Nothing Phone 3 Review

Nothing bided its time before releasing the Nothing Phone 3. Where the Nothing Phone 2 was a solid mid-ranger, and Nothing’s Phone 2a and

The rest of the phone is a mix of mid-range and high-end design. The Nothing Phone 3 is slightly thick at 8.99mm and heavy at 218 grams, up from the 8.5mm of competitors like the

Wireless connectivity is also a strong point. Not every phone plays well with the carriers in the U.S., like Poco and RedMagic. But in my testing, the Nothing Phone 3 generally had a solid and speedy connection to T-Mobile much like I’d get, generally topping 40Mbps and sometimes ramping up upwards of 100Mbps. The phone also supports tri-band Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0, which gives it a good degree of future proofing

Nothing tops off all this generally decent performance with a solid battery. You won’t find anything mindblowing, with the Nothing Phone 3 sporting just a 5150mAh battery. But that’s ample for all-day use and will likely last all but heavy users well into a second day. The phone can juice back up on a 65W wired charger, which is just peachy if you have a USB-C laptop charger. Wireless charging is a bit slower at just 15W.

Nothing Phone 3 – Cameras

On a lot of phones, cameras can be a bit of an afterthought, or overhyped without the hardware and software to actually deliver. Nothing seems to have really put some effort into their camera stack with a full setup of quality sensors, not pulling a fast one with one good sensor and a handful of throwaway sensors to pad the specs. Here’s what the Nothing Phone 3 includes:

• 50MP Wide, f/1.68, 1/1.3”, OIS, EIS, PDAF
• 50MP ultrawide, f/2.2, 114-degree FOV
• 50MP telephoto, f/2.68, 3x optical, OIS, EIS
• 50MP Selfie, f/2.2, 81.2-degree FOV

The Nothing Phone 3 starts off on a good footing. The main sensor captures lovely photos with clear details, plenty of light gathering potential, and lifelike color. In very bright sunlit environments, it wants to overexpose the scene, but this is quickly dialed back with a simple slider in the camera app. It’s not always spot-on with focus, especially for close-up shots, but it performs well enough.

The ultra-wide manages to provide consistent lighting and color, not straying too far from the main sensor. But it suffered from hard-to-miss distortion and aberrations to the image. It also struggled to focus close-up. While it can capture a larger field of view, its issues hold it back from being a solid addition to the setup.

The telephoto proves more worthy. It’s able to punch in nicely on distant subjects with a 3X optical zoom. 5X would have been more impressive, but 3X still helps. It shifts colors slightly from the main sensor, so there’s not a perfect consistency there, but it’s still fairly close. More importantly, the telephoto makes for some sharp shots. Whether you’re trying to shoot a far-off subject or a close-up, the telephoto sensor comes into play. When switching to macro mode, it’s actually the sensor used, and it does a good job bringing out texture. Nothing’s computational photography isn’t great at digital zoom, with the photo quality dropping off quickly even when pushing to just 6X zoom.

The selfie camera also does a solid job. It captures sharp images with bold contrast. Interestingly, it appears to perform better than using the main sensor to take a selfie with the Glyph Mirror. While there’s no easy way to account for subtle differences changing how the camera processes a photo, it appears that photos are noisier and more washed out when using the Glyph Mirror to take selfies.

Overall, it’s a good camera system, but doesn’t quite push into exceptional territory. It may have higher resolution sensors than the OnePlus 13 and Google Pixel 9 Pro, but Google and OnePlus just do a better job processing and matching images between its sensors. And the Google Pixel 9 Pro has better zoom.