Just look at the back of the Nothing Phone (3). Gone are the familiar thick LED lines of previous Glyph Interfaces. In their place sits a small, circular display tucked into the upper right corner – a feature Nothing now calls the Glyph Matrix. This mini screen still carries the same cryptic, sci-fi DNA the company has built its design language around, but now it’s going to become more useful. You can fiddle with a handful of quirky tools like a fun, pixelized mirror, and mini-games, like spin the bottle or magic 8 ball, and Nothing is opening it up to developers via an API. Who knows, there might be even crazier people out there who might build apps for the Glyph Matrix. It might even run Doom one day! But that’s a given.
The Glyph Matrix and the crazy camera layout
And yet, for all its eccentricity, the Phone (3) doesn’t feel off-putting. In fact, after spending some time with it, I suspect the design will grow on future owners of the Nothing Phone (3).
Is the Nothing Phone (3) a real flagship or is it not a real flagship?
I can’t wait for us to put the Nothing Phone (3) through performance benchmarks, and hope that we won’t see much deviation from the 8 Gen 3 performance this chip is supposed to deliver.
A 200MP camera? No, but we have four 50MP ones!
Nothing is a brand for the young, and if there’s one thing young people do besides scrolling TikTok, that’s taking pictures and video of themselves (probably to be used on TikTok). And so, Nothing has seriously upgraded the camera system on the Nothing Phone (3) – each of the four shooters on board is 50MP.
- Main 50MP shooter with a large 1/1.3” sensor and bright f/1.68 lens
- Periscope zoom camera offering 70mm focal length, up to 60X AI super resolution zoom, and even 10cm macro shots
- 114-degree 50MP ultrawide
- 50MP front camera that can shoot 4K video
It’s the most ambitious imaging system Nothing has built so far, and it makes the Phone (3) feel like it’s finally ready to compete beyond just design gimmicks and clean software.
The rest of the hardware seems equally polished. The bezels are just 1.87mm thin all around – an impressive 18% slimmer than the previous generation – wrapping around a 6.67-inch flexible AMOLED display. The panel delivers a sharp 1.5K resolution and peaks at an eye-searing 4,500 nits of max brightness – an improvement over the Phone (2).
The biggest battery in a Nothing phone yet. Thank you, silicon-carbon!
Software has always been a big part of Nothing’s pitch, and this time you get Nothing OS 3.5 on top of Android 15, with a commitment to 5 years of OS updates and 7 years of security patches. Nothing also teased that Android 16-based Nothing OS 4.0 is coming later down the line. From first glance, the software is typical Nothing – clean, uniquely customized, and smooth. Especially now that it has the 8s Gen 4, I’m hoping it’ll simply fly, and for years to come!
If the Nothing Phone (3) proves anything, it’s that the company is done playing in the margins. This is Nothing’s most confident and polished device yet – still weird, like that one kid who just won’t fit in, still unapologetically different, but finally – genuinely flagship.
Nothing Phone (3) is available in black and white
And speaking of flagship… you know what I’m about to say, right? Yep, it’s also the most expensive Nothing phone yet, starting at $799 for 256 GB storage, and going up to $899 for 512 GB storage. Oh well, I guess those flagship internals have a cost after all!
Now, for the other big question: when? Nothing Phone (3) pre-orders start on July 4, and the Phone (3) release date is on July 15.
Whether you end up loving it or not (and I’d wager this is a design that one either loves or hates), you can’t deny that Nothing is making the world of phones just a little less boring.
Source: Phone Arena
