of the intriguing Nothing Phone 2, details – both official and unofficial – are now appearing in steady flow, but now we might have an answer to one of the biggest question marks still looming over the company's next smartphone: the price, and it's probably more than you expected.
Company founder and CEO Carl Pei has a habit of drip-feeding details of upcoming unreleased products; it was true during his time at OnePlus and persists at Nothing. As such, we already have a pretty good idea of the hardware that the Nothing Phone 2 will come packing and because of this, a general sense of a possible price.
Speculation might not be needed, however, as a new source has spouted what it claims is the official European pricing for the Nothing Phone 2. In its own right, this unverified claim wouldn't have carried a huge amount of weight, if it weren't for Pei subsequently acknowledging the story on his own Twitter feed.
Who leaked this? 😡 https://t.co/ww15dFzCMgJune 22, 2023
According to French website Dealabs, the Phone 2 will arrive in two storage variants, each in two colorways (white and black): a 256GB model priced at €729 (approximately $800 / £630 / AU$1,180), and a 512GB model, costing €849 (roughly $935 / £730 / AU$1,375). For context, here's the European launch pricing for the Nothing Phone 1:
- 8GB RAM / 128GB = €469
- 8GB RAM / 256GB = €499
- 12GB RAM / 256GB = €549
If true, this would mark a 55% increase in price compared to last year's base model Nothing Phone 1, while also rendering the Phone 2 more expensive than the Google Pixel 7.
Of course, a glance at the storage variants listing for the upcoming Nothing Phone serve as some indication of why the price may have risen – with double the base storage compared to Phone 1 and a higher peak storage at 512GB, while Dealabs also speculates that the former will come accompanied by 8GB of RAM, with the top-tier model adopting 12GB of RAM, like last year.
Nothing has also already confirmed that the Phone 2 will run on Qualcomm's premium and capable Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset – a notable step up over the Snapdragon 778G at the heart of last year's device, which will also up the cost.
A bluff or a double-bluff?
While it's impossible to verify, I don't trust the serendipitous timing of this leak. As I mentioned earlier in this piece, the aforementioned drip-feeding of unreleased product information is something Pei has been known to do in the past and paired with his direct acknowledgement of the original Dealabs story (and the subsequent coverage it's creating, i.e. this story you're reading right now), I can't help but feel like the angry emoji in his above tweet isn't actually an admission of genuine frustration; behind that pictographic facade, I suspect he's grinning.
It could be read as written – the Nothing Phone 2's pricing has gotten out and it's notably more expensive than the company's first smartphone. One alternative possibility, however, could be that this rumored starting price of €729 is now attached to the Phone 2, disappointing fans hopeful for the same impressive price/performance balance of its predecessor, only to be hoodwinked and pleasantly surprised, when the Phone 2's real price turns out to be lower when it's officially unveiled on July 11.
This would then soften the blow of what will still likely be a price hike, even if it isn't as significant an increase as we all believed ahead of launch.
Thankfully, we don't have long left to wait, with Nothing preparing to launch the Nothing Phone 2 in the second week of July.
