Nothing’s Ear 3 buds remind me more than anything else of the Ear 1, the company’s first product. Not because the design is similar (though it is) or because the sound is similar (it’s gotten a fair bit better, in fact). No, I’m reminded of the Ear 1 because both sets of earbuds share a sense of invention, of boundaries pushed with mixed results.
In the Ear 1, that was the result of a new company making its first products, building earbuds that looked unlike anything else on the market but that suffered from hardware faults and software bugs at launch. In the Ear 3, it’s the new Super Mic, a novel directional microphone system built into the charging case that’s intended to deliver better audio quality for calls, voice notes, and AI assistant interactions. And it does — sometimes.
The $179 Ear 3 are, somewhat confusingly, Nothing’s fourth flagship earbuds, with the Ear 1 followed by the Ear 2 and then simply the Ear, which don’t seem to count anymore.
Super Mic is the big addition this time around, a first both for Nothing and for the rest of the earbud industry. The charging case has two built-in microphones, one along the side and one on the bottom, activated by an invitingly large “TALK” button.
A double press during a call toggles the case mic on and the earbud microphones off, or you can press and hold the button to activate Super Mic temporarily. Outside of a call, holding down the button serves as a shortcut to activate your smart assistant of choice. Importantly, none of this works unless at least one earbud is out of the case and connected to your phone — you can’t connect the case itself directly to your phone.
Nothing hasn’t detailed the specs of the microphones, though the two on the case certainly look bigger than those on the earbuds. It’s likely that a large part of the benefit comes from simple physics: A microphone held in front of your mouth will pick up better sound than one tucked back by your ear. This is the problem earbud manufacturers have grappled with ever since we all moved away from wired buds with inline mics, and Nothing’s approach is novel, if nothing else.
And it does sound better… some of the time. I’ve been baffled by the variability I’ve experienced while testing Super Mic, which sometimes sounds good enough to use for social media videos, and at other times sounds no better (or even worse) than the mics in the Ear 3 buds.
The problem, I think, comes down to the same directionality that gives Super Mic its advantage in the first place. Position the case just right, and the microphones record sound with more depth, warmth, and clarity than the earbuds themselves can offer. Hold it too far away, too close, pointing the wrong way, or with your hand blocking one of the mics, and quality drops dramatically. It means there’s a bit of a knack to using Super Mic, and if you’re hoping for better microphone quality while you leave voice notes on the go and gesticulate with abandon, this might not deliver.
Then there’s compatibility. Broadly speaking, Super Mic works anywhere that the regular earbud mics do. That means you can use it for voice and video calls, whether through your regular system phone app or the likes of WhatsApp, Zoom, or WeChat, and in iOS Voice Memos too. But it doesn’t work for video in the default camera apps on either iOS or most Android phones, so if you want to use it as a handheld mic on TikTok, you’ll need to use a third-party app like Blackmagic with the option to manually select the mic input. iOS 26 added the ability to select a microphone to use across any app, which should solve this problem at an OS level, but I couldn’t make the two features work together at all.
Perhaps because the case has to connect via Bluetooth to the earbuds, which then connect to the phone, Super Mic also suffers from lag. When I used it to record video in the Blackmagic app, I found my voice was out of sync with the final footage. It’s little enough lag that it won’t be an issue in voice calls, but it’s going to be a problem for any sort of video that you can’t just fix in post.
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