Digital Theory: Changes and Constants of Nut Smartphones

Nut Mobile held a new product launch conference on October 20. In addition to the highly anticipated Nut R2 mobile phone, the appearance of Smartisan TNT go expansion notebook and others made many people's eyes light up. Nut Mobile is still the familiar Nut Mobile phone, but it has been integrated into ByteDance's "big family".

Change: Nut smartphone officially announced as a member of ByteDance's "big family"

Ever since Luo Yonghao sold the Nut phone brand to ByteDance, his influence on the Nut phone has gradually diminished, and Nut R1 became Luo Yonghao's last product of the brand.

ByteDance, which took over the Nut mobile phone brand, released the Nut Pro3 after some adjustments, and the speaker of the press conference was changed from Luo Yonghao to someone else. On the Nut Pro3, ByteDance began to appear, but it was not obvious, and the Nut mobile phone team still has a lot of independence.

However, when it comes to Nut R2, the brand began to collaborate with many products under ByteDance. For example, in order to encourage more people to use mobile phones to shoot videos to record their lives, Nut Mobile and Xigua Video jointly launched a national mobile phone shooting campaign.

In order to promote Smartisan TNT's outstanding performance in "future creation", JMGO also invited the product manager of Jianying APP to stand on the platform.

The launch conference of the Nut mobile phone turned out to be a promotion conference for ByteDance's APP products, which made many old Nut fans and old Hammer mobile phone fans angry. The Nut mobile phone has changed.

As early as last year, the Smartisan OS pre-installed on Nut phones began to do things that were detrimental to user experience, causing some users to complain to Luo Yonghao. Luo Yonghao could only give suggestions to express his dissatisfaction.

Image source: Weibo

However, no matter how angry Luo Yonghao was, the Nut phone had nothing to do with him at this time. At the beginning of the Nut launch conference, the official clearly stated that Nut had joined ByteDance, and the new name was Xinshi Lab. Nut became a full-process hardware team under ByteDance, covering all aspects of the entire life cycle of a hardware product from design, R&D, production, to brand marketing, sales, and service.

Unchanged: Continuing the sentiment of Luo Yonghao's era

Although the Nut mobile phone brand has changed hands, it has not abandoned the sentiment of the Luo Yonghao era, but has continued it.

In terms of industrial design, the launch of the Nut R2 white version (officially called the Light Special Edition) shows the Nut team once led by Luo Yonghao's dedication to industrial design. The photosensitive pattern on the back of the Nut R2 white version will slowly solidify after repeated light exposure, forming a slight, permanent mark, which the official calls time. This is full of sentiment, literary style, and style.

In the released Smartisan OS 8.0, the skeuomorphic UI is well preserved, and the feature of "light and shadow perception" is added. Through the expression of light and shadow, various changes in the physical world are integrated into the mobile phone, which makes people feel the dedication of the Smartisan OS team and the attention to details as always. This must be what Luo Yonghao likes to see.

In addition, the Nut TNT, which Luo Yonghao once took pride in, has also been upgraded. Not only is it supported by TNT OS 2.0, but the TNT go expansion version is also available. Compared with the first generation of TNT, it has undergone earth-shaking changes in application adaptation, usage scenarios, etc. What's more important is that its price is quite affordable.

After the Nut launch conference, the official released a video with text, expressing special thanks to Luo Yonghao, which moved many people. Some people speculated that Luo Yonghao took on 600 million yuan in debt in exchange for his personal bankruptcy to ensure that the Nut mobile phone team would not go bankrupt, allowing Nut mobile phones to go into battle lightly and make great strides.

As for how to better survive in the fiercely competitive Chinese mobile phone market, how to deal with the impact of ByteDance, and how to continue Luo Yonghao's sentiments, these are all tests of the wisdom of the Nut Mobile team.