Meizu Zero won iF Design Award 2020 gold award

The world’s first smartphone with absolutely no holes, Meizu Zero, won the iF Design Award 2020 in the Product category. The awards are presented by the German International Forum Design. The award ceremony will take place on May 4 at the legendary Friedrichstadt Palace in Berlin.

Meizu Zero wins the gold award for combining high quality materials and integrating details and functional elements, leading to a new level of quality and precision.

Meizu Zero is an ambitious product that removes all holes and does not even have a SIM card slot or USB charging port. Works with eSIM only and only charges wirelessly. At the time of its introduction at the end of January 2019, eSIM was not very common, so the smartphone remained only conceptual.

The company then attempted to commercialize Meizu Zero through a crowdfunding site, but failed to raise the amount needed to produce a limited number of phones. However, a Forbes contributor Ben Sin obtained the most expensive item, the one from the presentation, by paying $2,999 for it the same day. Ben Sin is a Sino-American journalist living in Hong Kong and covering consumer technology in Asia.

On February 2, 2019, an advertisement for Meizu Zero also appeared on the huge LED panel of the US Stock Exchange NASDAQ, located on the northwest corner of Times Square in New York. Three screens alternated on the panel. The captions read: “We created the world’s 1st holeless phone”, “We are the creators from China” and “Please support us on Indiegogo”.

Although crowdfunding was unsuccessful, Meizu Zero has been talked about as a revolutionary product for quite some time.