Nothing has confirmed that the Nothing phone (2) will be powered by Qualcomm hardware, with Carl Pei making a surprise visit to the Qualcomm booth at Mobile World Congress to make the announcement.

In the run-up to the launch of the Nothing phone (1), the company put plenty of time into teasing its first phone, including holding briefings at MWC 2022 and also releasing some "leak" photos of Carl Pei and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, examining the forthcoming device.

That's all old news now, with the Nothing phone (1) launching in July 2022. But one of the regions not on the launch list was the US. That's going to be corrected with the launch of the Nothing phone (2), which will be arriving in the US and giving Nothing a new market to conquer.

Carl Pei confirmed that the Nothing phone (2) will be a flagship device, moving into the top tier and powered by Snapdragon 8 series hardware. That's almost certainly going to be Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the latest Qualcomm hardware in many of 2023's devices.

We also spotted that Nothing was included on the list of brands working on Snapdragon Satellite, so there's the potention that it might also offer satellite messaging, but this hasn't been confirmed.

Carl Pei didn't offer any other details of the new device, but we're expecting a long campaign of teasing, sticking the hype-building playbook that Nothing used for the previous device - and was successful in building interest in OnePlus in the early days too.

There's no word on launch timeline, but Nothing phone (1) launched in July 2022, so a July launch for the Nothing phone (2) could be a reasonable guess. Carl Pei did confirm that the engineering team at Nothing is now larger and that a number of prototypes had been shown at Mobile World Congress. We're sure there will be plenty more to report on Nothing's next phone in the coming weeks.