• Nothing has just revealed its biggest Phone (4b) teaser yet
• It's a lower-end alternative to the Nothing Phone (4a), which makes us wonder whether it was originally planned to be a CMF model
• It'll be announced on July 7

Something strange is going on at Nothing — just a few days ago the company announced that there wouldn’t be any new CMF phones this year, but now it’s back with a teaser for the first in a new line of phones, dubbed the Nothing Phone (4b). And there are reasons to think this is the CMF Phone 3 Pro in all but name.

The main teaser for the Nothing Phone (4b) comes from Nothing’s official X account and includes sketches of various possible designs, thereby not actually giving much away. But it also says that we’ll learn more on July 7 at 11am BST, which is 3am PT / 6am ET / 8pm AEST.

We do know a bit more already though, as Nothing’s co-founder Akis Evangelidis has explained on X that “the B Series builds on the success of the A Series by expanding into a new segment, while maintaining a clear product hierarchy.”

More tellingly, they added that “the A Series remains our most premium line below our flagship products, which doesn't carry a letter designation.” That’s a roundabout way of saying that the Nothing Phone (4b) will be lower end than the Nothing Phone (4a), and you know what else would have been lower end? The canceled CMF Phone 3 Pro.

A CMF phone at a higher price?

So why would Nothing repackage the CMF Phone 3 Pro as the Phone (4b)? Well, Nothing has stated that we won’t see any new CMF phones this year thanks to the ongoing RAM crisis, which has meant that “we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF.”

What they might be able to do though is sell that phone at a price that makes sense for the more premium Nothing brand. So in other words there’s a chance this is the CMF Phone 3 Pro, just at a higher price than Nothing could get away with while using CMF branding.

Of course, that’s just speculation. It’s entirely possible that along with the budget CMF Phone 3 Pro, Nothing was also working on the budget Phone (4a), and that it just happened to tease the latter mere days after canceling the former. But the timing does seem odd.

We’ll probably never know for sure whether this was originally designed as a CMF model or not, but we should at least learn more about the specs, features, and perhaps pricing of this phone very soon.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.