The Nothing Phone (3) has a unique look and pro-level power in most respects, though its style won’t suit everyone – and some competitors offer more power for the same kind of price.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| A genuinely new look for smartphone design | Rear panel look won’t suit everyone’s sense of taste |
| Rear glyph interface is surprisingly handy | Snapdragon 8S Gen 4 isn’t exactly cutting edge |
| Fairly decent app performance | Less than premium battery life |
Score: 3/5
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In this review
Nothing Phone (3) Specifications
Nothing Phone (3) Design
Nothing Phone (3) Camera
Nothing Phone (3) Performance
Nothing Phone (3) Battery
Nothing Phone (3) Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer:
The Nothing Phone (3) used in this review was supplied to me by Nothing for the purposes of evaluation. Nothing as a company has (ahem) nothing else in terms of influence over this review, and all opinions, editorial statements and terrible puns are my own.
As it should be – I need to own my own bad jokes, but also publications should be upfront about the source of their products and any conflicts of interest (actual or perceived) upfront.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
Nothing has since its inception sold on the idea that its phones are different, both in terms of pricing with a lot of phones that punch above their price weight, but also in terms of design.
At either $1509 or $1689 Nothing is stepping outside of its typical affordability zone, and that’s not that differentiated.
The style of the Nothing Phone (3) however? That’s quite different, though you won’t automatically spot that from the front.
The Nothing Phone (3) is built around a 6.67 inch 120Hz capable AMOLED display with a centrally mounted holepunch for the front facing camera. Your choices for refresh rates sit at 60Hz, 120Hz or a dynamic mode that shifts between the two; this isn’t an LTPO display where screen refresh rates can dial down as low as 1Hz when required. That being said, the Nothing Phone (3)’s display can get exceptionally bright, with a stated peak brightness of 4500 nits, making it quite easy to discern even in very bright sunlight.
Premium phones need premium protection, and the Nothing Phone (3) features an IP68 rating for water and dust ingress, which is pleasing to see. The front panel features Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, not quite best in class given that’s a cost-conscious choice on Nothing’s part compared to what you might expect for a phone at this price point. I am pleased that Nothing does include a simple case in the Nothing Phone (3)’s box, however, because every phone deserves a level of extra protection.
The Nothing Phone (3) has slightly more buttons on its sides than you might expect, with volume on the left and power/assistant on the right plus the additional “Essential Key” button beneath it, a play that Nothing also used for the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro. The dual SIM tray resides on the base of the phone, and there’s support onboard for eSIM as well.
Also Read:
Nothing Phone 3a/Nothing Phone 3a Pro Review
All of this feels rather par for the course, and then you flip the Nothing Phone (3) around to its back.
That’s where, depending on your sense of style, the magic happens. Or possibly the tragedy.
It’s very safe to say that there’s nothing that looks quite like the Nothing Phone (3) at the rear.
Your colour choices aren’t extensive – just white or black, with the white model being the one that Nothing sent my way – but the layout of the lenses and the use of geometric shapes, a small circular Micro-LED at the top right with a touch panel around 6cm beneath it certainly catches your eye. Also there’s a tiny red square between two of the lenses, because sure, why not?
I honestly like the chaotic style of the Nothing Phone (3), but I can 100% see why it’s such a divisive design element. A lot of the people I’ve shown it to have made comments ranging from it being “unique” to “crazy”, so it’s not going to be for everyone.
Camera
At its premium grade price, the Nothing Phone (3) has to step it up in the camera space. This it does with a trio of 50MP sensors at the rear, with 50MP Wide, 50MP, 50MP 114° Ultra-Wide and 50MP Telephoto 3x Optical lenses to play with. The holepunch at the front houses a.. you guessed it.. 50MP selfie camera as well.
That’s a lot of megapixels, but camera quality isn’t just a question of how many pixels you can cram into a sensor.
For the most part the Nothing Phone (3) takes photos that look nice; the default here is for 12.5MP shots using pixel binning to sharpen up your photos, though you can opt to take the storage hit and take full fat 50MP shots if you prefer.
