Once again, nothing has created a phone that turns heads like no other. Everywhere I go, people get curious when they see me with the Phone 3, and the Glyph Matrix seems to confuse and delight them.
Unlike the Nothing Phone 3a Pro’s excellent camera, the Phone 3’s three cameras are housed separately on the back and stick out just a fraction of a millimeter. The transparent exterior returns to reveal screws and hardware modules arranged in three vertical rows. This time, it’s clearer that this is more of a design style than an actual look at the phone’s components. For example, an odd half-circle of frosted glass under the flash seems to serve no purpose (other than aesthetic).
Elsewhere, a red square next to the ultra-wide-angle camera now functions as a recording light. This is another cool feature that you can disable in Settings if you find it annoying. The camera’s off-center telephoto lens may also bother symmetry enthusiasts, but I don’t mind this choice too much. The Phone 3 is 18% thinner than the Phone 2, and without the 3a Pro’s camera bump, it looks much better than its predecessors.
The main attraction is the Glyph Matrix – a circular matrix display consisting of 489 LEDs that shows simple notifications, time and battery level. While some loyal fans may miss the flashy light show of previous models, this version is much more useful. Instead of a barrage of flashing lights, Matrix can tell you who’s calling using unique patterns and, with future updates, custom images assigned to your contacts.
Nothing follows the inspiration of retro-tech design and I admit to being a fan. The dot matrix text and numbers match the Nothing’s Android theme perfectly and add some cohesion to the whole device. A capacitive glyph touch button below the matrix cycles through notifications and tools. Interactions are simple: short press to change mode or long press to start tools like the stopwatch.
Fortunately, you can use the Phone 3’s settings menu to assign tools and “toys” to the Glyph Matrix. Most are fun and frivolous, like Spin The Bottle and Magic 8 Ball, and Nothing uses its community to create new Matrix widgets. We expect the functionality to expand as more and more users become involved. However, some tools are less useful, such as a level that uses the phone’s accelerometer for a pixelated screen. It seems a bit vague; How accurate can you be with less than 500 pixels? Others are quite nice, like the grainy camera screen for taking selfies.
With Essential Notifications, you can link notifications from specific apps or contacts to a unique pattern or pixelated photo. But creating something that doesn’t look like a mess is a challenge. In the same settings menu, you can adjust the brightness of the matrix and the duration of messages.
The front of the Phone 3 consists of 6.67-inch screens and a resolution of 2800 x 1260. If you prefer a large screen, this is probably its biggest advantage over the iPhone 16 and Galaxy S25. It’s also Nothing’s brightest phone, with a resolution of up to 4,500 nits for HDR content, significantly brighter than the Nothing Phone 3a. It supports HDR 10+ and a refresh rate of 120Hz, all protected by Gorilla Glass 7.
Cameras
No one covers the basics of the Phone 3’s camera. The triple camera system includes a 50 megapixel f/1.7 main sensor with optical image stabilization, a 50 MP ultra-wide-angle camera and a new 50 MP telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom.
As we noted in our Nothing Phone 3a review, telephoto lenses are rare on cheaper smartphones. The Phone 3 has a periscope zoom, which keeps the camera slim and barely protruding from the device. Also impressive is the 3x zoom combined with a high-resolution 50-megapixel sensor that allows you to crop images while maintaining fidelity. Nothing even added a 6x zoom button to the camera app that crops the image further. The app also uses standard pixel binning for more accurate colors and better low-light images, allowing them to be saved as 12-megapixel images.
Nothing Phone 3 Review sample photo
Overall, the camera system can be a bit inconsistent. During a holiday in Amsterdam, the Phone 3 captured sharp images of wildlife and architecture. Action mode is particularly impressive, easily adding motion blur to photos while keeping the subject in focus. Other times, however, photos of vibrant cityscapes and street art appeared drab and grainy. For example, psychedelic illustrations of cats, incredibly vivid in their natural appearance, looked flat in photographs. Metadata showed that the phone had a higher ISO value, a setting I haven’t had to manually adjust on a smartphone in years. While some color variation between the three lenses is to be expected, images often looked like they were taken with different phones, which was particularly noticeable in scenes with blue skies.
The telephoto lens is the main feature of the Phone 3. I like the ability to play with the zoom, and the 3x optical zoom (plus an extra crop) makes it a more useful camera than the iPhone 16 or Pixel 9, which have 2x zoom. It’s also a great macro camera that uses zoom to prevent the phone from casting a shadow on the subject.
software
Nothing retrofits the phone with its own signature Android look. The aesthetic is completely monochromatic, with serif fonts and matrix accents. I immediately picked this skin when I first set up the phone, although without the original colors it might be harder to find some app icons.
Essential Space remains Nothing’s best software add-on with its dedicated hardware button. Since the launch of Nothing Phone 3a, you can now add events to your Google calendar, remind yourself of tasks and summarize audio recordings. My biggest issue though is accidentally pressing the power button instead of the Essential button, or vice versa. The keys should be different sizes or at least look brighter.
Performance and battery life
Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processor, the Phone 3 offers solid performance, but it’s not as fast as a true silicon flagship device like the Snapdragon 8 Elite or the Apple A18. Some might argue that the Phone 3 isn’t a “true flagship” since the processor can be found in devices under $400, but the chip is still powerful enough for most tasks and games and can even offer ray-traced graphics.
Nothing opted for a 5,150 mAh silicon-carbon battery, making it one of the first phones we tested with this new technology. It can store more lithium ions than traditional lithium ion batteries, resulting in a 10% increase in energy density compared to its predecessor. However, I didn’t notice any noticeable difference when the Phone 3 was running at a cooler temperature. In our battery charge test, the Phone 3 was able to play a video file for just over 23 hours. It’s a little worse than the Phone 2, but it has a smaller screen.
The Phone 3 also achieves top charging speeds and supports 65W wired charging, allowing the device to go from empty to fully charged in less than an hour (with a compatible charger). It also supports 15W wireless charging and reverse wireless charging for headphones. However, the lack of Qi2 support seems like an oversight for a “true flagship”.
Summary
How does the Nothing flagship compare to similarly priced smartphones? The Phone 3 offers a large 6.67-inch screen, a large battery with fast charging and 256 GB of storage, double that of the base models Pixel 9 and Galaxy S25.
However, a non-flagship chipset and inconsistent camera performance reduce the appeal of an otherwise exciting phone with slick software and a unique design. The Glyph Matrix is much more useful than the flashing lights on the Phone 3’s predecessor, although the design isn’t quite as flashy. I just hope that the company continues to develop the tools that exist.
The Phone 3 is a much better phone than the two-year-old Nothing Phone 2, but it also costs $200 more, making its flaws more noticeable. While I want Nothing to continue experimenting with their phones, improving camera performance should probably be the number one priority.
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