By Kavita Mistry 
When the Australian cricket team toured India in 2004, it was looking to win a series in the country for the first time in more than thirty years. One of the Australian team’s most high-profile players was a fast bowler called Brett Lee. In the build-up to the series, the Australian team kept talking of Brett Lee and the impact he would have on the Indian team, and even marketing campaigns around the series featured Brett Lee prominently. Australia did win the series, 2-1, but here is the interesting part: Brett Lee did not play even a single match. The Australian team was roundly criticized for not playing him before every match, but they simply stuck to keeping him on the bench. In the end, it emerged that the hype around Brett Lee had been built up mainly to market the series – Australia never had any intention of playing him in conditions that did not suit him.
We got a similar sensation when Nothing revealed the price of the Phone (3) yesterday. As some parts of the tech community heavily criticized the phone’s pricing – Rs 79,999 in India and USD 799 in the US – we wondered if the brand had released the device mainly to grab attention rather than market share.
On the surface, the Phone (3) – unlike other Nothing phones – gets utterly thrashed in the tech spec department by the competition. Yes, it does have some neat touches like the Glyph Mirror and that amazingly clean UI, but at the time of writing, we do not think it would be enough for it to take on the heavyweights in its price segment.
For, with the Phone (3), Nothing is no longer tangling with the premium mid-segment or even budget flagships but is actually trying to get its teeth into the premium pie, where it faces competition from the likes of the iPhone and the Galaxy S series, and even lower priced Android flagships from OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Vivo. The brand could count on using “user experience and innovation” to sell its devices in the mid-segment where value for money and relatively predictable specs were the rule but being able to do so in the premium segment, and that too with a device that seems seriously under-specced for its price is going to be difficult.
We are not saying that the Phone (3) has no chance of succeeding, just that the chances of its doing so are slim. It is difficult to see people investing Rs 79,999 in a device when they can get phones from well-established brands with faster processors, better displays, bigger (and faster charging) batteries, and equally versatile cameras at comparable or even lower prices. And while we know there are those who will say that “experience beats specs,” the brutal fact is that only Apple has been able to sell that line to the consumers, and mainly because it has software that is exclusive to its own devices. Google itself has had limited success trying to push ‘experience’ on its Pixel range.
It would be naive to assume that someone as experienced as Carl Pei was not aware of all this. This is why we think that the canny Nothing co-founder and his team might have released the Phone (3) purely as an attention-grabbing device. A bit like the Aussies hyped Brett Lee before the India series almost twenty years ago.
If that sounds very unlikely, consider the evidence. Unlike the Phone (1) and Phone (2), which were the only phones in Nothing’s portfolio when they were released, the Phone (3) actually comes at a time when Nothing has a very diverse portfolio, comprising half a dozen phones as per its website priced in the range of Rs 15,000 – Rs 35,000. In simple terms, while the Phone (1) and Phone (2) were literally the sole bread earners of Nothing’s phone portfolio, whose failure could literally have doomed the brand on the phone front, the Phone (3) joins a family that, according to most research reports is doing very well. Just as Brett Lee was part of a very strong team, one that ended up winning the series without him.
Again, we are not saying that Nothing has deliberately released the Phone (3) to fail, but it does not depend as heavily on its success as it did on the Phone (1) and Phone (2). It can afford not to do well – a luxury other Nothing phones did not have. To get back to the cricketing simile, just as Brett Lee was important to Australia, but the team could manage without him.
What the other phones in the Nothing portfolio could not have done, however, is grab attention on the scale at which the Phone (3) has done. Let’s face it, if the Phone (3) had been released at a more ‘perceived to be reasonable’ price (say, Rs 49,999, as some had speculated), it would have got more favorable reviews, but it would have been ‘just another flagship killer,’ getting the predictably positive coverage that is the hallmark of an age where media and influencers coexist and intermingle. With its seemingly outrageous pricing, the Nothing Phone (3) has managed to get the entire tech community talking about it, something a more competitively priced avatar of it might not have managed. In fact, it has triggered far more discussions and debates than the far more compellingly priced iQOO Neo 10 and Poco F7 have done.
It might not set the sales charts on fire, but the Nothing Phone (3) has definitely set off flaming sessions in the Twitterverse and other media. And for a relatively new brand, that attention is important. However, this is a bit of a mixed blessing, as a lot of the attention is negative in nature. Nothing might have reached more people with news of the Phone (3), but if our social media is any indication, it has also disappointed many of its followers. The brand’s next challenge is going to be to win back their confidence, which we suspect could be through a more competitively priced device – maybe a Nothing Phone 3 Lite, or maybe even a Nothing Phone (4a) Pro.
Of course, that might not be needed if the Phone (3) becomes a massive hit. Stranger things have happened in tech. And in life. If you had told us in mid-2004 that Australia would beat India at home without Brett Lee, we would have laughed. And Carl Pei does know a thing or three about hype.