Meizu Admits Zero Port-Less Smartphone Was An Epic Fail Marketing Stunt

We're now learning that the whole exercise was a big marketing fail by Meizu. The company's founder and CEO, Jack Wong, took to Meizu's official discussion forum to come clean about the smartphone.

"This crowdfunding project was just the marketing team messing about," Wong explained. "The holeless phone is just a development project from the R&D department, we never intended to mass-produce this project."

While it's somewhat refreshing that Wong was so upfront and blunt about what took place behind the scenes with Zero, it's an unfortunate that the company went through all of this trouble by asking for funding from backers and "marketing" what was essential vaporware. And this wasn't even a project that the company had originally intended to push through to the public; there was no plan in place -- at all -- to actually see this device through to fruition.

What made the Zero stand out from the pack was that it had absolutely no buttons or ports. That's right, there wasn't even a USB-C port for charging/data transfers -- instead, charging was to take place via a Qi wireless mat. Meizu sought to hit a funding goal of $100,000 to bring the smartphone to market, but ended up with just shy of $46,000 in its coffers.

The smartphone was to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, and included a 5.99-inch AMOLED display with an embedded fingerprint reader. Other features included dual rear cameras and IP68 dust/water resistance.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle for the phone was the fact that it had a price tag of $1,299, which is a lot to ask for a smartphone packing last year's flagship SoC instead of the new and more powerful Snapdragon 855. Thankfully, because of Meizu's decision to use a fixed Indiegogo funding goal, all of the backers that were duped into dropping money on the Zero will get all of their cash back without issue.