Nothing Phone (3) is the weirdest flagship yet – and that’s a good thing

There’s no shortage of brands trying to stand out in the sea of glass rectangles, but Nothing seems determined to push this idea to its absolute limit. And with the new Phone (3), which I had the chance to play with at the product’s unveiling in London, the company is making its dangerously unique design even… stranger.

See it in action in the following video:

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?

This is also the first time Nothing is officially calling one of its phones a flagship. That made me wonder if we’d finally see a proper, top-shelf chipset in a Nothing phone. And in a way, that’s almost true: the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 powering this device is a cutting-edge 4nm chip whose performance lands roughly in the same ballpark as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It’s not quite Snapdragon 8 Elite territory, but it’s leaps ahead of the hardware inside the Phone (2). Nothing says it’s about 2x faster than that model, and up to 5x faster than the Phone (3a) midranger.

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!

Under the hood, there’s the company’s biggest battery yet: a 5,150mAh silicon-carbon cell. Charging is quicker too – 65W (vs 45W on the Phone (2)) will get you from empty to 50% in only 19 minutes.

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.

If there’s one thing the Nothing Phone (3) makes clear, it’s that the company isn’t afraid to take risks. To be fair, that’s what young companies do – take risks. But in an industry that so often feels stuck in a cycle of safe upgrades and predictable spec bumps, Nothing is trying hard to bring a sense of fun back into smartphones.

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.