iPhone 16 Pro vs Nothing Phone 3: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change?
iPhone 16 Pro or Nothing Phone 3? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Tom Halvorsen
The short answer
iPhone 16 Pro 7h 10m, Nothing Phone 3 7h 20m — the same test, run the same way. Where they part company is who they suit: the iPhone 16 Pro is the one to get if you are anyone shooting video, or already invested in the Apple ecosystem, the Nothing Phone 3 if you are buyers who want flagship battery and software without flagship pricing.
Price difference: The Nothing Phone 3 undercuts the iPhone 16 Pro by £520. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | iPhone 16 Pro | Nothing Phone 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £1099 | £579 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Display | 6.3in LTPO OLED, 120Hz | 6.7in AMOLED, 120Hz |
| Chip | A18 Pro | Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 |
| RAM | 8GB | 12GB |
| Battery | 3582mAh | 5000mAh |
| Charging | 25W wired, MagSafe | 45W wired |
| Weight | 199g | 198g |
| Screen-on time | 7h 10m | 7h 20m |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent fourteen days as the reviewer’s only phone, SIM included. Screen at a metered 200 nits, adaptive refresh left on, the same twelve apps installed on every handset, and a fixed 5G network in the same building.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Screen-on time | A scripted day — four hours of mixed browsing, an hour of video, thirty minutes of camera, the rest idle — repeated three times and averaged. |
| Sustained performance | Twenty minutes of continuous load, reporting the figure at the end rather than the peak in the first ninety seconds. |
| Charging | From 2% to 100% with the fastest charger the manufacturer sells, at 22°C ambient, timed to the minute. |
| Camera | The same eighteen scenes on every phone — backlit portrait, indoor low light, moving subject — shot in the default mode with no editing. |
| Thermals | Surface temperature at the hottest point after the sustained run, measured with a contact probe. |
We deliberately do not report synthetic benchmark totals quoted in isolation, and any figure supplied by the manufacturer.
The honest caveat: Battery results are specific to our routine. A heavy camera user will see materially less screen-on time than these numbers suggest.
Where the iPhone 16 Pro wins
- The best sustained performance of any phone
- Video quality nothing else matches
- A display that needed no calibration out of the box
It also has the edge on the intangibles: it lost only 11 percent of peak performance over a thirty-minute load.
Where the Nothing Phone 3 wins
- Excellent battery life
- Clean software with almost no preinstalled clutter
- A design that still stands out
And in day-to-day use, the Glyph lights have become genuinely useful as a delivery and timer readout.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The iPhone 16 Pro has one clear weak point — iterative to a fault — and the Nothing Phone 3 has its own: weak low-light photography. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
Both scored 4 out of 5, and the Nothing Phone 3 costs £520 less. Unless the best sustained performance of any phone is specifically what you need, the cheaper one is the better buy and we would not agonise over it.
If neither quite fits
Look at the Pixel 9a at £499 — it scored 5 out of 5 and suits almost everyone — the sensible default recommendation. If the budget will not stretch, the Galaxy A56 at £399 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the iPhone 16 Pro the thing you adjust to is iterative to a fault, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its display (6.3in LTPO OLED, 120Hz) is the part you stop thinking about. The Nothing Phone 3 asks for a different accommodation: weak low-light photography, against a display of 6.7in AMOLED, 120Hz that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
The Nothing Phone 3 is 1 year newer, which usually means 1 more year of security updates at the far end of ownership — the part of the decision nobody weighs at the till and everybody feels at year four. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: weak low-light photography on one side, iterative to a fault on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the iPhone 16 Pro, which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the iPhone 16 Pro for the best sustained performance of any phone. Buy the Nothing Phone 3 for excellent battery life.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the smartphones we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are iPhone 16 Pro vs OnePlus 13: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change? and iPhone 16 Pro vs Pixel 9a: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
