Oppo subsidiary OnePlus is gearing up to launch a new flagship phone in China and the press is devouring every little glimpse they can get. The OnePlus 16 will be the company’s first major release that Americans won’t be able to buy because the brand lost its identity and halted sales in North America and Europe. The OnePlus 16, however, has bright, bright lights on the back of the phone. And that has people talking up a storm and making comparisons to its close competitor, Nothing.
Specifically, on what OnePlus calls the “Tomorrow’s Starlight” colorway, the company designed an “interstellar lighting effect” aimed at alerting owners to incoming notifications. The glass surface of the device has special three-zone lighting, each of which is carved with specific patterns: in the lower left corner there is the text “16 AREA”; to its right, celestial coordinates which point to an indeterminate location between the astral constellations of Hydra and Monoceros, and; an “X-marks-the-spot” location marker in the upper right corner. It’s unclear exactly how much control users will have over these lights, but from what we can assume from the previews, the LEDs are only meant to glow in warm, sunny hues.
Aside from the galactic theme, Oppo’s new OnePlus design echoes a similar feature from Nothing, the phone brand founded by Carl Pei, himself a co-founder of OnePlus. When Nothing’s first phone launched in 2022, it garnered praise for its cutting-edge aesthetic choices that include the distinctive Glyph interface. Nothing has changed about its Glyph LEDs over the years: it started on the phone (1) as concentric strips of white LEDs filled with user-assigned pulse patterns. The design has evolved several times since then, before arriving in its current form as a retro-style pixel array on the latest Phone (4a) Pro. But it turns out that this is just the beginning of the story.
The Glyphs of Nothing were neither the first nor the last of their kind
Front-facing notification LEDs were once a standard feature on many smartphones until the mid-2010s. They were displaced when phone makers began making screens larger to take up as much real estate as possible. Some manufacturers have used the camera’s LED flash as an alternative medium, but because users had to opt into this feature, it didn’t really take off. At the same time, the industry was gradually transitioning from the use of LCD panels to higher-performance, more energy-efficient OLED displays. As each individual pixel could turn on or off, the humble always-on display became more viable as a passive notification feature. This luxury, however, does not come without considerable energy consumption.
This convergence of developments would lead to reinventing the notification LED. Nothing, which released its first phone in 2022, was the most flashy in its shots, but it wasn’t the first. Asus, for example, launched its Republic of Gamers series of handsets in 2018 and they came with customizable RGB lighting on the back from the get-go. Most recently, Google’s colorful HiLight on the Pixel 11 Pro launched in 2026. Hell, Xiaomi went even further with its 17 Pro and Pro Max, converting the camera tray into a full-fledged, albeit tiny, screen. Out of curiosity, we can only hope that OEMs continue to push the boundaries in the future.
