Meizu Zero, The True Holeless Phone, Turns Out To Be Nothing But A Tease

When Meizu launched its “True Holeless Phone” – the Meizu Zero on Indiegogo on January 30, it shocked the mobile world with a design that sports no holes, no ports. The Chinese phone maker said it would release 100 “Engineer Units” with a price of $1,299 and only one “Pioneer Unit” with the price of $2,999.

Meizu Zero was teased to be a true holeless phone which sports no holes or ports

Now, the company has closed the campaign because it could not achieve its previously set goal, particularly it got only $46,000 compared with the expectation of $100,000. The news comes with a statement from Meizu’s CEO, “We never intended to mass-produce this project.”

He wrote:

This is contrary to what we knew before when the company said there would be real devices for sale and it even seeded review units.

However, such campaigns are common these days. Companies often launch floating crowdfunding campaigns, using them as trial balloons to see how interested people are about a product. In addition, the limited, expensive editions that the phone maker promised to release in April still light the hope that it may be working on the project.

Meizu is a China-based consumer electronics company, established by Jack Wong in 2003. It initially produced MP3 players, then moved to MP4 players. Starting 200, the company switched to focusing on manufacturing smartphones. In 2015, Meizu sold more than 20 million devices and became the 11^th biggest smartphone maker across the globe. In February 2015, Alibaba spent $590 million to buy an undisclosed minority stake of this smartphone player.