Nothing says that the Phone 3 is its “first true flagship phone,” and it has put its money where its mouth is. The phone is getting a full US launch, and at $799, it costs exactly the same as a Pixel 9, Galaxy S25, or iPhone 16.
That makes reviewing the Phone 3 refreshingly simple, because there are only two real questions that matter: is this as good as those three? And will it be as good as what we’re expecting from the new Pixel and iPhone models that are right around the corner?
The answer is going to come down to how much you like its unique look. The bad news for Nothing is that the Phone 3’s design is more divisive than any out there, even among Nothing’s biggest fans.
The Phone 3 is the first Nothing phone to ditch the Glyph interface, an abstract pattern of LED dots and strips that became Nothing’s design trademark when the Phone 1 launched in 2022. In its place is something smaller and subtler: a circular dot matrix display dubbed the Glyph Matrix.
The Glyph Matrix plays spin the bottle, but don’t you dare call it a gimmick. Nothing says the Glyph Toy range will expand with new community-developed apps. Nothing includes some notification icons of its own design, like this one I used for WhatsApp.
The Glyph Matrix can display pictures and icons, so instead of trying to remember which light show you programmed for phone calls from your mom, you can set an emoji to represent her (you could even use a photo, but these are just as illegible as the old lights when rendered on the dot matrix). You can use Nothing’s preselected designs or generate your own from an image, but if you want to use a specific emoji or app icon, then you’ll need to get a hold of the image file yourself to convert it. This all needs to be enabled manually, contact by contact, app by app, so it’s a fair bit of work to set up.
The Glyph Matrix can also do sensible things like display the time or remaining battery, stranger things like run a solar clock or frame a selfie using the rear camera, and downright weird stuff like play rock, paper, scissors or spin the bottle. Practical or not, these are collectively dubbed Glyph Toys, and you can cycle through them using a hidden haptic button on the phone’s rear. You can set the clocks or battery indicator to run perpetually as a form of always-on display, too, which is a boring use case but the best part of it for me.
The end result is a system that’s a little more practical than it used to be — though it doesn’t do a whole lot to dispel accusations that it’s a gimmick — but feels less unique, following in the wake of several years of Asus ROG phones that have similar second screens.
It also leaves the rest of the phone’s rear oddly bare. Lots has been written already about the phone’s asymmetric camera placement, but it’s the barren white space that bothers me more. Nothing’s design language is all about details and doohickeys that draw the eye and hint at the hardware underneath. But here, there’s a cramped cluster of cameras and other details at the phone’s top, and at the bottom there’s a whole lot of, well, nothing. I love the look of the company’s other hardware, but the Phone 3 is its first design dud — too busy at the top and too empty everywhere else.
Nothing OS is great, but gray, which can make it hard to use. This is a beta “smart” layout of the app drawer, with automated categories. You can use Essential Space to take screenshots of event invites… …which are summarized and can be synced with Google Calendar.
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