Nothing Phone 3 Review: A Rule-Breaking Phone for Rebels

Gizmodo

4 days ago

A month removed from the flustered echo chamber of gearheads, self-proclaimed tastemakers, and apparently everyone-is-a-designer-and-engineer-now people on social platforms like X and Threads, I can say with certainty that almost all of the complaints about Nothing's controversial Phone 3 are much ado about—excuse the pun—nothing.
Taken as a whole, the Phone 3 is exactly what I expect from Nothing, the London-based technology startup led by ex-OnePlus cofounder Carl Pei that's known for stirring up strong opinions with its eye-catching, transparent gadgets. Everything from the Picasso-esque backside design and its unorthodox asymmetrical camera lens layout to the circular dot matrix screen in the upper right corner to the AI-focused 'Essential' key that functions like a secondary brain screams different. To the masses, Nothing is trying too hard to stand out and be cool. But that's the whole point—the only way to break the status quo is to make some noise in the now mature and very predictable world of smartphones. And the Phone 3 noise has been both positively and negatively deafening.
Nothing Phone 3
Nothing's Phone 3 is a statement phone that broadcasts your own individuality. It's not for everyone, only a person who's tired of the status quo.
Pros
Cons
I understand the disappointment with the Phone 3's not-quite-2025-flagship-level chipset, or that the screen isn't as good as the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy's displays, or the fact that Nothing is charging $800 for a slab that—on paper—falls short in some places compared to competitors. But you were never going to consider buying the Phone 3 if tech specs were the only thing that mattered. Like all of Nothing's products—the excellent Ear wireless earbuds and over-ear ANC Headphone 1—the Phone 3 is a statement that tells everyone that you're not a sheep following the herd.
I'm gonna address the so-called 'flaws' of the Phone 3 first because the echo chamber has been the most vocal about them, starting with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8S Gen 4 chipset. Tit for tat, the 8S Gen 4 chip is a step below the more performant and 'flagship' 8 Elite (Gen 4), with the CPU being roughly 35% slower and the GPU around 44% slower. These synthetic performance benchmarks lost all meaning long ago; no person—I feel sorry if you are that person—is counting cores and clockspeeds for phones. Maybe the 1% of pro mobile esport gamers are losing sleep over a few dropped frames in League of Legends: Wild Drift or PUBG, but us normies are not. Nothing could have gone with last year's flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 3), which is pretty close on paper, and the Phone 3 would run with equal responsiveness.
I've tested every phone that Nothing has released since the original Phone 1 in 2022, including all of the modular CMF budget ones, and I can't recall any major hangups with Android running on them. That's not because Nothing used the best chipsets (it never has), but a testament to optimizing its Nothing OS version of Android for what's perceptible to consumers—the taps and swipes of the animations that make a phone feel and appear fast and fluid. Bouncing around the OS on the specific model that Nothing sent me to try, with 16GB of RAM (the base model has 12GB of RAM), felt no less smooth than on a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 or OnePlus 13. All of my apps opened instantly, and while I'm by no means a hardcore HoYoverse gamer, the game developer and publisher's graphics-intensive titles like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail run just fine on the Phone 3. Anyone complaining about the 8S Gen 4 chipset is bitching just for the sake of bitching. I haven't felt the chip or the Phone 3's performance was not up to snuff in a month of daily usage.
Next on the list of complaints is the display. Sure, you can get a slightly larger display on the OnePlus 13, but everyone's gripe is that the Phone 3's 6.67-inch, 120Hz AMOLED screen is LTPS (Low-Temperature Polycrystalline) and not LTPO (Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Oxide). The latter is found in almost all premium smartphones and simply means the screen's refresh rate can drop down to as low as 1Hz in standby or when content doesn't need to draw as many frames as frequently. The benefit of an LTPO display is potential battery longevity. I appreciate having the most cutting-edge specs in new devices, and I'll never refuse longer battery life in a phone, but the Phone 3 has such strong battery life (easily 1.5 to 2 days) from its 5,500mAh cell that I'm not sure the minor upsides to LTPO would have extended power by any meaningful metric.
