Who Cares If It’s a Flagship, It’s Still Really Good

The Nothing Phone 3 is the first “true” flagship device from Nothing after a couple of years of only dropping mid-range phones on the world. This phone is certainly the most high-end that the company has released to date, with a set of specs that probably meet the price point. In proper Nothing form, the Phone 3 also tries some new stuff in order to stand out or act “fun” as the company likes to claim about its approach to an era of technology it has deemed not fun.

I’ve been able to test the Nothing Phone 3 for the past couple of weeks now in order to try and figure out if we’re flagship enough here, whether the fun stuff is actually fun, and if you should buy an Android phone in the US from someone not named “Samsung” or “Google.”

Let’s dive into it with this here Nothing Phone 3 review.

What’s good about Nothing Phone 3?

Design. Nothing may be a technology company, but you could make the argument that they are a design company first. Every single product they release is a showcase of their latest ideas around hardware design. From the see-through glass, spotlight on components, and the little thoughtful touches (like a red camera status light) accompanying it all help create a style that not many companies are willing to even test.

I’m definitely a fan of Nothing design and happen to find the Nothing Phone 3 to be a great looking device. That’s probably a controversial take! From the bits of feedback we’ve seen and conversations I’ve had with others in the industry, it’s clear that I might be in the minority in thinking this.

First, I love the squared-off frame with flat edges. The metal really lets you know that this device is made well, with great balance from top to bottom that your hand will appreciate. It is on the heavy and larger side of phones I tend to want to hold, but because it feels premium and there are edges to get a grip on, I’m OK with both of things. The buttons are metallic and clicky and there are uniform bezels on the front and back of the device.

As for the back of this phone, yeah, it’s not going to be for everyone. The cameras have almost no alignment with one another, there’s that ugly Glyph Matrix screen in the top right corner, and we even have a weirdly positioned touch pad to control it. Most of it makes no sense and I think that’s kind of the appeal. It’s a bit chaotic, yet it’s also incredibly clean in this white colorway and quite interesting. You can stare at the back of this device and find something new each time that catches your eye. And you know what? It’s not just another plain slab with a camera bar or left-corner camera housing.

Sometimes, being different, even if different is all over the place, is refreshing enough that it works. I think that’s the Nothing Phone 3 to me.

Performance. This phone runs a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, a chipset that is a step or two below Qualcomm’s top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite, which all of Samsung’s best phones run. The thing is, almost no one who uses this phone will ever know what chip is inside of it because it’s as smooth as any phone on the market.

Nothing included 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage in the review unit they sent me. Those two items coupled with this processor and the 120Hz refresh rate in the display is everything I could ask for in a phone. Their software is tuned to be fast and smooth, so running ill-tuned apps like Pokemon GO have no issues at all, even when running the native refresh rate. My other combination of use that includes Chrome and Instagram and Telegram and the camera, all just works. If you handed me this phone and didn’t tell me the chipset, I’d assume is was something major. Is the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 in that category? It’s close enough and runs well enough in this device that it’s not really an area of concern.

Battery life. Nothing put a 5150mAh battery in the Nothing Phone 3 and gave it fast 65W wired charging, as well as 15W wireless charging. Since Nothing doesn’t include a charger in the box, I have yet to find a 65W charger that’ll charge this phone at those speeds, but I haven’t really needed to. This phone trickle charges on my wireless charger at night and then lasts all day and then some. This is a phone that you will not need to charge in the middle of a day – ever.

Through a couple of weeks of use, it looks like I’m averaging at least 5 hours of screen on time per day, but that amount of usage never kills the phone. I’m just telling you that I’m maxing out my personal usage at around 5 hours. However, on at least one day, I went to bed and was shocked to see 7 hours of screen on time and 24% battery remaining. That day might have been somewhat of an outlier, as most of my screenshots are in the 4-5 hour range with 30-40% remaining. You get it, though, this phone just goes and goes.

As an example, it’s the summer, so I’m back into Pokemon GO, which I mentioned above. That means I’m outside under the sun with the screen at full brightness, using GPS and cellular, and running a game that is as poorly tuned as they come. But yet, I still couldn’t finish this device off before bed. In fact, I never came close. This phone is in the running for battery king.

Display. In the Nothing Phone 3, you’ll find a 6.67″ AMOLED display at 2800×1260 with a max refresh rate of 120Hz. This is not an LTPO display, so it’s lowest refresh rate is 60Hz. The only real concern there would be a bigger drain on the battery at times where the display could be sipping instead of running at 60Hz, but I just told you how good the battery life is. I don’t think this is really something to worry about.

