Nothing launches its most expensive flagship yet, Phone (3)

Nothing on Tuesday launched its newest flagship phone after a two-year gap. At an event in London, the company unveiled the Phone (3), which starts at $799 and aims to take on bigwigs like Samsung and Apple with its differentiated design and features targeting tech enthusiasts.

Since releasing Phone (1) in 2022, the GV-backed startup has relied on a transparent design to make its phone stand out from others.

The Phone (3) follows that same design language, but it introduces a stranger camera arrangement that forgoes the typical square or circular alignment found on other smartphone devices. (If you are someone who gets triggered by unaligned elements on websites or apps, this camera arrangement might make you mad!)

Nothing has also favored arranging LEDs on its back — a feature that it calls Glyph. This was always somewhat gimmicky, but the company made use of this to show you different alerts and notifications using the LED lights.

Now, the company is replacing Glyph with a small circular mini LED screen, called Glyph Matrix, on the back of the device at the top right.

This addition displays 16-bit styled patterns, which can offer more information than the earlier Glyph arrangement.

The company is also releasing mini-apps for this interface, such as spin the bottle and rock, paper, scissors.

It is 2025, so the phone has to include some AI-powered features, too. At launch this includes two features called Essential Space and Essential Search.

The company first debuted Essential Space, an app to save screenshots and take notes, on the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro. Now, Nothing is upgrading this app to let you record meetings and view an AI transcription and summary.

To use the feature, you’ll have to press the Essential key and place the phone with the screen side down to start the recording. While this sounds potentially useful, Nothing doesn’t have a web interface to access these transcriptions and summaries at this time.

Nothing is also debuting Essential Search — a feature like the iPhone’s Spotlight search — and infusing it with AI.

This search feature allows you to search for settings, files, or photos on your phone by typing in keywords.

Plus, you can type in natural language queries to get web results by pressing a button next to the search bar. This is similar to iPhone’s upgraded Siri interface, which is integrated with ChatGPT.

The new smartphone has comparable specifications to other companies’ Android flagships.

This includes a 6.67-inch AMOLED screen with 1.5K resolution, which is protected by Gorilla Glass 7i. The device is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 processor, built on a 4-nanometer architecture.

The trio of cameras all have a 50-megapixel resolution, but play different roles. The main camera has a 1.3-inch sensor, which is 20% bigger than Phone (2), at a f/1.68 aperture; the periscope telephoto lens offers 3x optical zoom, and 60x digital zoom with AI Super Res Zoom; and the ultra-wide lens provides a 114-degree field of view.

Nothing is also upgrading the selfie camera from 32 megapixels to 50 megapixels.

The Phone (3) has a 5,150 mAh battery (5,500 mAh in its India variant) with support for 65W wired charging and 15W wireless charging.

The company said the phone will ship with Nothing OS 3.5, which is based on Android 15, and will be updated to Nothing OS 4.0, based on Android 16, later this year. It noted that the flagship device will get five years of software updates and seven years of security updates.

The company will sell the 256GB model of the Phone (3) for $799 and the 512GB model for $899. At this price, the phone directly competes with the Samsung Galaxy S25, which was released at a base price of $799 earlier this year.

Preorders for the device begin on July 4 with general availability on July 15.

As TechCrunch reported last month, Nothing is making the Phone (3) available in the U.S. generally through its own website and Amazon. This is the second device, after Phone (2), the company is making widely available. Its other budget devices were available only through a restrictive beta program.