There has been a growing amount of gossip surrounding the possibility of there being a phone in the pipeline from Nothing, Carl Pei's new brand.

The latest in this story comes from known leaker Evan Blass, who has shared an image showing Nothing's Carl Pei and Qualcomm's Cristiano Amon examining a phone.

The image is shared without details, but we know this is in the meeting area behind the Qualcomm stand at Mobile World Congress 2022. We know that, because we spent a lot of time there.

It's previously been reported that Nothing was showing off the forthcoming handset at MWC and following the acquisition of Essential in 2021, we always thought that it was a matter of when rather than if.

We can't tell that much from the image, but we suspect that it's in a case to disguise its true finish and design, the placement of the thumb conveniently conceals the camera array to a degree.

The photo appears to be have been taken on 1 March 2022; the character to the left of the photo is Don McGuire, chief marketing officer at Qualcomm. We have deduced this based on the shoes and jacket in the leaked photo, which match McGuire's outfit he was wearing when he shared images on the same day.

We know Carl Pei was on the Qualcomm stand around this time, because we sat down with him on the same day to talk about Nothing.

There are a lot of questions, however, about this image. We know all those people were there, we know when and where it was taken, but we don't know who took it.

Given that these rooms aren't filled with people, we suspect that Cristiano Amon and Carl Pei know exactly who took it. We suspect that person passed the image over to Evan Blass to play a part in building the hype for the forthcoming Nothing Phone.

Nothing phone leaks in Carl Pei hands-on with Qualcomm CEO photo 2

If there's one thing we know about Carl Pei, it's that he loves the internet and he loves these sorts of games. When OnePlus launched its first phones, it was all about building hype, making them hard to get to build a degree of exclusivity.

Then we've seen Carl Pei talking to huge name YouTubers like Marques Brownlee, revealing a OnePlus phone ahead of schedule in a way that he knew would garner a lot of attention with the online fanbase.

This doesn't feel any different. We can't verify that this is the Nothing Phone, we can't verify that this is a plant rather than genuine leak - but it does have the feeling of Nothing playing a few games to build interest for its next product launch.