On the zoom front, the native 3x zoom can be pushed out with a digital hybrid approach all the way up to 60x, with the promise of AI smoothing of resultant images. 60x is an interesting play here where so many competitors go to 100x, but that does create potential for slightly better shots, because honestly, most of the 100x zooms take things way too far.
Equally honestly… so does the Nothing Phone (3).
Here’s an ordinary park shot. Let’s invade the privacy of this pigeon.
I don’t think it’s spotted me (yet). This is a 3x optical zoom shot, all well and fine.
6x zoom is the next default level, and it’s workable too — at least partially because it really doesn’t have to do all that much.
Punch it up 10x more though to 60x, and…
Yikes. It’s seen me. RUN!
The Nothing Phone (3) also lets you set visual profiles for different camera/film styles, with a number of pre-baked formats in place. These work nicely, and you can create your own as well.
Mini King Ghidorah is having an existential crisis in the appropriate French noir fashion.
My only complaint here is that the predefined profiles include watermarks by default, and you can’t switch them off – though of course a little judicious post-photo cropping can deal with that issue, as can creating a near-identical profile with the same settings. It’d be nicer if Nothing let me tinker with the presets, though.
Nothing Phone (3) Sample Photos
Macro shots take some time and patience to get right.
Nice enough, though the Nothing Phone (3) did take a while to sort out its exposure for this shot.
Low or challenging light shots are handled appropriately for the most part.
Shorter zoom ranges than 60x can work out OK, as with this clock shot.
To be clear, this is not a selfie.
This IS a selfie, though I fear I look better in the photo above..
Guess the station, win a no-prize!
Cat photo testing is a mandatory part of my process.
Sydney does not look its best in the rain.
Performance
The Nothing Phone (3) represents Nothing’s big foray into the premium space, but here once again Nothing has thought a little differently. If you were going to build a premium smartphone to be released right now, you’d most likely stuff a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite (unless you were Apple) into its frame.
The Nothing Phone (3) instead runs on a Snapdragon 8S Gen 4, paired up with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of storage. Predictably, the higher storage tier variant is the one that gets the larger RAM allotment.
The 8S Gen 4 is undeniably a step below the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and while Nothing does offer the Nothing Phone (3) up at pricing that’s slightly beneath top-tier premium pricing right now, the margins are slim, especially for phones that have been in the market for a couple of months or more.
So how does it stack up in comparative terms? First stop, Geekbench 6’s CPU test, where I pitted it against phones that could be purchased at the time of reviewing for broadly similar pricing:
It’s not a surprise that the Nothing Phone (3) beats out the Pixel 10 here, given the AI focus of the Tensor G5 processor in that phone. I’ve included Nothing’s considerably cheaper phones here for comparative purposes if you were looking across the range, and it is interesting to see how close they come in performance terms. Still, Apple’s recently price-reduced iPhone 16 and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, which has seen some recent price drops do beat it handily.
Even if the S25 Edge does creep back up post iPhone Air announcement, it’s not hard to find a similarly specced Galaxy S25 or S25+ around these price points.
This is a pattern that repeats itself looking at GPU power, by way of 3DMark Wild Life Extreme:
The practical reality here for the Nothing Phone (3) is that for most users it’s got enough power, but in the premium space it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay the same or similar for a system that runs slower than others.
In terms of updates, Nothing promises 5 Android OS updates and 7 years of security updates, slightly behind the pace of 7 of both offered by rivals Samsung and Google, though a little better than anyone else in this respect. No, I’m not counting Apple in that, because it never actually states how long it’ll support any iPhone for.
Nothing’s take on its UI tends to the minimalistic, though you can pretty easily switch any Nothing phone to a more colourful and label-centric view if you forget to do that during setup:
Like the Nothing Phone 3a/3a Pro, you also get the “essential” key for launching Nothing’s Essential Space app, which is one part screenshot organiser, one part voice and text notes app.
The Essential Space could work well enough as your organising platform, but it’s rather like any other manufacturer-specific approach to such matters; if it became an indispensable part of your daily life then it’s going to be tricky to shift to other data platforms. Of course, because it’s 2025, there’s also a smattering of AI built into the Essential Space for features like AI voice transcription and a simple AI news reader built in as well if that’s important to you.
