we never intended to mass-produce the hole-less phone

Remember Meizu’s hole-less “Zero” phone? The one we found hidden on one of the stands of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, sad, forgotten and label-less?

Well, it looks like Meizu doesn’t want you to remember. The crowdsourcing campaign for the Zero failed, never having reached even half of its $100,000 goal. And answering a query about the campaign on Meizu’s official forums (via Engadget), company CEO Jack Wong essentially said the Zero will never see the light of day. 

“This crowdfunding is carried out by the marketing department,” Wong wrote, calling the phone a “pre-research project.”

“We never intended to mass-produce this project,” he wrote.

That’s a bit of an odd thing to say about a phone for which the company had launched an actual crowdsourcing campaign (we hope all backers get their money back), but at least we can appreciate the man’s honesty. 

I’ve had some hands-on time with the Zero and it wasn’t actually that bad (though I didn’t get to test many of the phone’s supposed tech breakthroughs, like ultra-fast charging). 

But the exorbitant $1,299 starting price, coupled with the fact that the lack of any ports, while visually pleasing, isn’t exactly an advantage, made the Zero a recipe for failure.