Nothing bided its time before releasing the Nothing Phone 3. Where the Nothing Phone 2 was a solid mid-ranger, and Nothing’s Phone 2a and 3a were pushing the upper limits of the budget phone market, the Nothing Phone 3 comes in with a $799 price tag to go squarely against flagship phones from Apple, Google, Samsung, and OnePlus. That’s no easy task for a still fairly recent upstart with less than five years to its name, but Nothing does an impressive job delivering a quality phone with respectably all-around performance and a quirky design that some may enjoy.
Nothing Phone 3 – Design and Features
The Nothing Phone 3 puts style first. Whether you like its style is a different matter, but the phone certainly goes for a remarkable and unique look. Its clear back offers some insight as to what might be going on inside, though the actual internals are still all covered up, so it’s not quite like the clear side panel of a gaming PC. It’s also no longer clear to show a host of different LEDs spattered around the phone. Now, there’s just a small coin-sized dot matrix display in one corner, which Nothing is calling the Glyph Matrix.
The 489-pixel screen is interesting, though something we’ve already seen done in slightly different fashion on the Asus ROG Phone 9. This can display some fun little gimmicks, like a spin-the-bottle game, notification animations, or a magic eight ball. It has some more useful features as well, like a battery meter, spirit level, and a selfie mirror – though this last feature was rather confusing to use, requiring me to cycle through the options to it, long press to activate it, and then long press again to take the photo (it doesn’t open the camera app on the other side of the phone, doesn’t work with the volume buttons, and doesn’t appear when taking a photo normally). Some features of the Glyph Interface are still pending, like per-contact notification visuals.
Beyond that special display and transparent back, the only quirky thing about the Nothing Phone 3’s design is its camera layout. The modules are simply laid out unusually, with the wide and ultra-wide sensors sitting side by side, albeit at some distance from each other, and the telephoto sensor sitting offset from either of these. Folks who favor 90-degree angles and straight lines will likely be put off by this.
The rest of the phone is a mix of mid-range and high-end design. The Nothing Phone 3 is slightly thick at 8.99mm and heavy at 218 grams, up from the 8.5mm of competitors like the OnePlus 13 and Pixel 9 Pro, which are 210g and 199g respectively. Its dimensions are otherwise reasonable for a phone packing a 6.67-inch display. The phone boasts an aluminum frame typical of devices in this category and uses Gorilla Glass 7i for scratch and drop protection. It’s tough to say how that stacks up to the higher-end Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on something like Pixel 9 Pro, but Nothing at least includes a preapplied screen protector with the phone. The device is also IP68 rated to keep up dust and survive dips in 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes. For an $800 phone, I’d expect no less.
The display on the Nothing Phone 3 is excellent. It’s a modest size, and with 1260×2800 pixels, it’s perfectly sharp. Nothing may not be at the cutting edge of bezel thinness, but they’re even and narrow all the way around. The screen is satisfyingly bright in outdoor conditions and boasts the color and contrast I’ve come to love on AMOLED displays, making for especially poppy HDR content while watching TV, movies, or YouTube. The display can reach up to a 120Hz refresh rate for smooth visuals, and it will dynamically lower its speeds to conserve power necessary. In my testing, it always felt smooth.
The display is flanked by speakers on either side that offer respectably loud audio and are reasonably balanced between the sides for clean stereo sound. On the bottom of the phone, you’ll also find a tray that can hold a pair of SIM cards, though the phone also supports eSIM, providing some pleasing flexibility. That is disappointingly set next to a USB-C port that only offers USB 2.0 transfer speeds. I’m not sure what excuse Nothing has for that, but I’m sure it can’t be a good one in 2025 – a full 16 years after USB 3.0 was introduced.
Concerning Moisture
In testing the Nothing Phone 3, I ran into an issue I’ve heard of on phones but never personally encountered before. After running a demanding test on the phone, I discovered condensation on the inside of the camera lenses.
For the primary and telephoto cameras, this condensation didn’t readily show up in photos, but it did cause blurring in areas of the ultra-wide sensor’s photos. After some time, the condensation went away. The weather was a bit extreme, with high temps outside and strong air conditioning inside. And the benchmark test I ran raised the phone’s temperature considerably. While it may have been a fluke or a confluence of extreme factors that led to the moisture inside the cameras, it was no less concerning.
AI Emphasized
On the right side of the phone, you’ll find an extra button below the power button. This is for a special AI-centered experience called Essential Space. Tapping the button will take a screen shot and holding it will let you record a voice note for future reference. Notes can also quickly be appended to screenshots for more context. If you flip the phone over and hold the Essential button, the phone will begin to record, showing a sound wave on the Glyph Interface and blinking a red light near the cameras to indicate it’s recording. From there, Nothing will process the recording and provide a summary.
Google launched a similar screenshot-centric feature with AI analysis on the Pixel 9 lineup. Nothing’s implementation so far seems a little more seamless to dive into thanks to its dedicated button, though it doesn’t appear to work as hard to provide useful insights into things or provide a quick way to dig up old screenshots by searching for them. Some features require use of a Nothing account, like quickly adding to-do list items via voice (something Google Gemini will also do). The service includes 300 minutes of audio analysis per month – a bad sign for on-device AI inference.
Nothing Phone 3 – Software
The Nothing Phone 3 comes with Android 15 out of the box. This runs Nothing OS 3.5 as a skin of Android, and it’s a clean one. It has some funky icons that aren’t always easy to interpret and a couple of Nothing apps, but otherwise comes with no bloatware that I could see. Some of the hardware controls, like the Glyph Interface, aren’t part of apps but are baked into system settings. It’s not always intuitive where seeings will be or even how to access the full settings when you find the right spot, but overall it’s been at least a clean and pretty Android interface. Impressive for a company that didn’t have very clear support lined up in the past, the Nothing Phone 3 comes with a promise of 5 years of Android updates and 7 years of security patches.That said, a skeptic might note that Nothing hasn’t even been around that long.