The most divisive thing about the Phone 3 is its love-it-or-hate-it design. Nothing ditched the Glyph Interface that was comprised of a bunch of LED strips on the Phone 1 and Phone 2 for the Glyph Matrix, a circular dot matrix screen made up of 489 individual LEDs. The mix of straight lines, circles, and an intentionally misaligned periscope telephoto camera lens can only be described as Mondrian meets Picasso. It's an opinionated design that makes many people weirdly uncomfortable because it's not another solid-colored iPhone. Like my colleague Kyle Barr, I've grown to like the Phone 3's oddball panel—strangely aligned triple-lens cameras and all. It does feel like Nothing has dialed back on the transparent elements that let you see the raw components underneath, but overall, I don't hate the direction.
The Glyph Matrix is not as—literally—flashy as the Glyph Interface, but the LED arrays have the potential to show more widget-like information (dubbed 'Glyph Toys') than the light strips. About two inches below the Glyph Matrix is a touch-sensitive haptic button that you tap to shuffle through the various Glyph Toys; a single tap switches to the next one and a long press will activate its secondary function (if it has one). At the time of this writing, there are several 'useful' Glyph Toys—stuff like the time, battery level, a stopwatch, and even a dot matrix 'mirror' of yourself when you take a selfie with the rear camera. You can also set custom animations for contacts and notifications, though I found doing so less amusing and more annoying, as it was hard to remember which one was mapped to who/what after a few hours. The Glyph Matrix doesn't look as cool as the Glyph Interface, but it's more versatile for displaying icons and numbers, which the light strips couldn't do. Then there are the other Glyph Toys that are just for fun—spin the bottle, a magic 8 ball, and a rock paper scissors. I don't know why you'd ever want to play rock paper scissors with a phone or spin a digital bottle to, uh, see who pays for dinner (Nothing's unconvincing use case example), but I suppose it's all harmless fun. You shouldn't buy the Phone 3 with the expectation that there will be tons of useful Glyph Toys that could help you reduce your screen time; an SDK for developers to create their own little dot matrix widgets is available, but I also don't expect there to be anything groundbreaking considering how niche Nothing's customer base is right now.
Perhaps one day Nothing will make a phone with cameras that blow away the competition, but there's also not a whole lot of motivation to do so when photos are mostly shared on social media. The Phone 3 takes good-enough photos and videos. Even as a camera nerd, the 50 megapixels of resolution for the main, ultrawide, and periscope zoom cameras, as well as the selfie camera, meant very little to me. Photos and videos all look fine with more dynamic range than I truly care to nitpick over and low-light shots that are more than bright enough. Were there times when the cameras took ugly photos and videos? Of course there were, but so does every other phone, flagship or not. The iPhone 16 Pro's 5X telephoto camera takes some of the muddiest low-light photos I've ever seen in a phone.
Whenever I pulled the Phone 3 out of my pocket, I'd feel a brazenness gently take over me. I wanted people to look at it and ask me about it. I wanted people to perk up as I fiddled with the Glyph Matrix. No strangers—in the subway or at coffee shops or anywhere in New York City—ever did strike up a casual convo, but I want to imagine one day there will be a person who does. The Phone 3 was a reality check with myself. Is my phone an expression of my own individuality or somebody else's? Some people buy a phone for the best tech specs because they're gonna slap a case on it and cover up its raw materials anyway. Some people buy a phone based on price, and also slap a case over it to cover up any cheap design. The Phone 3 does not have the very best tech specs, but it does have an aesthetic and fun vibe that you won't find anywhere else. (The Essential key and its AI 'memory' is still meh to me and I really wish I could remap the button to do something else.) Is that worth $800? At a time when everyone thinks they're cool wearing the same clothes and same sneakers, doing the same dance challenges on TikTok, eating at the same Instagrammable foodie spots, and using the same iPhone, the Phone 3 at least dares to challenge the status quo—and it always costs extra to be a trendsetter.