– This is the Nothing Phone 3 and yeah, it’s ugly. You know, people say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and stuff like that. I get it. You can find
beauty in anything, for sure. But also, you know,
there’s a nice alignment to things that feels good. And you know, when things are, when things are where
you expect them to be, doesn’t that feel better? Okay. All right, carcinisation. I learned about this recently. This is a strange and
odd but funny phenomenon and evolutionary biology where a bunch of undersea crustaceans have
all slowly evolved towards the same, flat, robust, crab-like shape because it seems to be
the ideal form factor for surviving in the ocean. Oversimplified, it feels
like everything down there is evolving towards a crab. And look at all these crabs, lots of smartphones today
basically look the same. So when something that comes
along looks a little different, well it’s gonna feel weird, isn’t it? But hey, maybe someone’s
into the layered glass look with the text in various places. Maybe you’re into the
red dot turning into a functional record light. Maybe you’re into a bit of a lobster. Real talk though, it feels
like every few months Nothing comes out with a new
product that looks crazy and people hate on all the pictures on the internet ’cause they look weird. And then two months later
we’re all used to it and we forget about the looks and we can focus on the product itself. So let’s just skip all that
and focus on the product. This is what Nothing is calling
their first true flagship, which is what you would
say if you’re Nothing and you’re charging $799 for a
phone for the first time ever after rolling around in the budget and mid-range space for a few years. But I’ve been using this
phone for the better part of the last week and I’m gonna disagree with the whole premise here actually. This is no more of a
flagship phone than any of Nothing’s previous phones. Now are they lying to us? Eh, not exactly but kind of. Hear me out. 799 is the same price
as a Samsung Galaxy S25 or the Pixel 9, or right
underneath the iPhone 16. Like they’re competing against
bonafide flagships from mega companies with basically unlimited money. And part of what we’ve come
to expect from phones in this class is basically giving
us the best available stuff. Like it’s kind of this unspoken rule, but if you’re spending
this much, you deserve to just get the best parts, right? That’s why it’s been so easy for me to rag on like the Pixel in the past for not having the best performance or the iPhone for not having
a high refresh rate display. So this Nothing Phone 3, it’s certainly dressed up like a flagship and it is the most flagship
yet of any Nothing phone. It is huge. It’s got this super bright,
high refresh rate, OLED display. It has a massive new
silicon carbon battery, new triple 50 megapixel
cameras, IP 68 certification, up to 16 gigs of RAM. Like it’s got all the makings
of what could be a flagship. But when you peel back the
mask, just a little bit, like right under the surface,
it’s the same exact strategy that Nothing has been running on all their previous phones in the past. The playbook is to just cut back just a little
bit from the highest end stuff in ways that hopefully
you, the buyer, don’t notice. And it still feels like a flagship, but that allows ’em to cut costs and undercut the competition a little bit. So it works. It’s not a bad strategy. It’s allowed ’em to make
great phones in the past, but it’s just harder to sell
that strategy at this price. So for starters, the chip inside, right? It’s not the expensive,
proven, powerful flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. This is running the
Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 instead. It’s one of the first phones
we’ve seen using this chip. And to be fair, it is much
better than anything we’ve seen in any previous Nothing phone. It’s a four nanometer chip, it’s something like 40% better CPU and like 90% better GPU than
the chip in the two year-old Nothing Phone 2. The phone is zippy and smooth as hell, basically all the time. And I’ll get to the software
experience in a second. But is it the best available?