Nothing Phone 3 – Gaming and Performance
The Nothing Phone 3 is built around the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 SoC, a notable difference from the Snapdragon 8 Elite floating around in most Android flagship devices. While it’s no slouch, it also falls well behind that flagship chip where performance is concerned. In my testing, it tended to line up closer with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
That’s not the worst news, as that was also a high-performing chip and gave phones running it speeds competitive with Apple’s latest iPhone 16 family. The Nothing Phone 3 also puts up that kind of performance. In Geekbench 6’s CPU and GPU tests, the Nothing Phone 3 is a worthy rival to the OnePlus 13R, RedMagic 9 Pro, and OnePlus 12, albeit about 10-25% slower in single-core performance. It also outpaces the Pixel 9 Pro. It puts up solid gaming results in 3DMark’s various graphical benchmarks, continuing to nip at the heels of these other phones, even if it generally doesn’t overtake them.
The Nothing Phone 3 can struggle a bit with heat, though, and it’s been inconsistent in this regard. After running a benchmark stress test, I measured a 115 degree Fahrenheit hotspot near the cameras and 100-105 degree points along the frame near that end of the phone. The phone also aborted multiple runs of the Steel Nomad Light stress test because of overheating. It only once successfully completed the test in a cafe with especially cold air conditioning, and there it got a surprisingly high 80% consistency score. By comparison, the OnePlus 13 didn’t struggle to finish the benchmark when it was tested (not in that cafe) but had only a 65% consistency as its score range started with a high of 2524 points and sank as low as 1662 – that low, notably, being close to the Nothing Phone 3’s highest score of 1799.
That heat can crop up some in everyday use. Of course, it built up while gaming. I felt the phone get a bit uncomfortable, though not intolerable, after a couple rounds of Delta Force. And even while watching a show on Netflix, I noticed the phone getting warm. On other occasions, the phone didn’t seem to be unduly warm.
Thankfully, the phone generally behaves well. It has more than enough performance for everyday use and plenty of memory (I was sent the 16GB configuration for testing) for quick app switching. Even after gaming for a while, I was able to go back to an app I hadn’t used for hours and pick back up instantly.
Wireless connectivity is also a strong point. Not every phone plays well with the carriers in the U.S., like Poco and RedMagic. But in my testing, the Nothing Phone 3 generally had a solid and speedy connection to T-Mobile much like I’d get, generally topping 40Mbps and sometimes ramping up upwards of 100Mbps. The phone also supports tri-band Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0, which gives it a good degree of future proofing
Nothing tops off all this generally decent performance with a solid battery. You won’t find anything mindblowing, with the Nothing Phone 3 sporting just a 5150mAh battery. But that’s ample for all-day use and will likely last all but heavy users well into a second day. The phone can juice back up on a 65W wired charger, which is just peachy if you have a USB-C laptop charger. Wireless charging is a bit slower at just 15W.
Nothing Phone 3 – Cameras
On a lot of phones, cameras can be a bit of an afterthought, or overhyped without the hardware and software to actually deliver. Nothing seems to have really put some effort into their camera stack with a full setup of quality sensors, not pulling a fast one with one good sensor and a handful of throwaway sensors to pad the specs. Here’s what the Nothing Phone 3 includes:
- 50MP Wide, f/1.68, 1/1.3”, OIS, EIS, PDAF
- 50MP ultrawide, f/2.2, 114-degree FOV
- 50MP telephoto, f/2.68, 3x optical, OIS, EIS
- 50MP Selfie, f/2.2, 81.2-degree FOV
The Nothing Phone 3 starts off on a good footing. The main sensor captures lovely photos with clear details, plenty of light gathering potential, and lifelike color. In very bright sunlit environments, it wants to overexpose the scene, but this is quickly dialed back with a simple slider in the camera app. It’s not always spot-on with focus, especially for close-up shots, but it performs well enough.
The ultra-wide manages to provide consistent lighting and color, not straying too far from the main sensor. But it suffered from hard-to-miss distortion and aberrations to the image. It also struggled to focus close-up. While it can capture a larger field of view, its issues hold it back from being a solid addition to the setup.
The telephoto proves more worthy. It’s able to punch in nicely on distant subjects with a 3X optical zoom. 5X would have been more impressive, but 3X still helps. It shifts colors slightly from the main sensor, so there’s not a perfect consistency there, but it’s still fairly close. More importantly, the telephoto makes for some sharp shots. Whether you’re trying to shoot a far-off subject or a close-up, the telephoto sensor comes into play. When switching to macro mode, it’s actually the sensor used, and it does a good job bringing out texture. Nothing’s computational photography isn’t great at digital zoom, with the photo quality dropping off quickly even when pushing to just 6X zoom.
The selfie camera also does a solid job. It captures sharp images with bold contrast. Interestingly, it appears to perform better than using the main sensor to take a selfie with the Glyph Mirror. While there’s no easy way to account for subtle differences changing how the camera processes a photo, it appears that photos are noisier and more washed out when using the Glyph Mirror to take selfies.
Overall, it’s a good camera system, but doesn’t quite push into exceptional territory. It may have higher resolution sensors than the OnePlus 13 and Google Pixel 9 Pro, but Google and OnePlus just do a better job processing and matching images between its sensors. And the Google Pixel 9 Pro has better zoom.
