As we prepare for the Nothing Phone 4, we took the 3 for a spin
The rumour mill says London-based phone company Nothing is set to release a new handset as early as March. To get you in the mood, we took its current flagship device, the Nothing Phone (3), for a test drive.
In 2007, the mobile phone landscape changed forever. When Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, he ended the era of Nokias and Motorolas as surely as the meteor ended the dinosaurs. Apple would go on to be the most valuable company in the world: the time of the black oblong was upon us.
Since then, efforts to deviate from the form factor – a palm-sized glass rectangle – have largely ended in failure. The BlackBerry, with its once-ubiquitous physical keyboard, went extinct. Attempts to revive the flip-phone have largely died on the vine. The rumoured entry of Apple into the foldable screen market later this year could be the biggest shake-up in a decade.
But some companies are doing things a little differently, not least London-based Nothing. Founder Carl Pei – a co-founder of OnePlus – set out to address a very particular problem: “The industry was just so boring”. Nothing’s first phone was released in 2022, featuring a clear glass shell exposing the gubbins beneath. You could programme the back to flash with customisable “glyphs” when you got a message or call. It was still a palm-sized glass rectangle, but it was unlike any palm-sized glass rectangle you’d seen before.
The Nothing Phone (3)
The company’s latest handset, the Nothing 3, is its first foray into the top end of the market, retailing at £799, placing it in direct competition with the iPhone 17. For that, you get a phone that feels genuinely different, something people will comment upon when you put it on the table and which comes with a raft of features that make it a strange, idiosyncratic joy to use.
The front is fine: a 6.7 inch 120Hz QHD+ OLED screen that’s perfectly serviceable without being anything to write home about. It’s when you flip it over that things get interesting. The glass back shows the neatly-presented circuitry beneath (it reminds me of Steve Jobs’ insistence that the iPhone looked as tidy on the inside as it did on the outside). I’m using the white version (nicer than the black imho), which has a little red square that offers a bit of contrast and three protruding camera lenses, as is the custom of the times.
On the right hand side you’ll find a touch sensitive button with haptic feedback that activates the “glyph matrix”, a little circle on the upper right corner that can be programmed to display almost anything you might want and a bunch of stuff you probably don’t. You can have the little matrix of white LEDs light up to show the time or a countdown timer or the amount of charge you have left. Or you can get it to use the camera to show a video dot matrix of your face, or you can play spin-the-bottle on it. There’s even a tamagotchi-style pet that you can hatch from an egg and check in on. Nothing allows user-created mods, so expect the dedicated fanbase to make all manner of weird and wonderful “toys” for you to play about with.
One of the major selling points of the Nothing range is the customised version of Android they run. Usually “reskins” of Google’s software are something to avoid – a major selling point of Google’s Pixel phones is that they come with an unadulterated version – but with Nothing it’s a perk. The company leans heavily into its dot matrix aesthetic, with minimalist black and white icons. Everything from the charging indicator to the volume control are rendered in the cool, retro-futuristic dotted interface, like something from a terminal in a Ridley Scott movie. When I turn it on, a little dot matrix phone with a smiley face greets me. Below that, a little dot matrix cloud tells me the weather is still crap. All of the pre-installed apps, including a custom voice recorder that’s great for interviews, are useful; no bloatware here.
Nothing Phone (3) tech specs
It almost seems beyond the point to go into the tech specs but here goes: it runs the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip: fast enough that everything feels instantaneous but lagging behind top-end Android handsets. You get almost two full days out of the battery, which is plenty. There are three 50-megapixel cameras on the back – including a three-times optical zoom and an ultrawide lens – and a 50MP selfie camera on the front. These have the functionality you would expect from an £800 phone but not much more – if you’re a keen photographer, this could be a deal breaker. The fingerprint scanner is great.
But this isn’t the phone you buy if you’re looking to max out on hardware – Nothing has created a rare thing in the mobile phone world: something fun. This is a phone for hobbyists and nerds, people who want to luxuriate in owning something that few people will have seen before. The major players in the smartphone market have Nothing to worry about.
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