Nothing lets you run the phone at a constant 60Hz, a constant 120Hz, or with a Dynamic mix where it’ll switch refresh rates to try and improve battery life. I’ve just left it on Dynamic and haven’t noticed it drop to 60Hz at all, at least not during important moments. This display is super smooth when scrolling, text is always sharp, and colors can be extra punchy if you want them to be. I left the display on its “Alive” color setting, which really boosts contrast and vibrance. Hey, I’m old and like a pop of color, OK?

Animations are poppy and fluid, the touch sensitivity is next level, viewing angles hold up at those odd angles your desk gives you, Nothing has produced a really great dark theme, and the adaptive brightness is pretty quick to react to your environment.

Overall, I have almost no complaints about this display outside of outdoor brightness. While it’s rated at 4500 nits of peak brightness when playing HDR content, it maxes at 1600 nits of full-screen outdoor brightness. I definitely noticed the screen not getting bright enough in some sunny situations. Like, it was low enough that I grabbed the slider and re-slid it down and back to full to see if I could kick on a brightness boost. It never happened.

Software. The Nothing Phone 3 runs Android 15 right now with their Nothing OS 3.5 on top of it. This is one of the better Android skins. Honestly, it’s probably the 2nd best next to Google’s, at least in my mind. For support, Nothing has promised 5 years of Android updates and a full 7 years of security patches. That’s not matching Google or Samsung’s level of support, but it’s not bad. The plan is to deliver Android 16 in the coming months.

So what’s good about it? There’s so much. From the option to re-theme all of the icons to circles with a black or white theme, all of Nothing’s really great widgets (that work on the lock screen too!), and their universal search with a swipe into the app drawer (like Google does so excellently), this is my type of software experience. There is a decent amount of customization too, like the ability to swap out the Google Search bar on the home screen for Nothing’s Essential Search (system search) or run custom icon packs from Google Play. Nothing is even trying to bring true AirPods support as an experimental feature and there is a level of ChatGPT integration, for those into AI.

But mostly, I love their software because it does the basic Android things correctly. Again, you can swipe into the app drawer to quickly search your phone, the web, or find an app. It handles notifications properly, unlike Samsung and OnePlus who keep f*cking with them in the most obnoxious ways. They aren’t doubling up on system apps with their own very often, the lock screen is clean and proper, and most of the settings are as you’d find on a Google Pixel phone.

Again, if there was a software experience I’d choose if Google’s didn’t exist, this would be it. In many ways, Nothing is doing some things I wish Google would adopt too.

Camera. If you want to sell your phone as a “flagship,” you better put a great camera system in it. With the Nothing Phone 3, we have a triple 50MP camera system on the back with wide, telephoto/periscope, and ultra-wide. You certainly have flexibility with all types of shots here, including a dedicated macro mode that is quite good.

From an overall view, this camera is good or good enough. In my early days of testing, I found the shutter speed to slow down at times and some shots came out blurry. A recent update since I started writing this review may have helped there, as my most recent camera sessions happened with less of those shutter struggles. In fact, a week ago I was not impressed by the camera, but I feel like my thoughts there have changed this week.

This camera excels with portrait style shots, adding a perfect amount of soft blur. It’s more than capable in low light, has enough dynamic range to balance pictures with tough backgrounds, and can product just enough contrast to help an image come alive in the right situations. It can brighten shadows in ways I don’t love, giving off a flatter image than my Pixel 9 Pro. It can also be inconsistent with color reproduction too. And if you want to get really nitpicky, at full zoom, it’s just not as sharp in finer details as other Pro phones.

As I often say when reviewing, a camera wins if it’s the only one with you and you are confident that it can be used at any time to get a shot you’d be proud of. This camera meets that goal, even if it’s not on the level of Google’s cameras.

You’ll find a bunch of resized sample shots below and a full Google Photos album here.

What don’t I like?

Essential Key and Space. Nothing came up with this idea that having a dedicated daily to-do space would be a way for your phone to better act as a personal assistant and help you stay organized. They call it the Essential Space and it is powered by a dedicated button on the side of the phone called the Essential Key.

Now, in theory or at least on paper, this actually sounds like a pretty cool idea. You can press this button at any time to take a screenshot of your current screen or whatever your camera is viewing and then add to a collection for organization. You also add notes to things or just take voice notes throughout a day that the Space will turn into reminders or a to-do list. As a basic to-do list service, it’s kind of OK, plus it has a widget that your tasks will show up on.

