TL;DR Nothing has posted a video showing co-founder Carl Pei reacting to Nothing Phone 3 reviews.
Pei defended the Glyph Matrix rear screen and its limited uses, claiming that there will be a rich ecosystem in the future.
He also defended the use of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip, saying the company wasn’t catering to ‘spec warriors.’
Nothing launched the Nothing Phone 3 earlier this month, and it looks like a well-rounded Android phone. However, the device has more than its fair share of complaints. Now, company CEO Carl Pei has reacted to Nothing Phone 3 reviews in an official YouTube video.
Nothing posted a video showing Pei reacting to reviews from MKBHD, Mrwhosetheboss, Mr Mobile, Trakin Tech, and more. For starters, several reviewers took umbrage with the phone’s polarizing design.
What does Pei think of design complaints? “We’ve designed a product that we’re really proud of and some people love it, some people don’t like it, and it’s fine,” the Nothing co-founder explained. “On one hand, it’s really great that we have so many users that care about us, but on the other hand, I think it went a little bit overboard with the Phone 3.”
He also added that some Nothing employees were harassed over the Phone 3 design. That’s really not okay at all.
Pei defended the Glyph Matrix rear screen in response to reviewer Marques Brownlee questioning whether app developers would utilize this: We have a small platform, like this is not iOS with a billion users. So when developers allocate resources, they can’t allocate a lot of resources to a small platform. However, the other point that he perhaps hasn’t thought of is that the cost of making software is going down to zero over time. So I think there’s going to be a rich ecosystem of Glyph Toys in the future. We’ll have to wait and see if there really is a healthy ecosystem of Glyph Matrix developers in the future. It’s also worth noting that Pei’s comment about the dropping cost of software development was accompanied by a screenshot referring to vibe coding (i.e. leaning heavily on generative AI for coding). This practice has been criticized for delivering unpolished, insecure, and buggy code. Needless to say, I hope Nothing doesn’t rely on this practice for its future software, as we certainly don’t want a repeat of the Nothing Chats debacle.
Complaints about the Nothing Phone 3 processor Arun Maini also pointed out the use of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset instead of the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and questioned the phone’s cooling. This processor shouldn’t make a noticeable difference in everyday usage and for many games. However, it does come after Nothing repeatedly called its phone a “true” or “real” flagship. Our own POCO F7 benchmark article also reveals that peak performance is behind last year’s flagships, although the processor narrows the gap in sustained performance tests.
Pei revealed his thoughts on this chipset criticism: When it comes to creating a really good smartphone experience, the processor matters, but so does the camera, so does the display, the battery, its entire package. And when you pick a Nothing device, beyond that, it’s also the industrial design and the software.
The Nothing co-founder also conceded that some games will perform better with a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip but added that it hasn’t seen any issues playing the most demanding titles. He later noted that the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 might not be the correct chip for “0.1% of the population” but that it’s not catering to “spec warriors.”
The video also sees Pei reacting to more reviewer criticisms and compliments, such as the AI suite, Nothing OS in general, and the phone’s price. So it’s worth a watch if you want to hear the company’s take on these topics.
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