Nothing, a startup from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, has announced its first flagship phone since 2023. The company bills its new Nothing Phone 3 as a "true flagship" device, but it doesn't have the absolute best hardware you can get in a mobile device. Neither does it have the highest price, clocking in at a mere $799. That's shaping up to be a good value, but it's also the highest price yet for a Nothing phone.
A few weeks back, Nothing teased the end of its trademark Glyph interface. Indeed, the Nothing Phone 3 doesn't have the illuminated panels of the company's previous phones. Instead, it has a small dot "Glyph Matrix" LED screen. It's on the back in the upper right corner, opposite the camera modules. Nothing has a few quirky games and notification icons that will flash on the screen, and it can be used as a very low-fi selfie mirror. Nothing is committed to the new Glyph screen, going so far as adding a button on the back to control it.
The rest of the design maintains the Nothing aesthetic, featuring a clear glass panel with a visible mid-frame and screws. The phone will come in either black or white—Nothing isn't really into colors. However, the company does promise the Phone 3 will be a little more compact than the 2023 Phone 2. The new device is 18 percent thinner and has symmetrical 1.87-millimeter bezels around the 6.67-inch OLED screen. That panel supports 120 Hz refresh and has a peak brightness of 4,500 nits, which is competitive with the likes of Samsung and OnePlus.
Nothing’s first “true flagship”?
Nothing has continued releasing budget phones during its break from high-end devices. While the Nothing Phone 3 is supposedly five times faster than the Phone 3a, it probably won't be able to keep up with the fastest phones on the market today. Rather than the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite, the Nothing Phone 3 has a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, which was released earlier this year to expand premium silicon features to slightly cheaper phones. It doesn't have Qualcomm's new Oryon CPU cores, and the GPU is a bit slower. However, it'll be faster than most devices in its price range. The specs are rounded out with 12GB or 16GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of storage.
There are four 50MP camera sensors on this phone, three of which are on the back. There's the 50MP primary wide-angle, a 50MP ultrawide with macro, and a 50MP 3x telephoto. The selfie camera on the front is 50MP as well. Naturally, Nothing emphasizes that the main sensor uses a very large 1/1.3-inch sensor. However, image processing matters as much as the hardware, and Nothing has struggled with that on previous phones.
The Nothing Phone 3 will have a marginally larger battery than the average smartphone, clocking in at 5,150 mAh. It also charges at 65 W wired and 15 W wireless, besting Samsung, Google, and Apple. Only OnePlus and Motorola offer the same or higher charging speeds in the US.
Nothing's version of Android maintains its stripped-down vibes. The phone will ship with Nothing OS 3.5, which is based on Android 15. That's no longer the most recent version of the platform since Android 16's launch, but Nothing is working on an update. The phone is guaranteed five years of full OS updates, plus another two years of security patches beyond that. The phone retains the Essential Key from the Phone 3a that launched in the spring. You can customize it, but it defaults to opening Essential Space. That's an AI-powered app that organizes and creates action items from your screenshots and notes.
That's actually an important thing to note about the Nothing Phone 3—it's launching in the US. Some of the company's past phones were geared toward other markets and were sold stateside only as part of a beta program. The Nothing Phone 3 is fully supported on T-Mobile and AT&T, with slightly more limited 5G performance on Verizon. Global preorders begin on July 4 for both the $799 (799 euro) base model and the upgraded $899 (899 euro) version with more RAM and storage.