Well, technically no. The Snapdragon 8 Elite still smokes this. You can see benchmark
scores, it’s pretty clear that’s still the flagship chip. Now you as the user
might never notice that. In fact you probably wouldn’t
if you just used the phone side by side in a lot of
random, normal activities. But if you happen to get into
graphically intensive gaming or the most intense tasks,
that’s what separates a flagship from an upper mid-range chip. So for some context, some
other phones using this chip, the Poco F7 and the Iqoo Neo 10, both of these are sub $500 phones. I also think they were
very clever pairing it up with 12 gigs of RAM and
256 gigs of storage base. It’s fast Ram, it’s UFS 4.0 and then the upgraded
version for 899 is 16 gigs of RAM and half a terabyte. Awesome to see that. But
there is no 8 128 version. And I think if they did make one, that would probably be
like 699, but they didn’t. Now when we get to the outside
of this phone, there is this, again, huge new AMOLED display. Surely it’s a flagship display, right? It’s gigantic. It’s 6.67 inches corner to corner with perfectly even
bezels all the way around, that takes extra work. It’s a gorgeous AMOLED,
nice color reproduction and it’s also, it’s a
good amount over 1080P. It’s nice and sharp, smooth with that dynamic refresh
rate up to 120 hertz and it gets crazy bright,
1600 nits outdoors, 4,500 nits peak brightness with HDR. So the numbers on paper go crazy and it’s just, it’s such
a nice screen to look at. I’ve loved using it. So
what’s the catch, Marques? Well one, you would
literally never know this unless you check the spec sheet, but the glass protecting
the front of this display, it’s Gorilla Glass 7i, and that is a mid-range
glass in their lineup where you might see flagships
using the more durable Gorilla Glass Victus or Victus 2. And normally I wouldn’t even bring that up but that’s definitely something
to consider on a phone that is meant to spend a
lot of its time face down. And then another thing, there are a lot of like really nice, subtle
things that go into this screen. Like it has a 1,000
hertz touch sample rate, so it’s even more responsive
than the phone too. It also has 2160 hertz PWM dimming and it also has a very acceptable
optical fingerprint reader down near the bottom. But it’s also an LTPS display, instead of the most premium LTPO. And all that really means
in practice is instead of varying a refresh rate
from one to 120 hertz, it can go from 30 to 120 hertz. You would never notice, but
it does mean a little bit worse power efficiency. I’ll tell you what though, it
can actually absolutely handle the slightly worse power efficiency because the battery in
this phone is elite. It’s marketed as a 5100
50 milliamp power battery, but according to Nothing
and it gets complicated but it’s actually rated at a
5,500 milliamp power battery. It’s silicon carbon, it
charges extra fast at 65 watts. It supports wireless charging,
reverse wireless charging, reverse wired charging. It’s great. It sips power in standby and it’s genuinely a two day
phone if you want it to be, even without the more
efficient Snapdragon 8 Elite. So honestly flagship battery for sure. So then, okay, what about the cameras? Triple 50 megapixel cameras
feels pretty flagship. And you know what, again, it is closer to a flagship than any previous Nothing phone has ever been, but I’ve used this now for a little bit. It’s still a notch behind
the S25’s and Pixel 9’s and iPhone 16’s of the world. The mainstream flagships
that I’m comparing this to. This main sensor is the
biggest they’ve ever used, one over 1.3 inches. It lets a ton more light in
and I’m shooting with this and I realize as I’m looking through all the pictures I’ve taken, for some reason it’s frequently soft. Like even on a perfectly normal shot, the colors will be fine,
the exposure will be fine, but the subject of the
photo when I zoom in, it should be in sharp focus
but it’s just a little bit off. I think you can blame this
a little bit on auto focus, maybe a little bit on
tuning for a larger sensor with shallower depth of field. It’s definitely capable of good pictures and it’s a little bit wider
than you might expect, but yeah, that’s a little bit odd. Then the telephoto is 3x, also
a tiny bit soft sometimes, but also very useful. It’s where your macro shots come from and you can get some really
sick, impressive closeups and the ultra wide and the selfie cameras, they are the most consistent
and most flagship of them all. But yeah, like I said, the whole camera setup is just one notch behind those things. And you may only notice
if you’re zooming in and pixel peeping. But again, that’s the point. Mostly good enough for most
people, most of the time. I think with a little tuning,
this can be an A minus camera. I think a perfect
encapsulation of the priorities of this phone are, I mean
look at, look at this design. It’s an insane design but
technically no camera bump. I mean the rings obviously
protrude a little bit, but most flagship phones at
this point also have some sort of big camera bump that they all sit on. It turns out to get this
whole big telephoto camera to not have a bump that actually
engineered part of the PCV or the board inside to have a hole in it. So the optics could
actually split like punch through the PCB instead of being stacked totally on top of it. I’m sure we’ll see this in
like a JerryRigEverything tear down video at some point. But yeah, basically mission
accomplished, no camera bump, but that also meant they had to use some smaller parts to make it work. And this is actually a
physically smaller telephoto than the cheaper Nothing Phone 3a Pro. So spoiler, the design
is still the priority of this phone, always has been. But let’s talk about the