That said, it’s so bad at what it wants to be or do. Like, it wants you to organize things by collection, yet I can’t ever get it to make a collection by voice or add something to a collection by voice. Instead, I have to manually create collections and then apparently manually add things to them. You are supposed to be able to do this with the Essential Key, but I can’t ever get it to work. It does a decent job of creating reminders and analyzing data on your screen, but then it does the stupidest little notes to each item at the top of your screen that all end with an exclamation mark in the most elementary way of expressing excitement or encouragement. You just end up with this never-ending stream of screen shots or voice notes, a carousel up top that is living in its own world, and then a mostly basic task manager. Again, the idea almost makes sense, but it fails at fully realizing all of it.

To make matters worse, Nothing created a dedicated button for this that you will mistakenly press dozens of times per day. And when you do, it’ll take a screenshot and ask for notes or to save to your Space. So you’ll spend far too much time in your day swiping the back gesture to get rid of the screenshot it took that you did not mean for it to take. Or if you don’t realize that’s happening, you may find screenshots in your Space that probably shouldn’t be there. And no, you can’t turn the button off or remap it to something else.

I almost want to applaud Nothing for trying this, because I actually do think the idea is a good one and they are already trying to improve it. Unfortunately, in its current form, it is a nuisance on the phone that you can’t escape.

Glyph Matrix. You probably remember the first several Nothing phones that all had the Glyph Interface light system on their backsides. These were an initial attempt at being fun by Nothing and I’ll admit that I think they kind of were. You could set these lights to blink with calls or notifications, show charging status of your phone, or act as a countdown for things like timers. They weren’t the most useful, but they at least looked cool.

For the Nothing Phone 3, Nothing ditched that idea completely and instead put a tiny round dot-matrix light system in the top right corner of the back of the device. It’s bad. It looks awful on the white version, in terms of design, and the functionality is so bad and gimmicky that I can’t imagine this thing sticking around for another device release. My guess is that Nothing is hearing the feedback and this Glyph Matrix will die after this one attempt.

Nothing built-in a way for the Glyph Matrix to act as a digital clock, show battery status, and for it to display Essential Notifications, which are a way for the Glyph to show you only select notifications you approve. From there, they added the silliest shit that you’ll never use. You can play spin the bottle! You can play rock-paper-scissors against your phone…or have it act as a magic 8 ball. Oh, they got rid of the timer (the only useful Glyph idea) and replaced it with a stopwatch. There are some other items too, just none worth mentioning.

The Glyph Matrix is apparently how Nothing brings fun back to tech. This is not fun, guys.

Fingerprint reader location. Nothing insists on putting in-display fingerprint sensors as low as it possibly can on phones. On both the Phone 3a Pro and this Phone 3, the sensor is borderline uncomfortable to press with each phone unlock because your thumb has to awkwardly reach downward. This thing should be a full 1.5″ higher. The fingerprint reader itself is OK at unlocking, it’s just painful to tap each time you unlock your phone.

Phone sounds. I don’t think I’ve ever complained about the sounds included on a phone in a review, but I’m about to. Nothing might have created the worst set of ringtones, notification sounds, and alarms in history for this device. I get that they bring this retro vibe to things as a part of their “fun” schtick, with their dot font and the bleep-bloops, but holy shit, man. I spent far too much time trying to find something unoffensive on this phone for just simple notifications, all while my skin crawled and neck tweaked as they robot bloop-bleeped me into a migraine. There’s trying too hard to be something and then there’s the sounds package on a Nothing phone.

Ok, enough venting.

Should you buy the Nothing Phone 3?

I actually like the Nothing Phone 3 quite a bit. I know I just got done ranting about several things, but overall, the parts of this phone that you need to be good are good. Battery life is exceptional. The display is good enough. Performance is buttery smooth. The software is excellent. Even the camera gets it right most of the time and is competitive.

Where you might get hung up on this phone is in the design – you love it or you don’t. The price ($799 with 12GB-256GB, $899 with 16GB-512GB) brings plenty of other phones into play too, like the very good OnePlus 13 or a Pixel 9 Pro with its regular discount. Is this phone better than those two? Probably not. It’s not that far off, though. Like with most phones, a discount might help sell it, and at this moment, Nothing has discounted the top model by $100 to $799.

Shop Nothing Phone 3