As Meizu’s port-free phone fails crowdfunding, company says it was ‘messing about’

That port- and button-free phone Meizu showed off earlier this year? It didn’t even get half of its $100,000 Indiegogo pre-order campaign. But that’s fine, says the company. Turns out it was “messing about”

That’s according a post by CEO Jack Wong on Meizu’s official forum. “This crowdfunding project was just the marketing team messing about,” the executive said in the statement noted by Engadget. “The holeless phone is just a development project from the R&D department, we never intended to mass-produce this project.”

The handset, if you’ll remember, used a combination of tricks to keep the product completely devoid of buttons and ports, including a technology that vibrates the screen for sound, in order to rid the device of speaker grilles.

It’s all novel and more than a little bit silly, but the comments are no doubt a disappointment to backers. Surely not the sort of thing the fans who scraped together ~$45,000 want to hear — and perhaps a bit of sour grapes for a device that generated some buzz, but failed to hit its target in amongst a sea of foldable and 5G phones.

It seems likely the company would be looking at the product in a different light, had the $1,299 handset met its goal.