Nothing Phone 3 review: More premium, more problems

For all that the new Nothing Phone 3 looks like the start of something new, it's hard not to see it as the familiar ending to the story that all challenger brands reach sooner or later.

When the boutique brand first arrived on the scene back in 2022, it did so with a design just as eye-catching as the price-tag. Only a few years later, Nothing's latest flagship doesn't feel nearly so much more fresh or competitive than its contemporaries. For better or worse, it feels like OnePlus cofounder Carl Pei's smartphone startup has speedrun its way through the natural lifecycle of a challenger brand in record time.

The upshot is that the Nothing Phone 3 is easily the brand's best and most distinguished offering to date. The more bitter news is that the higher price tag and limited novelty factor found here ultimately make it much more difficult to recommend than its siblings, predecessors and rivals.

The Nothing Phone 3 sees the brand break into the flagship phone conversation but lose much of its charm in the process.

The original Nothing Phone hit the scene with a spec sheet that played up the idea of working smarter rather than harder.

Opting for more modest specs and a price point that meets those who can't afford to pay Apple's premiums where they are isn't just thrifty, it's tactical - not to mention a big part of what made that Nothing's debut device such a crowdpleaser. For better or worse, though, the brand has been chasing this idea that it needs to eventually produce a "true flagship" device ever since.

By most metrics, the Nothing Phone 3 is the handset that finally lives up to that promise. The front of the device is built around a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with thinner 1.87mm bezels, a crisp 1.5K resolution, up to 4500 nits of brightness and a variable refresh rate that can rev all the way up to 120Hz when needed.

More than just built to impress at a glance, Nothing's new flagship is also built to go the distance. The device boasts IP68 water and dust resistance, plus Gorilla Glass 7i protection on the front, and Gorilla Glass Victus on the back. Both sides offer 1 meter of drop protection, but only the front comes with added scratch resistance.

Meanwhile, the reverse side of the Nothing Phone 3 is primed to be just as big a drawcard. Instead of the Glyph LED lights found on older models, Nothing's third-gen flagship adopts a new Glyph Matrix display. This circular screen is located on the top right corner of the device and can display images, animations and more. Below it, you'll find a secondary Glyph Key that can be used to interact with the miniature display. Press the button and you'll toggle your way through a roster of Tamagotchi-like screens that run the gamut between mundane tasks like checking the time or battery life to more lighthearted stuff like a virtual game of Spin-The-Bottle and a Magic 8-Ball.

Although this inclusion is genuinely novel in the sense that there's nothing else quite like it out there, I can't help but say this quality was fast-fading, and the overall utility leaves something to be desired. Don't get me wrong, if the past is any precedent, then the Nothing community will likely put together some pretty snazzy functions for it before long.

However, where the older Glyph setup asked you for little more than something you were already doing (turning your phone over when you don't want it to distract you), its replacement asks for more active engagement in a way that I quickly found myself reluctant to live up to. On a more positive note, the camera lenses found alongside the Glyph display handily deliver on the promise of flagship-grade smartphone photography in ways that earlier efforts by Nothing never quite managed.

Arranged in an unconventional three columns on the back of the Nothing Phone 3, you'll find a 50MP main lens with a larger sensor than the one found in the Nothing Phone 2, a secondary 50MP periscope lens that adds support for 3x optical zoom, plus a 50MP ultrawide lens to round things out. Last but not least, there's also a 50MP selfie camera found on the front of the device.

In practice, I found myself relatively impressed with the results that the camera on the back of the Nothing Phone 3 delivers.  In ideal conditions, the results delivered by the hardware lined up neatly with the expectations set by the higher asking price. Even in more challenging low-light environments, it performed well in a way that devices that aren't made by Apple or Google typically fall short.

However, as opposed to something like the Google Pixel 9 Pro or iPhone 16 Pro, there is still something of a noticeable difference when it comes to Nothing's overall image processing pipeline. The shutter speed and auto-focus are sometimes just ever so slightly off the mark, which can ruin an otherwise perfect shot. Although this issue isn't super common, it's basically never an issue with the brands this device is competing against. It isn't as simple as the Phone 3 having a worse camera, but more than it has one that's just a little bit less exceptional at accounting for or covering up for human error.

Under the hood, the Nothing Phone 3 is powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processor. Relative to Nothing's last flagship, this promises to offer 36% faster CPU performance and 88% better graphics performance. Compared to the silicon inside the latest Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, it's still a little bit behind the curve. However, unless you're a power-user looking to edit video content (or something similarly demanding), then I doubt you'll really notice the difference.  

Moment to moment, the Phone 3 feels as snappy as flagship devices get. Like previous models, it's also available in two storage configurations. The cheaper of the two features 12GB of RAM and 256GB of on-board storage. Meanwhile, the latter ups the ante to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.

The sample that Nothing sent me to write this review relied on the latter specs, so it's no shock that apps loaded fast and there were zero major issues when it came to everyday performance. The Nothing Phone 3 didn't break a sweat when it came to multitasking, nor did it have any issues with more graphically-intensive games like League of Legends: Wild Rift, Diablo Immortal and Zenless Zone Zero.

Out of the box, the Nothing Phone 3 runs on Android 15 and Nothing OS 3.5. In terms of long-term support, Nothing has confirmed that an upgrade to Android 16 and Nothing OS 4 is slated to happen in Q3 2025 as part of its commitment to 5 years of OS updates and 7 years of security updates. That's not quite best-in-class for a flagship phone nowadays, though it is decent so far as software support is concerned.

Battery-wise, the Nothing Phone 3 features a 5150mAh battery with 65W fast charging, 15W wireless charging, and 7.5W reverse wireless charging. When paired up with a charger designed to take full advantage of that functionality, you can go from 0% to 50% in just twenty minutes.

Burned down via streaming video from YouTube over Wi-Fi, the device took 20 hours and 36 minutes to go from a full charge to zero. That's a decent result, but a little short of where some of the competition tends to sit.

Even so, the Nothing Phone 3 left little on the table when it came to battery life. I found myself regularly getting about a day and a half to two full days off a single charge, though your mileage may vary depending on your own usage patterns.