The News Reader feature is somewhat hidden within the Nothing Phone (3) settings panel, and in all honesty I only knew it was there because Leigh Stark from Pickr commented on it to me. His experience of the News Reader was that it was a snarky AI led approach with the option to skip stories; for me it’s appeared more like a simple podcast, so maybe Nothing’s still fine-tuning this particular feature. I suspect I might have preferred the snark, but tastes can vary. Maybe it’ll come back.
I can’t review the Nothing Phone (3) and not talk about its second-most striking design point, the Glyph Matrix. On previous Nothing Phones, the company has offered glowing phone sections that owed as much to the RGB-mania of many gaming peripherals as they did to utility; they always felt like they were there mostly to be different with only limited utility.
The Glyph Matrix on the Nothing Phone (3) is different; instead of a lighting array, it’s a circular array of micro-LEDs controlled by a touch button sitting further down the back of the phone. As an aside, it does feel like a slightly missed opportunity for Nothing not to reintroduce the rear-facing fingerprint sensor here, because it’s very easy to find with your finger when holding the phone… but I once again digress.
The Glyph Matrix provides a range of functions that you switch between with a tap, from a simple clock to a battery meter, volume indicator and even a spin the bottle game. Really, you can use the back of the Nothing Phone (3) for a simple party game if you really must.
Is any of this vital? Not really in the case of Spin The Bottle, but it’s handy enough to get a quick glimpse at the time when I wake up overnight, or to see how the volume is increasing over time.
Battery
The Nothing Phone (3) is built around a 5150mAh battery, just a shade larger than the typical 5000 mAh power pack found in most Android phones. As I’ve seen so many times, however, having a larger battery is not automatically a promise of superior battery power.
I’ve written before about the challenges in battery testing, primarily because everyone’s battery usage patterns differ a lot. You can read about that here if you like or watch the video below:
To get a comparative measurement of the Nothing Phone (3)’s battery performance, I ran it through my YouTube battery test against the same suite of similarly priced phones as above. Here’s how it fared:
On the optimistic side, any phone that cracks above 90% can typically manage a day’s moderate usage without too many issues. Anecdotally, I can get through that day’s usage the way I’ve been testing out the Nothing Phone (3) over the past couple of weeks, but again, usage patterns can differ a lot.
On the pessimistic side, the Nothing Phone (3) is a more premium-priced phone, and I expect more if I’m paying more, especially when the competition delivers quite a bit more – and even moreso when the cheaper alternatives in the same range do better too!
On the charging side, the Nothing Phone (3) supports a whole host of connection types. For power coming in, it will handle up to 65W wired charging (though there’s predictably no charger in the box) or 15W Qi charging wirelessly. For power coming from the Nothing Phone (3), it will send power out wirelessly at 5W, or via a wired cable at 7.5W – though given its mediocre battery performance, I’d suggest going lightly on giving out power from the phone.
Nothing Phone (3): Alex’s Verdict
I love that Nothing does think differently, delivering some of the most unique looking phones on the market. I’ve certainly had my fill of reviewing dull black slabs of phones. Nobody can accuse the Nothing Phone (3) of being a dull black slab.
Some of what Nothing has done here also has function hidden behind that unusual form; while I initially wrote the Glyph interface off as a gimmick – much as I’d found it on prior Nothing phones – the smaller and more interactive display gives it some genuine quick utility. The Essential Key has some serious productivity scope, even if it does sometimes confuse me when I’m reaching for the power button.
However, Nothing’s best products to date have been those that match quirky style up with affordability, and here, Nothing’s playing in an entirely new shark pool for the Nothing Phone (3).
Even at the lower spec price of $1509, it’s up there with the bigger established players, most of whom offer that little bit more, whether it’s the AI-first focus of phones like the Pixel 10, the thin style of the Galaxy S25 Edge or Apple’s strong OS control as found in the iPhone 16.
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Nothing Phone (3): Pricing and availability
The Nothing Phone (3) retails in Australia for $1509 with 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM or $1689 with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. The model tested for this review was the 256GB/12GB variant.
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[kofi]
*I too am shocked. It really took me this long to make a Shakespeare reference in a Nothing phone review? I must be getting old.
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