most controversial bit of this design, which is the glyphs, which made Nothing Phones famous for a couple years. This year, the glyph lights are gone and replacing them is this
small display on the back upper corner of the phone. It’s 489 LED pixels. They’re calling it Glyph Matrix. On its face, this has
some usefulness about it, but then it’s also surrounded by gimmicks. Okay, so the basic idea is
like your phone is face down and then the lights on
the back would light up and you could tell something
about what that notification is to decide if you wanna actually
pick it up and check or not. So if that is all you’re after, then okay, success, you know, more
pixels means more information. The new essential
notifications builder is super powerful and informative. It’s better than ever before. I can set up a certain
icon to come up in the dots whenever I get a certain
type of notification or anything from a certain person or from a certain app. Let’s say I wanna be able
to leave my phone face down, but I never wanna miss any
notifications from Mom, ever. Okay, set that up. No matter what she sends,
no matter how she sends it, I will get an icon or a
picture from my gallery or something that it can
turn into dots and done. Anytime mom calls or texts or whatever, I can’t see what they said, but I can see that she sent me something. So that’s convenient, that’s functional. Outside of that, it immediately starts feeling
way more gimmicky, like, okay, take another look at the back
of this phone, you see a, you see this little dot
here hidden in this design? This little circle is actually
a pressure sensitive area. And when you press that,
the back display lights up and then you can use a
single press to cycle through these glyph toys and then a long press to
actually engage with them. So you can cycle to a timer and then start a timer on
the back of your phone, which doesn’t sync up
with the actual clock app. So if you turn your phone
screen on the timer disappears. So be careful. You can also use the back display as a viewfinder for your
main camera kind of, or you can play spin the bottle. Maybe you’re into that. Maybe you and your friends
don’t have a bottle handy, but you have your Nothing phone. Or you can play Rock, Paper, Scissors against your own phone. I think you get the idea. They’re fun tech demos, but the
utility runs out real quick. Now they have opened up the API. So developers, if they want to, can make more stuff for the back screen. I, you know, with this
phone, I don’t really know how many actually will, like, is Spotify gonna make like album art, cover art on the back of the phone here? I don’t know. But the Nothing community has
already started developing some stuff and messing with it. They’ve made this one.
This is a magic eight ball. So instead of turning your phone over and asking Google for a magic eight ball, you can ask the back of your phone and it’ll give you a little message. Cool. Look, the real best part of a Nothing phone is still
the software on the front of the phone because Nothing OS 3.5, soon to be updated to
4.0, it’s just great. Like they have this tastefully modified version of Android with
this nice aesthetic, finely-tuned, smooth performance and a handful of useful features that they just sort of sprinkle in there. So you can sort of choose
which ones you want to use or easily ignore. The AI-powered essential
space continues to evolve and get more features, though it doesn’t sync with anything externally. So I don’t use it. And yes, there’s still a custom button for it on the side of the phone, but it’s not too in-your-face. You can ignore it if
you don’t wanna use it. And the little things like being able to resize the quick settings toggles or the way you can swipe up
on the camera app to flip through presets, which is so clean. Everything is, it’s clean,
it’s smoothly animated and the whole OS is responsive in ways that feel higher end than
the specs would ever suggest. I think the best new
feature on this phone is the universal search box. So you might actually
kind of get it confused ’cause there’s a permanent
Google search box on the bottom of the home screen at all times. Not that search box, but when you pull up the
app drawer, that search box. Now, that one searches through
your stuff on your phone, like usual, or you can ask it a question and hit that AI button and it’ll use a modified
version of Gemini to go online and pull up a short and
sweet answer for you. It’s tuned to kind of just be brief and give you answers to stuff. It’s nice. And again, you can choose to use it or just never even try. You can just leave it tucked away and it’s just, you can use
it the way you normally do and just search for
your apps on your phone. And this is also gonna get updates. They are gonna do, they’re
promising five years of major software updates. I could do the nitpicky thing and be like, oh, Samsung’s
doing seven years and Apple does even more. So it’s not quite a flagship, but you’ve seen how flagships kind of vary all over the board. So I’m giving them flagship
credit for the software. So at the end of the day, is the title of this review a little dramatic maybe? Sure. But flagship, the word flagship
is being used here heavily as a marketing term. And so maybe the review title should just been Nothing Phone 3, They Did Marketing, whatever. But the point is, it still stands. They’re charging 799 for this phone and there are other really good phones that you can get for that much money. So this phone, just like previous
Nothing Phones is the one that you would get if you really care, not so much about raw specs,
but about good software and a unique design. You don’t want another
crab, you want lobster. Thanks for watching. Catch
you guys the next one. Peace.