Nobody cared about Meizu’s hole-less Zero phone at MWC 2019

After a few days of looking at foldable phones at Mobile World Congress 2019, I’m already kinda sick of them.

Look, I know foldable phones are cool — Huawei’s Mate X was without a doubt the showstopper at the mobile show in Barcelona — but I’ve said it a zillion times and I’ll repeat it a zillion more times: they’re far, far, from ready. 

So I went in search of another highly sought after phone: the Meizu Zero, aka the phone without any buttons, charging ports, speaker grilles, or holes of any kind.

As it turns out, nobody seems to care about this vision for phones.

Meizu didn’t have a booth of its own at MWC to display the Meizu Zero. Instead, I found the hole-less phone at Qualcomm’s booth, virtually hidden in a row of other phones powered by the mobile chipmaker’s Snapdragon processors.

The Meizu Zero was flying under the radar so hard that Qualcomm didn’t bother to even give it a proper label so booth visitors could identify what phone it was. Every other phone had one.

It was maybe the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in the four years I’ve gone to MWC.

And what a waste because the Meizu Zero is a legitimately interesting phone in my opinion. It doesn’t have a flashy screen that folds in half, but like, it’s hole-less!

The Meizu Zero is the physical manifestation of an idea Mashable dreamed up years ago with our iPhone 2020 concept, where we designed a phone without physical buttons.

A port-less and hole-less phone is supposed to be the future — a phone in its purest form as a single pane of glass in your hand. That a company is even daring enough to design, build, and hopefully ship such a device by April should be an achievement.

Instead, the Zero and all of its anticipated innovations — like wireless USB file transfer that’s supposed to be as fast as a wired connection, super fast wireless charging, vibrating screen speaker technology, and haptics-based buttons — went completely ignored and unnoticed as MWC attendees fawned over overpriced foldable phones and 5G promises that won’t realistically take shape until 2020 at the earliest.

My hope was to get a closer look at the Zero and its hole-less design. How well do the vibrational buttons work? Is its wireless charging really as fast as Meizu claims? But because the phone was mostly covered by a metal grip to secure it from theft, all I got to see were slivers of the phone.

Perhaps, the Zero was rightfully ignored because it wasn’t finished. I mean, the dual cameras on the back didn’t even have a completed housing cover to protect the image sensors:

Even though I didn’t get to hold the phone in my hand, I got a sense for what a phone without holes and ports would look like and I admit I like it a lot. As I’ve said before, the Zero feels like the smartphone’s final form.

But maybe the Zero’s hole-less form is arriving years ahead of its time. Perhaps, the world isn’t ready for a hole-less phone yet. Honestly, from the sad phone I saw in Qualcomm’s booth, Meizu probably isn’t either.