Fancy picking yourself up the Nothing Phone 1 when it gets released? You’ll need an invite. Here’s how to get a Nothing Phone 1 invite…

The Nothing Phone 1 hype train is now in full swing ahead of its July 21 release date. As with OnePlus when it first hit the market, to pick up a Nothing Phone 1, you’ll need an invite. But how the hell do you get an invite to buy the Nothing Phone 1?

As of right now, the invite list is currently 14,000+ people deep. You can sign-up for an invite to buy the Nothing Phone 1 right here. Once you’ve done that, at some point in the future you’ll be sent an invite that will allow you pre-order the phone.

How To Get Nothing Phone 1 Invite

When you sign up to Nothing’s invite system, you’ll be asked to make a $20/£20 deposit which, of course, is non-refundable. It is, however, taken out of the final price of the phone. Why sign up for an invite? Well, according to Nothing you’ll be able to buy the phone as soon as it is announced on July 12 – everybody else will have to wait until the 21st.

And when you do pre-order the phone, Nothing will give you an additional £20 store credit that can be used to buy a pair of its Nothing Ear 1 wireless headphones. These usually retail for £99.99, so you’ll get them for £89.99.

If you want to get higher on the invite list, all you have to do is invite friends and family to sign up which, to my cynical old brain kind of sounds like a pyramid scheme, especially since no one really knows how good this phone will be, save for the fact it runs a Snapdragon 778+ CPU and 8GB of RAM. It is NOT a flagship phone.

Is The Nothing Phone 1 Worth The Risk?

The thing with first-generation phones, and products in general, is that they’re seldom very good. Most products don’t really hit their stride until the second or third iteration – just look at the iPhone, the iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Note, and OnePlus’ first phone. This means, that taking a punt on the Nothing Phone 1 is a tad risky – it could be a complete lemon.

I personally do not think it will be a lemon; Carl Pei knows what he is doing and has plenty of experience in designing and launching great phones. The price of the phone will be the biggest risk; if it costs more than the Pixel 6, for instance, but uses lesser specs and doesn’t have the same camera performance, you’re going to feel like you’ve made a mistake, so it is potentially worth tempering your expectations if you’re signing up to pre-order the phone. You can always sell it if it all goes wrong…

If you’re risk averse, I’d just advise you to go with something solid and already established like the OnePlus 10 Pro, the Google Pixel 6, or the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. With these phones, you know what you’re getting. With the Nothing Phone 1, no one really knows how things will play out. Add in the fact that it will cost the best part of 500 quid, and most would agree that going with a Google or Samsung phone is probably way less of a risk…